Sweet relief

Today I had a parcel delivered that's about four years late. It should have been delivered to me in Lesotho (I was there during my gap year) but it must have got lost somewhere en route.

Anyway, it contained a pack of fruit pastilles and some postcards from my family when they were on holiday. I strongly advise against eating three year old fruit pastilles and I'm lucky to have any teeth remaining after the first chew.

It's a great little surprise and this little time capsule from the year 2005 reminded me just how much I enjoyed getting parcels out in Lesotho.


This is what I where I was on March 12th 2005. Good times.

There should be some mission week and Relay updates coming sometime early next week, and you never know, I might even get round to putting up some of the posts that I promised months ago...

Salford goes FREE

This is a slightly belated update on the happenings of Salford Christian Union's events week.

Salford CU held three events during the week:

Tuesday night was the JazzCake event with talk on "Free to all". Salford University's favourite jazz and cheesecake night returned for the third time and about 60 students attended. Tim Hanson talked on how the good news of Jesus Christ is free to everyone. We looked at two facts from the Bible, firstly that human beings matter and secondly that we have all sinned - they've fallen short of the standard that God expects from us. He then showed us that there is a wonderful third fact in the Bible - that in Jesus, we have a solution to the problem. It was a great evening with about 45 non believers present, and many had great conversations afterwards.

Thursday night was the Grub Crawl. We went to three different locations to eat each course in our meal, and Tim did a talk on "FREE but at a price". We learnt that the price of the solution to the problem that was discussed on Tuesday night was the death of Jesus Christ, God's son. We saw that on the cross, the sins of many were put onto Jesus and Jesus righteousness was given to them in return. In essence it's a giant swap - Jesus was punished in their place and they recieve Jesus' obedience to God - and it's free to anyone who believes and trusts in Jesus. Six people attended.

Friday night was a talk on "FREE but costly". Ten people were there as Tim showed us that even though the benefits of the swap that occured on the cross is free to anyone who believes, living in the light of it is costly. Jesus sayst that the believer will repent and believer - that the new way of life is to be lived with God treated as God. This is the opposite of sin: sin is essentially living with ourselves as the most important person rather than God as the msot important person.

Each day CU members met for prayer, which I found really encouraging. It's great to see students really expressing reliance on God during mission weeks rather than drifting into the wordly way of thinking that more work makes things better. As it's God who does the work of saving unbelievers, it makes sense to ask him to work during evangelism!

All in all, it has been a wonderful two weeks of mission in Salford University. In those two weeks about 1100 gospels were given out and at least a couple of hundred students heard the good news about Jesus explained by students, friends of the CU and Tim. During this mission I have seen CU members who have become more confident in evangelism and have been encouraged by the openness of non believing students at Salford to talk about the good news of Jesus.

As is the way with most university missions these days, this mission was much more about sowing seeds rather than about seeing many people come to believe in Jesus. We're in the same situation as described by Jesus in the parable of the growing seed in Mark 4:26-29:

And he said, "The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come."

We won't know when these people who have heard the good news and received gospels will begin to believe in Jesus, but the seeds have been sown and there will be an effect at some stage in the future.

There will be an update on the Manchester Mega Mission Week coming early next week.

FREE, New Leaders Training and Daniel

It's about a week since I last posted on here. Time for a bit of an update!

Last week was University of Salford Christian Union's gospel distribution week. Here's a few numbers for what happened:

5 days of gospel distribution

Nearly all CU members heavily involved in it
15 hours of having a stall in the foyer of the main building on campus
100s of good, gospel focussed conversations
1000 gospels distributed
1 in 20 students in Salford University now have a FREE gospel

It was a fantastic week and the CU members are really pleased (and pleasantly surprised!) with how it went. It was really encouraging seeing CU members step out of their comfort zones and doing questionnaires and handing out gospels. Great work guys!

This past weekend was the annual New Leaders Training conference. At this time of year, all the CUs in the country change leadership, so UCCF gets all the new CU exec members together in their regions for some training. This year we held our New Leaders Training in Leyland and Justin Mote joined us to teach us from the book of Daniel. The Staff and Relay workers pitched in to help train everyone for their new roles.

It was a brilliant weekend with fantastic teaching. Daniel is a wonderful book and is incredibly relevant for students today - its the story of four young Jewish men as they live with the challenge of living and speaking for God in an alien culture that's hostile to their faith.

One thing that encouraged me was seeing the new CU leaders became more and more excited about the gospel through the weekend. Being on exec is not about serving men or the CU, it's about serving the Lord, and the only way to motivate yourself to do that without being legalistic is in joyful response to the wonderful gospel.

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. Colossians 3:23-24

This week Salford CU has their events week, so please pray for us that we'd be confident in sharing the gospel and that God would show Salford students that the gospel is true!

Wintry update

You would have thought that in the North we would get more snow than the South. Wrong! They woke up to over a foot of very Narnia-esque snow back home in Guildford on Monday morning.



In Manchester we had a smaller, yet still exciting, offering. Whilst it's not quite as pretty as the Surrey countryside, I think it's quite nice in a Moss Side kind of way!