2025 November Update: Deepening Family

When the semester comes to an end and the holidays approach, the academic demands increase as classes wrap up. So as exciting as Thanksgiving break and Christmas break are, the consistency of attendance with ministry fluctuates drastically. Students are pelted on all sides by expectations, growing pains as discipline is needed, and an anxiousness to go home. We stress the necessity of still treating this community of Christ as family, and as such the necessity to celebrate the holidays together. One would only miss the holidays with family under extreme circumstances, and we should be no different. "For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother" (Matthew 12:50). Many small groups are wrapping up with a Friendsgiving to eat together and celebrate. And then we as a whole ministry will finish with a Christmas service in December.

Pizza Theology

We had Dr. Rikk Watts come out again to speak to our students on the Gospel of John for Pizza Theology. Dr. Watts has become more and more integrated with our staff and our ministry over the years since first coming in 2016. His vast biblical knowledge and his deep devotion to Jesus has been essential to the growing understanding of God in our ministry. Ov
er 450 students came to listen to him. If you're interested in listening to what he taught, you can go here! One of our values is to think and understand our faith at the level of our highest education. If you've received a college degree, you've proven that you can learn at the college level. So, why wouldn't you learn about your faith at the college level as well? 

Keep FOCUS Growing

During the month of November, we host our annual fundraiser, Keep FOCUS Growing (KFG). There are a lot of things that are required to run a ministry. Many of y'all support me and allow me to spend my time with college students and other pastors, training them up to be ministry leaders and "thoroughly equipped for every good work" (2 Timothy 3:17). But behind us ministers on the frontlines, there are background supports that need to exist for us to do what we do. Administrators, financial software, website hosts, outreach materials like food, games, sports equipment, Bible study resources, and lots more are all necessary to keep this ministry running. Not to mention the funds needed to plant new ministries at the many unreached campuses in the area that have no campus ministries presently at them. Y'all have been so generous to me, but permit me to ask even more boldly if you would consider giving to KFG here. We have $75,000 of matching funds available if we can raise it!

Thank You!

Regardless, thank you so much for supporting me and enabling me to invest in generation after generation of college students. Jesus continues to change lives, flipping things upside down, and the world has been marked forever by his impact. Thank you for being a part of what God is doing here, and I pray that you would see some of the harvest that God has brought!

2025 October Update: A New Generation

The Grove

God is good and this new generation is showing up like crazy. Two months into the school year and it feels like we've just started to get our heads above water. There has been such a huge response in terms of students interested in Jesus and being a part of Christian community. Two years ago we were averaging around 150 students coming to large group on Fridays. This year we're averaging around 250! The number of students who attend our small groups have historically been double the amount that attend on Friday nights and this year is no different. We have over 500 students in our small groups learning about Jesus and learning how to love one another as friends like Jesus called us to. 

FOCUS Asian Fellowship

This year we hard launched our FOCUS Asian Fellowship for Asian Americans in FOCUS. It's a place to share in our cultures with one another, bring our whole selves to the table, and process what makes us Asian Americans before God. Please pray as we keep developing this community and providing a place for us to be vulnerable and share in our highs and lows. 

The Getaway

Our fall retreat, called the Getaway had its highest attendance ever as well! Which bodes well for the relationships that are being built in this ministry. Something in this generation has an openness to spirituality and talking about God. They want to know who he is. It has also produced a different issue. So many have not grown up in church or have only the slightest experience with organized Christianity. Including some of our leaders! They have come to know Jesus and devote their lives to him in the context of college and campus ministry so they're quickly having to learn on the fly, just like Jesus' 12 disciples! And that puts even more on us as their pastors to return to the basics, covering foundational disciplines like how to read the Bible, how to pray, and how to give. It's an exciting time and a very foundational time, so please be praying for us!

Thank You!

Thank you so much for all your support! As our family grows, both biologically and spiritually, I grow more and more appreciative of how faithful my supporters have been to enable me to do this ministry. To have a son and be able to take care of him even as I do God's work here at UTD is a privilege that I don't take lightly. Thank you so much for your continued belief in me and in what God is doing here!

2025 August Update: New Year

 
The Beginning

We put on Move-In Parties for the freshmen every night for the first week! I estimate we met over 2,000 freshmen over the course of the week! 

It's the beginning of the year! There are no tougher weeks, no longer weeks, and no more 

Another capture of a move-in party!

exciting weeks than the first two weeks of school. As students move in and start their year again, they are often excited to be in college and open to new friendships and experiences. Those who have grown up in their faith are looking to see how they'll live it out in this next phase. Those who have only dipped their toe in the church are considering whether they'll continue or whether they'll seek something else. Those who have never considered church may encounter one devoted disciple and have their whole life turned around. The possibilities are limitless, and God only asks us to be faithful and to be bold. A few years ago, I said that the goal was that all 30,000 students at UT Dallas would be personally invited to encounter Jesus, that every single student at UTD would know they could get to know God if they wanted to. Historically, our ministry has probably reached about 2,000-3,000 students with our events at the beginning of the year. This year, we're not yet done and I'd say we've reached about 3,000-4,000. This is only possible through the students who heed God's call and choose to show up each afternoon, and each evening, even after a day of classes and/or work, and put themselves out there to reach their peers on this campus. It's been an exciting time and in the coming weeks, we'll see how God uses these efforts to bless this campus and this student population!

Changing Culture

For the first time we put on a UTD Olympics event and about 250 students came!

Last year, after years of prayer, thinking, and deliberation we switched up a lot of things in our ministry. The values remained, but the methods were tweaked. Each previous year, our students would hit the beginning of the year hard and have a great turnout on our first Friday night meeting. And then we would do our best to try to bleed out as little as possible, slowly losing numbers throughout the year as people were taken by school, busy-ness, or just flagging interest. I believed that that was simply inevitable. Almost as if devotion to God was something that needed a shot of energy and then we had to just hold on as long as we could, spilling as little of it as possible. But last year, we dared to consider that what had been true for over a decade, didn't have to be true. That perhaps the beginning of the year wasn't the mountaintop experience of God. That perhaps, it was only the beginning. And we could become more excited as we climbed this mountain with God, becoming more like him as we climbed with him. Last year, we ended the year with more students than we started with! An indication that our students were catching the vision of spreading the good news, not because they had to but because they were excited to. Our hope this year is for that to continue to be true. One year does not make a trend. One year does not change a culture. But it could. We're praying for a lasting transformation that only Jesus can do in our students. And that we would be listening and faithful to where he's leading us. So please, be praying for our students as they share the good news, invite others to their small groups, and continue changing the culture within this ministry and the campus. 

Thank You!

Our second annual Paint 'n Sip event brought over 600 students!

Thank you so much for all your continued support! Because of your generosity, I get to do another year of campus ministry. I get to continue to watch over another generation of students who are seeking God and who are sought by God. I won't lie, it's been a different journey being a campus minister and a dad at the same time. But I do believe that God had been preparing me for the change for years and it's only through his gospel that I can understand how to be successful at both. Thank you for all that you do, and pray for a great year for these students that is full of Jesus!

2025 July Update: Summertime

Preaching

A few of our students trained at our leadership conference! 

Recently I had a friend ask me for one of my sermons. It's not a common thing for me to share my sermons. Now, they're all available online whether through my church's website for those that I preach there or on Spotify for the ones I preach at FOCUS. But preaching is both a very spiritual and a very performative action. We step into a space that historically was the place of the prophets, or the rabbis, or people's parents. We speak and teach the word of God to people, with all of its weight and significance. There's also a performative aspect to it. Unlike my one-on-one conversations that are individualized and free-flowing, a sermon requires preparation. Preparing what I will communicate and how I will communicate it, in such a way that will sufficiently convey the meaning and considerably impact the most people. Like a piano piece practiced and prepared before a performance, a sermon is a piece that is practiced and prepared. This one simply attempts to directly convey the word of God. 

And it's that unease of defining it as a performance that keeps me from wanting to share my sermons unsolicited. It seems to communicate, "Look at me!" When the whole point of a sermon is, "Look at God!" However, without sharing them, sermons simply become personal musings. Thoughts to entertain and selfishly hoard, excluding community from our interactions with and learnings from God. Each of us has sermons to preach, whether from the pulpit or in our daily lives. When we follow Jesus closely, we look like him. Luke 6:40, the student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher. So when we say, look at me, hopefully people will also look at God. 

We had three baptisms at our last Friday night meeting!

So with that said, here's a sermon that I preached back in February if you'd like to read it. My friend has generously hosted it on his site. We used technology to transcribe it and AI to clean it up. It made up a title that is not the actual title of the sermon, and it added some headings that it thought would summarize sections of my sermon, but other than that it's a pretty faithful transcript of my words. If you'd like to listen to it instead, the recording is here. I hope you'll get a small view of what God is like and how we handle topics like this with our college students.

Summer

Baptism 2 of 3!

In other news, summer is well underway and our weekly large group gatherings have gotten enormous, nearly 400 students each week. It's reflective of how much God has been doing at each of our campuses this past school year that they're still excited to spend their break with one another learning about Jesus. We are wrapping up leadership conversations and selecting student leaders for our small groups next year. It looks like we'll have around 70 student leaders for this next year. Again, the Lord has been working on raising up students who are committed to changing the campus and helping others know Jesus. 

Prayers and Thanks!

Baptism 3 of 3. All of them will be leaders next school year!

Please pray for the plans that we are making for the new school year! Pray for the hearts of the incoming student leaders and the new students who are coming to our campuses as freshmen! We never know what all God is doing, we just try to stay aware and faithful as we see him moving. Thank you so much for all your support! Each year during the summer, I see how generously God provides and has been providing through all of you faithfully giving each year. It is what enables me to preach and minister to others and what has encouraged me to grow as a disciple in ways I never anticipated. Thank you all so much for all your support! 

2025 January Update: New Year, Same God

Work-Life Balance

Hey everyone, I hope the holiday season was a blessing for you. It was William's first Christmas, and he definitely got spoiled by his friends and family. Ministry is not a career for anyone who wants what the world considers "work-life balance". As much as we dream of a steady even amounts of work and play each day, our lives rarely resemble that. And the more we dream and pursue it, the more we are disappointed when our expectations are not met. Instead, there are seasons of hard work that can only be done in that certain season. Long days and long nights. The first month of the school year is like that. Students are more open than any other time, it's a time to set the pace and the culture for the rest of the year. We can't just spread out the work evenly to later months, because the whole atmosphere of the university has changed by then. So, we go hard for weeks, sacrificing many things in our lives in order to pave the way for the rest of the year. And then we get to winter break, when most of our students have gone home to their families. There's still ministry to be done, many students do stay in the area. But even they are caught up with family functions, spending more time with their friends, out of their normal school routine. So we too, as ministers, get to spend more time with family and friends and enjoy the slower pace for a bit before things get hectic again.

Winter Retreat and The Grove!

The first hectic thing of the semester is Winter Retreat! It's out biggest event of the year and it was our largest ever this year, almost 700 students attended. The previous largest group was just over 600 and that was pre-COVID. So, God has been blessing us with more momentum as we reach more and more students. This year our theme was Following Jesus. A basic one, but always a necessary one no matter how old we are! As always, the students were eager to learn and to grow and to grow closer to one another. We've already seen some momentum from Winter Retreat as we got back into our first Grove meeting of the year on the first Friday night of the semester. We had 226 students in attendance, our second-highest number this year, only following 240 from the first week of school (back to the long days and long nights)! While the beginning of Spring Semester is not the same as the beginning of the school year, it still does have a bit of a similar feel of new beginnings. New resolutions to be more committed, to pursuing God more deeply, to joining a community and we want to capitalize on that. It's not about the numbers, but it is about being faithful to the students whom God is working in. And on a campus of over 30,000 students, we're only just scratching the surface!

Thank You!

So, please be praying as we enter into another season of hard work, long days and long nights. We want to be faithful to what God is doing here, and there is no way we should allow laziness to dictate which people get to hear about how God is moving. Thank you so much for your trust in me and in us to do what God has called us to do. Your support is a vote of confidence that we will be faithful to God's mission vision here at UTD. Thank you!

2024 November Update: Loving God's Word

How do you get a generation that is extremely biblically illiterate to become lovers of God's word? That's a question we've been asking for a few years. More and more often we have students who grew up in the church be unable to identify who Saul, David, or Solomon are. They don't know the stories of Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob. They don't know who Samson is or any of the judges. They have heard the names of some disciples but couldn't tell you that Paul wasn't one of them. Many of them have never read an entire book in the Bible. Here's how we try to address that issue!

Pizza Theology

For longer than I've worked for FOCUS, we've done Pizza Theology twice a year. We get to spend hours diving into a biblical topic. This semester, we invited Dr. Rikk Watts, a retired seminary professor, to teach our students about 1 and 2 Samuel. Dr. Watts has taught our communities multiple times over the past decade and regularly teaches our apprentices every year in their studies on the New Testament. His understanding of Scripture and love of Jesus has deeply impacted our staff and our ministry even if this generation of students don't know it. What they got was more than even we bargained for. He didn't just teach on Samuel, he challenged and opened our eyes to why God might choose stories and narratives to be the genre in which he would communicate to us in his book. As humans we are defined by our stories and when we read the Bible as it is and not as we want it to be, we might be able to define ourselves by God's story. It was an awesome experience that I know will bless our community for many years to come.

Scripture Smackdown

To capitalize on that momentum, we implemented a competition for our students that we have named Scripture Smackdown. A battle between the sexes on reading the Bible. They are awarded points for reading entire books of the Bible (this is not a memorization verse competition, but a steeped in the Word competition). We incentivize consulting other resources and reading it aloud with others to heat up the value of hearing the Word as it was originally heard: out loud and in community. We know that this is only one step towards becoming like Jesus, that simply reading does not in itself create disciples, but our students have attacked the challenge with fervor. In one week they've read 138 books of the Bible already. And the only prize is a small engraved plaque on a trophy signifying who won this year. We're very happy with how much they're already getting each other in on it, and we hope God will produce a lot of fruit from this!

Thank You!

This year has been an exciting year of innovation and change. The world has changed a lot and what has always worked for us has needed to adapt to the needs of a new generation. But it's only thanks to you guys that I get to be here and a part of it. The gospel message of God's love to the world has not changed, but the ears and the minds that hear it have. So, in a reflection of God's example, we step towards them rather than have them climb their way to us. Thank you for believing in the kingdom vision here, and I ask for continued prayer for the ways our community is growing, that it will take deep root in our students' lives and that they would follow Jesus for the rest of their lives. 

2024 October Update: The Grove and The Getaway

The year of the rebrand continues on as we attempt to embrace Gen Z as they are and rather than push them to be something they're not, meet them where they're at and bring them towards Jesus. The Grove continues to build momentum as students are excited about coming together and fellowshipping with one another. They've loved the challenging teaching, the new song repertoire by the worship band, and the care we put into establishing the Grove as a place to rest from the week and reorient towards Jesus.

The Getaway

We also rebranded our annual fall retreat to The Getaway. Historically, it's been a small group-oriented event that deepens bonds within the small groups that come. However, challenges arise when some small groups have few to no members who end up coming. This year, we decided to rethink our goals and that resulted in a new vision of wanting our larger community to form and deepen bonds with one another, without a focus on the small groups. As individuals get to know others in the community beyond just their small groups, their dedication to showing up and participating increases as well. They end up encouraging one another, feel empowered to reach out to one another for support and for advice, they spur one another on to love and good deeds. This new emphasis on the importance of God's greater community has been taking root in our community and hopefully will bear great fruit as the year continues!

Baptisms!

The baptisms keep rolling. Every week there seems to be another baptism. God is pulling us out of the muck and into his saving grace. Whenever we study the Bible with anyone, we make our intentions clear, that not only are we reading the Bible to get to know Jesus but that they'll be brought to a decision point on whether they want to follow Jesus or not. Jesus is not a museum exhibit that we learn more about, he's a person who has extended an invitation, "Come, follow me." And we cannot ignore that invitation, we can say yes or no. And praise God that people are saying yes!

Thank You!

Without your support, I could never be a part of and bear witness to what God has done at this campus and in this community. Thank you so much for all your support, for the prayers and the donations that enable me to serve these college students every day. After nearly 10 years, God continues to show up for me and for them to make us more like Jesus every day.