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!