Kevin Pike Ministry Blog #33

 March Blog

    March is here! This month has been so much fun and I'm excited to let y'all in on it! Thank you for giving me the opportunity to work full time doing what I love most, college ministry! 

TNF (Thursday Night Fellowship):

    Our weekly Thursday Night Fellowship meetings are going great! We are having an average of 80-90 students come every week which is amazing! We are so blessed to have such a great group of consistent students spend their Thursday evenings worshipping the Lord instead of being at home doing who knows what. We have just finished our sermon series on, "Disciples Are..." where every week we choose a different characteristic of Jesus to talk about. We talked about disciples being; humble, intentional, generous, servant hearted, sacrificial, and prayerful. We have realized as a staff team that our students are more engaged with and remember sermon series when there is a clear outline and direction that we are going with. For example, when we started this sermon series we first made clear why we were doing this topic, explained all the different characteristics of Jesus that we are going to go through, and had this graphic pop up at the beginning of each sermon just to remind them where we had been so far:

    But there was still one more crucial aspect that we wanted to make sure we hit every week which was story-telling. We wanted to include a fictional or non-fiction story to each sermon that tied all the ideas together. We have realized that the students, and our staff included, love hearing stories which makes it way easier to remember what the sermon was about. I put in my latest blog the story for the sacrificial sermon was focused around real events in the year 251 of Christians sacrificing themselves to tend to those infected. We have found that when we ask our students about what they remembered from the sermons, they hardly ever remembered any specific points or even scripture. But, they did remember a story or two that was shared during the last sermon series. There is something inherent in us that latches onto stories, this is why I believe the Bible is filled with narratives, because as humans we love to listen to the experiences of others. So as we go into this next sermon series, we haven't quite figured out what we want to do at the moment, we do want to continue our trend of including stories to help them digest what they are learning. Here is a recent picture from one of our TNF's:

Core:

    The small group that I help lead with another one of our staff members named Stian and it's going great! This semester we are looking for some of our students that have leadership potential this next school year and giving them more chances to lead. We are choosing specific students to help lead the discussion of our small groups to give them a feel for leadership. We are also choosing students to go to SICM this Summer. SICM (Student Institute of Campus Ministry) is a nine day leadership conference that we send our students to so they can learn how to be a disciple on a college campus. Once our students go through this, then we can consider if we want to ask them to be a Corefa (Co-facilitator) with our ministry next school year which means they would lead their own small group. Here is a picture of one of the guys in our small group that I get time with, we just finished going through FOJ (Focus on Jesus) which is our 10-week studying of scripture to get to know Jesus better:

Prayer Requests:

    Please be praying for our students and our staff as well as we enter the last six weeks of the school year so that we can all finish off strong. It is easy for our students to start to give up and phone it in on their classes and with their involvement in our ministry. Pray that they continue to show up to Core, TNF, and their 1 on 1 meetings with our staff. Also be praying for our staff to have the energy to finish well and put in the good work. 

    Since the summer is coming up, that also means that fundraising season is beginning again. Please pray that not only I but all of our staff across the DFW are able to meet their fundraising goals so that we can minister full time on campus.

Thank You: 

Thank you for your generous support of my ministry at Collin Community College. Your contributions are making a real difference by helping students grow in their faith, build meaningful community, and develop as future leaders. Through Bible studies, fellowship, and discipleship, lives are being changed as students draw closer to God and learn to live out their faith with purpose. Your partnership is a blessing, and I am deeply grateful for the impact you are making. May God richly bless you for your generosity!

P.S. This is a testimony from one of our Focus students from the TWU ministry. Your support has helped students like her find a door that leads to a real relationship with Jesus and find a community that supports her.