Didn’t you love the stories in that last post? Well here are some more awesome stories from campus from January 2012-April 2012.

New Vision for the New Year

Coming out of my winter travels and reflections about the fall term of ministry; I met with the student leaders to vision for the winter semester. Upon reflection of how the fall term landed, I saw that we were offering some really good things to the campus; but we needed to have our ministries more cohesive and try connecting some together; and rather than promoting events on an individual basis, making sure some ministries were promoting for others that were connected or reached people at the same stage or the next one. I also saw the need to build on some of our graphics and iconography and connect our ministries to our Join the Party theme. I also hoped we would try some more visibility experiments and try engaging the campus in service around stressful times for students; one idea was to do a cookie outreach, where we’d make and package cookies and then hand them out on campus to students studying for midterms.

Highlights from the ministries:

COOKING

We saw new vision and direction draw in new students to our Cooking Ministry, as we moved away from using Cooking with Bible; and instead drew our themes and recipes around cultural holidays and festivals and shared how they connected with our faith. We celebrated: Martin Luther King Day, Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day, Holi, Hungarian Revolution Day and Passover. It was fun and exciting spending time exposing students to some of the lesser known holidays and engaging them in conversation as we discussed the meaning behind these days and what they meant to us. It was also great to have members from our community and from the larger GTA community offer insights and recipes.

COOKIE OUTREACH

Picture this scene: Every flat surface on the first floor covered with cookies, sprinkles, baggies and twist ties! The oven timer going off every ten minutes, and students taking a break from exams to roll, shape, bake and decorate 400 cookies! After baking and assembling the cookies in packages with a flyer about the Cooking Group and our upcoming movie night; we broke off into pairs and delivered the cookies on campus. One of the highlights of this experience was being paired up with Michelle*, who when I asked if she’s done anything like this before admitted she hadn’t, and when asked how she felt she was bursting at the seams with excitement! It was a lot of fun delivering cookies with her as she boldly approached people and was unflappable when people rejected the free cookies. We had a lot of fun as we received a wide range of responses; some of delight and surprise; some of wariness and suspicion. The parallels to evangelism were many and clear; the people we didn’t expect to receive the cookies did, and the ones we thought would did not.

MOVIE MINISTRY

We gathered 3 times to watch and discuss movies this semester. We kicked off the semester with X-Men First Class, which drew 3 times as many people as our last movie outreach! We followed the movie with a discussion about good and evil, and how each person has a measure of both within them and how we must strive to allow the good to flourish. For our next movie night, we decided to minister strategically to the single people on our campus by having a Valentine’s movie night, where we showed The Help. We chose that as it was a heartwarming and funny movie, but also strayed from the stereotypical notion that romantic love is the single most important love that exists and one’s life is drab and meaningless without it. We spent some time in lively discussion talking about how love, which is beyond the simple romantic love, is powerful and can cross cultural, ethnic, and societal barriers then and now and how we should strive to allow love to move us to action and overcome the oppressive powers of our fallen world. Men and women who attended the evening left inspired, and we welcomed some new faces into our community, including Dee* who is one of Lauren’s fellow nutrition classmates who doesn’t know the Lord, who first came out to help make and bake cookies for our outreach, and who enjoys spending time with our community as we are a group of people who don’t complain all the time! On our last movie night we watched Outsourced and had an engaging discussion about what it means to cross cultures and how we need to engage people of different cultures to receive the good things of other cultures and share the good things of our own.

PRAYER

We spent some time praying in different strategic places on our campus this semester. We spent January in the Ted Rogers School of Business; February in the new Maple Leaf Gardens Loblaws; and March in the Student C ampus Centre. It was exciting as we focused on doing flash prayers for people, and watching as God answered these prayers in exciting ways! We also spent some time going through the book of Common Prayer, it was fun introducing students to liturgical prayer and seeing them grow to be fond of it!

JOHN MANUSCRIPT BIBLE STUDY

We continued in the book of John, as Jenna and I lead the students through the rest of the gospel. We had fun leading as we tried different approaches with some meditative studies and some dramatic performances of Scripture! One exercise that really hit home for students is when we gave students a piece of scripture and asked them to insert their names in place of the disciples or the Pharisees; and as the students saw how it changed how they understood the passage, they began to see the ways they truly were similar to the disciples or the Pharisees and how desperately they needed Jesus.

SUMMER LOVIN’ PARTY

We ended the semester with a bang! We had 3 students going to Bangladesh in May and 6 students attending MarkCentral (formerly known as City/Script) and we decided to throw a summer themed event with a silent auction and dance party! Most of the food was themed and prepared by the Cooking Group, we made sushi and ice cream cone cupcakes as well as a few snacky items. And we had students, friends and supporters of the ministry at Ryerson donate items and services for the auction. It was a lot of fun, especially as Amber one of new exec leaders served as auctioneer and had fun rallying the crowd to bid on items and facilitating a live auction for a couple items. At the end of the night we raised $800!!!

BANGLADESH

So you may have received my booklet of reflections or seen my other post about Bangladesh but here are a few other snippets that were not in the book.

I was asked in mid-October to be on the staff team for this GUP, a bit of background, I have wanted to go on this GUP since the partnership began, and have been tracking what’s happened/hounding my staff friends upon their return to hear about it each year, so the fact that I was asked was a huge answered prayer. Unfortunately, saying yes would possibly mean that I would say no to standing in my best friend’s wedding. It was a tough decision to make, as this wasn’t just any GUP invite, nor was this just any wedding. I wrestled with the decision, and invited members of my communities to listen and pray with me. In the end, I decided to say yes to Bangladesh, and hope that circumstances would work for me to be part of both good things. It looked like it wasn’t going to work, so I decided to devote as much time as I could helping Naomi with preparations, so that even though I wasn’t physically standing in her wedding, I was very much present. Through a number of what I believe to be God-ordained circumstances, it ended up that the wedding was moved to June, and it would be possible for me to stand in the wedding, and serve by baking the wedding cupcakes! This process and unveiling of circumstances was long and seemingly painfully slow; but in the meantime I recruited 3 of my student leaders to join me in Bangladesh. They jumped into preparations and fundraising and their excitement was contagious! We had the support from the Ryerson community as we went and were excited about what God would show us there. We spent the time before and during the trip reading Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, that analyzed the elements of story and through the course of the book Don collects stories and begins living a better story. This became the theme of the trip, as we engaged risk, life in community, conflict, and many other new experiences! For more stories, look at my reflections here.

TEAM RYERSON

Toward the end of the March, I learned that a few changes would be coming my way. First, Veronika who was one of the Toronto interns would be staying in Toronto post-internship and working as a staff volunteer at Ryerson. Then, I found out my supervisor for 3 years, Jamie, would no longer be my supervisor as I would have a new supervisor who would also be pioneering International Student Ministry at Ryerson! A little while later I found out that my friend Dan Clubine, who was staff at York University, would be changing campuses and would be my new full-time staff partner! Then, I found out Joy, Dan’s wife would be going back to school, and would appreciate living downtown. THEN, I found out that maybe the best thing with all of these pieces would be that all of these people would live at the McGill House, just minutes away from campus, with me….and after much deliberation and discernment…it came to be! As of July, this new configuration of people made up the inhabitants of the McGill House, as the intern house became another house in Bloor West Village! Once all the pieces were landed, but before everyone moved in, we announced to the Ryerson IV community, at an end of semester potluck at my house, the changes to the staff team at Ryerson and the McGill House; there was much excitement and rejoicing!