2014 Annual Report
Here’s a few ministry highlights of 2014! Check back here for more photos and extras about these and other stories!
Shaped by Acts
The Acts of the Apostles has been a primary text in shaping ministry at Ryerson, the Bangladesh GUP team and my regional staff team this year. I’ve sat in these familiar texts with students reading them for the first time, translated into Bangla with our sister organization, and using it to shape ministry in the GTA with my colleagues. And with each group of people, I’ve been impacted by the text in new ways. Acts 4 and the prayer for boldness, led GUP participants to boldly rely on God and try new things as they interacted with our Bengali brothers and sisters. During the winter semester, the Ryerson community was captivated by the Acts community, as they wrestled with what it meant to share all things in common and be a welcoming community that continues to have the Lord add to their number daily. While I was in Bangladesh, the Ryerson community continued to gather during the summer, and welcomed students from the OCAD community to study Paul’s missionary journeys. We found ourselves living in the text as we grew close as a community and prayed and sent each other into local and global mission fields. As a regional staff team we’ve spent this fall studying Acts 2 in-depth, and praying and seeking partnership with the Spirit on our campuses.
2013 Highlights
Here is this year’s annual report. Enjoy!
Scattering Seeds
He also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.” Mark 4:26-29
Early in November, the Toronto regional Undergraduate Student Ministry, International Student Ministry, and High School Ministry Staff got together for a time of fellowship and training. We started this time studying the above passage of scripture and spent some time reflecting on where are the places we have faithfully scattered seeds in our ministries. We focused more on the places where we have been faithfully scattering as opposed to paying too much attention to whether or not things have grown. As my staff partner and I reflected on how we were scattering and wanted to celebrate the following:
Tube Duels
A google search of “obscure sports” brought up the discovery of cardboard tube duels, where people duel in homemade cardboard armour with cardboard paper tubes! My staff partner, leadership team and I thought that this was a ridiculous idea, but one that could be a lot of fun to attempt as a new student outreach event, so we did. It was a lot of fun, brought in a bunch of new and old faces, and we had reporters from one of the campus newspapers come and participate and do an article about it! We began the event by putting people into teams and asking them to create armour that represented their team (there were 4: ninjas, robots, pirates, and knights). Then the dueling began! After a number of individual and team wounds, we announced a winner who won a cardboard replica of Thor’s hammer. After a quick clean up, we invited everyone over for burgers at the McGill house, where we had a pinata strung up across our driveway. 80% of the people who came to the duel came back to the house, and a few signed up to come to our fall retreat!
Fall Retreat
For the first time in 4 years we had a fall retreat (which happened outside of the city)! We took the students to a retreat centre at Jackson’s Point, and had a great time studying Scripture, growing in friendship, worshipping by the campfire and enjoying the outdoors! We had a good mix of new and existing group members and felt very blessed and refreshed by our time together!
Teaching Workshops
Responding to a need for more teaching and training, Lauren, a student leader who is in her last year on campus, and I developed some workshops to equip students with tools to grow in their leadership and spiritual development. These workshops include scripture study, an interactive art piece, prayer and a time to learn and share from experiences. We led 3 this term on invitation, being a welcoming community and how to discern calling and listen to God’s voice. We’ve been amazed as we have seen students come from different clubs on campus and different campuses to receive and be blessed by these workshops!
Vision Fulfilled
By the end of September, I was ready to dub this semester, “the best fall ever”, and now at the end of November, I can claim that title with more fervor!
What’s been different about this year than other years? That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer. A lot of it has to do with the mysterious workings of God and his timing. And during the fall reading week, in mid-October, it hit me, God had been answering prayers I (and some of my student leaders) had been praying for years now.
Here’s a few:
- In 2009, God put ministry to South Asians on my heart, and gave me vision for the ways he had uniquely made me for this ministry. In the years that followed I have seen places and circumstances where I’ve come closer and gone farther from fulfilling this vision. I’ve been in seasons where I’ve felt blessed by the larger organization to advocate for and pursue this ministry and seasons where I’ve felt my voice and opportunities limited. And in the midst of my place in the larger whole, I’ve continuously prayed for God to bring South Asians to be part of the ministry at Ryerson. I’ve seen some students come and go, but this semester brought 2 male South Asians who continue to blow me away with their commitment and willingness to step up in leadership and responsibility! Both have expressed interest in leading manuscript studies, both are actively applying the Scripture in their lives, both are sacrificially making choices to be part of our community despite the long hours of commute and the challenges of balancing time with our community and schoolwork (both are engineering students). In addition to these two, we have seen a number of South Asians come and be part of some of our New Student Outreach events, and on campus our office is situated near the South Asian Alliance and the Bangladeshi Students Association which has led to some great conversations and possibilities of hosting events together!
- At Urbana 2006, a speaker challenged the crowd to pursue ministry by taking stock of activities and hobbies that you love to do and inviting non-Christians to do them with you and find ways to naturally talk about your faith while doing these things. This challenge has been at the heart of many of the ideas that formed our new student outreach events and specialized small groups. In 2011, Lauren, a student leader studying Nutrition, and I began a Cooking Ministry. One that she could widely invite her Nutrition classmates to and help bridge that community with her faith community on campus. In December of that year, we debriefed the semester and talked about how we longed for better partnership with the Christian students who attended that they would bring their friends and not force their faith on the non-Christians who attended but be able to share in natural ways that could provoke curiosity and opportunities for deeper conversations later. We would cast vision for Christian students to partner with us, and model what we were hoping for and had what seemed like endless group and individual conversations about inviting friends to be part of the ministry and the purpose for our gathering together. In the 3 years since this ministry began we have seen a steady stream of Christians and non-Christians gather, we have had a non-Christian step up and co-lead the ministry with us, and we have had the Nutrition Course Union and the Campus Community Garden advertise our group and pursue partnership with us (and have been blessed to watch a representative of the course union become a believer through seeds planted in this ministry)! This semester, we had 16 students gather for our cooking ministry (the largest gathering we’ve had), and we found out that even though our usual door for wide invitation had been temporarily closed, we had our biggest turnout because all of the Christian students who had been attending since the beginning each brought 2 friends! Praise God!
- As I mentioned in a few posts already Scripture has taken root in students lives in ways that we haven’t regularly seen, in addition to this happening we have seen deep community grow as people study scripture together. Last year, in one of the manuscript studies I attended, the leaders longed for our study group to close to one another through studying the Word and have that inspire spending time together outside of the study. They would often suggest fun activities to do outside of the study that were often met with lukewarm receptions at best. However this year, we’ve seen students choose to spend time having a meal together, commuting home together and even pursue housing close to one another!
- As I’ve seen our ministry on campus grow, I noticed that many of our key student leaders were women, and there was not as much ethnic diversity in our ministries as one would expect given the demographics of our larger campus community. As I continued to observe “who was in the room”, and asked who was not, I realized we had a surprising lack of diversity in programs of study represented. So I (and others) prayed for more diversity. This year we have seen a large diversity in students from various ethnic backgrounds, religious experiences, and programs of study. We have also seen a growing number of male students deeply commit themselves to our community and step up when leadership opportunities arise!
- For the past couple years, we have spent time developing ministries that help meet students where they are in their journeys. We have some ministries that focus on helping people trust and develop relationships with Christians (perhaps for the first time ever or the first time after having a large trust-breaking experience). We also have some that meet students who are seeking to learn more about Christianity. And we have a few that minister to Christians who have grown up in the church or have been following Jesus for a significant portion of their lives and long to grow deeper in their understanding or in how they express their faith. And we have a few ministries that help student leaders grow in their leadership. Of all the above listed, it was often the leadership ministries that were sparsely attended. It was not for lack of content, and it left my staff partner and I baffled. So we prayed and we opened up our leadership training ministries to anyone who would be interested in growing in leadership and we have seen a huge number of students choose in! Some we wouldn’t have guessed, and we have seen what was once a small ministry grow to influence students from various communities on Ryerson’s campus, as well as students at George Brown and OCAD!
Salted cookies, secret giving and sowing seeds
…are just some of the fruits of this fall’s Manuscript study.
We have spent this fall studying Matthew 5-7, the Sermon on the Mount, and this year we (my staff partner and our student Ieadership team) hoped to see students more actively living out the application of the Scripture.
So we thought through how we could apply the Scripture with a combination of thought provoking questions, simple illustrative activities, and tangible take-home challenges. Here’s a quick summary:
week one: We wrote out the Beatitudes in our own words.
week two: During our study we invited students to have a piece of gum that lost its flavour quickly. Then we gave the students a salted chocolate cookie which they ate and found delicious, after which we gave them a second cookie to give away (and left it open to see how they would go about doing that).
week three: We gave each person a plastic plate and invited them to write with a marker a word or phrase to represent something they needed to release to God. Then had them dip their plate in a bowl of water and as it washed away see it as a symbol of God’s forgiveness.
week four: We discussed what it would look like if we actually followed through with the words that we say and the good intentions that we have.
week five: We engaged in a prayer mapping activity to help us love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
week six: We encouraged students to “give in secret” by choosing to give and serve sacrificially.
week seven: Using the Lord’s Prayer, as a model, we spent some time interceding for each other and the campus.
week eight: We sent the students out to try a new prayer practice to help release anxiety.
week nine: After studying about not judging others, we spent some time reflecting on places where we have been too judgmental and working through the next steps toward repentance and where possible making restitution.
week nine: Through a different prayer mapping activity, we invited students to map out an answered prayer, making note of whether or not God answered in the ways we expected. Then we invited them to ASK God for something big, holding it open-handed to the ways God may answer it or in the timing He takes to do so.
week ten: After spending some time reviewing all the ways God has spoken to us through this sermon, we sent the students out with a packet of herb seeds so that they could grow in their understanding of how things grow (and better understand Jesus’ use of growing imagery) and also bless others with the herbs they grow, so that the impact of our study group goes beyond those participating in the study.
There are so many stories to share about how God has been working in the lives of these students who have gathered to study scripture with us, but here are just a handful:
• a student who is brand new to our community chose to: share the gospel for the first time to a stranger on the GO train (after giving that person a cookie), give his time sacrificially to serve his church, invite his friends to come to bible study, learn how to lead a manuscript study and co-led a study with me, and be actively involved in our community even though he has a long commute home!
• In fact, I found out in week seven, that half of the students who regularly attended our tuesday study chose to stay on campus for the study even though their classes ended hours earlier and they would then commute home to Pickering, Brampton, Scarborough, Markham or Mimico after the study during rush hour!
• Two students would come downtown just for the study (from Mimico and Markham) on days they didn’t need to come downtown for class! One of these students told me, ‘well, I would come downtown for a two-hour class, so I’m willing to come downtown for this’.
• And there have been so many encouraging stories of how the students have been actively choosing to love and serve their friends, family, roommates, and classmates in sacrificial ways coming out of choosing to apply this Scripture! Praise God!
More than friends with manuscript study
I have a confession to make: I hate manuscript study.
Or at least I used to.
When I was a student and my staff worker led me in one method of an inductive style Bible study called manuscript study, I was confused, at best. The next few times, I grew to loathe it, especially after a long day of lectures. I wouldn’t say much to contribute to the discussion during the study and I rarely left feeling like I had gained anything of value. And when I would meet with my staff worker, I would tell her all the reasons why I hated this method, and she would patiently listen and try and cast vision for why it could become a method I could grow to love…
Now, with a lead up like that, you probably are expecting me to share a story about how my eyes were opened and I began to see the value of manuscript study and deeply come to love it. After 3 years of studying scripture in this way as a student, a mission trip with the purpose of teaching local students of one of our sister movements how to do manuscript study, an internship with Intervarsity, and 3 years as a staff worker; I still didn’t love manuscript study.
To be clear, at this point, I liked manuscript study; if I tried to equate my relationship with manuscript study to a romantic relationship I would say that I liked it as a friend, I saw its value and would appreciate its company but would always be on the lookout for a style that was a better fit for me.
But what did that mean for ministry with students? Where my staff worker had a host of students who disliked manuscript study, I found myself with the opposite situation where I had a community of students gathered who LOVED manuscript study. So I would spend my time equipping students how to lead a manuscript studies so I could free myself up to pursue other creative ministries.
Last year, I found manuscript studies particularly draining. And after some time reflecting, I realized it was because we had let this method become routine and predictable. We would spend hours engaging the text intellectually, but not allow the truth of the text penetrate our hearts and we would rarely find ourselves applying the scripture beyond our study time. And I realized that we couldn’t keep on going this way, and actually there was room for some of those creative ministries to be included in our bible studies.
So we pursued manuscript studies in a new way this year, and in addition to amazing stories of God speaking new truths to students and students choosing to actively apply the Scripture in their lives; through the fusing of God’s word lived out creatively, it happened: I became more than friends with manuscript study.
A few more oldies but goodies
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!
Summer Visioning with students
“What followed was an explosion of creative ministry ideas…”
Following City/Script, my student leaders were excited to be begin visioning for the upcoming school year and explore creative ministries ideas.
During the last weekend of June, we debriefed the year and began to prayerfully make plans for the upcoming year. We studied the building of the tabernacle passage of Exodus 35, and asked God to show us how and where to use the gifts He had given us.
What followed was an explosion of creative ministry ideas, as we discovered using our passions as a way to engage in ministry.
- Jenna: running ministry, to offer a place to worship God while honouring and taking care of the bodies He has blessed us with!
- Elizabeth: movie ministry, to offer a place to use popular culture as a way to engage non-Christian friends in spiritual discussions!
- Bethany: Worship, to lead and serve the community in a ministry that has needed new vision and life for the past years!
- Lauren: Cooking Classes, to serve as places where her friends from her program could meet her friends from her faith community and discuss spiritual things while cooking!
God convicted us of the places where He wanted us to be more invitational to the people He was calling on campus. So we set forth to study a gospel to get people in Scripture and interacting and discovering the fullness of Jesus; and what His life and ministry mean and model for us. We chose to spend time this fall studying the Gospel of John in a manuscript study on Thursday evenings.
We also realized that as we engage in a lot of new forms of ministry, that we really needed to set aside time to pray with God, and see what He is inviting us into on campus.
As we took account for the ways our fellowship had not pursued students in the past, we began to brainstorm ways to reach new students. One of the ideas we had for orientation week and the first week of school was to provide a map for students of the campus and the surrounding areas, noting the places to eat, make copies and buy supplies and find entertainment. We would also point out on the map where our fellowship gathers and offer the map to students free of charge.
City/Script
“…it was one of the most moving moments of my staff life.”
Every May, the Inter-Varsity fellowships from across Ontario come together to intensively study scripture of Mark’s Gospel or Genesis for one week. This year marked the 7th anniversary and was my third year attending the conference.
Up until this year, city/script was one of those conferences that Inter-Varsity as an organization was excited about, but not one I was excited about. I thought it was great, but found myself much more excited by other ministries and conferences of Inter-Varsity. That changed this year.
This year, we were amazed as God doubled our enrollment for the conference! Last year we had just over 120 people, and 3 Mark 1 studies, 1 Mark 2 study and 1 Genesis study. This year we had 5 Mark 1 studies, 2 Mark 2 studies and 1 Genesis study and had 188 people enroll!
My staff role at this conference was to find ways for the students to creatively process what God was doing in their hearts and lives that week. I partnered with my friend, Dave, who is Campus Staff at OCAD University. Together we visioned for and set up a studio space with 6 stations and various mediums for students to creatively express how God was speaking to them through the Scriptures they were studying. We also organized a coffeehouse, in order for students to share stories and display the artwork that was created, that happened toward the end of the week. I loved this role! I’m sure I would have loved teaching scripture but I loved using my creative gifts for this ministry.
But the one thing that made me rethink how I felt about this conference happened when a student in my Mark study decided to accept Jesus as his Saviour. This student was part of a group of students from the University of Ottawa. He came as a non-Christian and left on fire for God! Throughout the week he would ask a lot of thought provoking questions that made the long-term Christians really come to terms with what they believed. His skepticism could be easily perceived by anyone in the room. Then, after a gospel meditation, something shifted for this student. Something HUGE. He left the room, then came back visibly shaken, and then shared what had happened, and how he had just gone outside and asked God if He was real. This student then confessed that he was terrified about how God would answer. What followed next was one of the most moving moments of my staff life, as this student shared what was happening for him, I watched as students from his campus who were dispersed around the room all began praying for him. Then, students from my campus and others who had just met this student 4 days prior, began to envelop him in hugs and prayers. The emotions were high in the room, as people surrounded this student. Soon as communal prayer time started, and the room began to pray for each other and for this student. We then took a break, and Dan our study leader (and Campus Staff and housemate of the above mentioned student) asked the staff in his study what to do next; to push forward in the text or spend time in prayer in our campus groups. We opted for the prayer time. When I ran into Dan later that night, and asked what happened during their prayer time, he shared that this student accepted Jesus as his Saviour! This happened mid-week, so for the rest of the study we got to see this student transformed as God’s fire burned bright in him! This student shared his testimony during the coffeehouse, and a clip of it can be seen here.
Seeing this student’s transformation not only moved me, but my students as well, and created in them a desire to be a community where stories like this happen, and to be the kind of community that welcomed this student into God’s family.
The Arch 