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.
Summertime reflections
The next couple posts will detail some of the exciting stories from the fall, but before I get there, here are a few of my Summertime reflections:
After a semester full of new vision and ministry; and a rapidly growing community; I spent the summer resting, planning for the upcoming year and embarking on adventures!
I started the summer a little hectically, as I quickly bid farewell to the interns, and packed up my room to make space for the Toronto Urban Partnership to inhabit our house during the month of May. While my house was occupied in May, I was in Bangladesh with 3 Ryerson students and 11 other students from Queens, McMaster, Western, Waterloo and Ottawa University. I had a blast with this fun group of students and an amazing staff team, and though Bangladesh wasn’t quite what I thought it would be, it definitely left an impression on me, and I came back changed!
After Bangladesh, I hit the road on the Greyhound and spent 6 days in rural Pennsylvania setting up and standing in my best friend’s wedding! It was a hoot, and I learned a whole new set of life skills, as I encountered “roughing it” in ways that were vastly different than my “roughing it” experiences in Bangladesh! After the wedding, I hopped on the bus and went down to Florida to visit with Sasha before she headed out to Kolkata on a Global Urban Trek. I remained in Orlando for a few days and rested and met up with friends; then headed to North Carolina for the Wild Goose Festival! An experience like no other, I enjoyed the time there and found rest in God despite the lack of many of my usual comforts. After the Wild Goose festival, I headed to Washington for a few days, and caught up with my good friend Crystel and was cared for well by her and her family. After being on the road for 3 weeks, it was nice to have South Asian parents take care of me. After Washington, I slowly made my way back to Toronto, to embark on the next new thing.
The next new thing being my household being filled with new housemates, we welcome Dan and Joy in at the end of July (Sara moved in while I was in Bangladesh). The rest of July was spent sorting out new household rhythms and planning for the new year of ministry with my new staff team and my new exec leaders. The new exec consisted of 4 women that I had invested in over the past year, Lauren, Bethany, Amber and Sandra; I was excited to see how they would work together and the vision they brought to ministry on campus! We met as an exec team a number of times over the months of July and August; first at Dan’s parent’s cottage and later at our house. There were a lot of great ideas and new vision for the ministries we would pursue this year.
All of the GTA campuses made a commitment to have the Gospel of Luke be the main teaching text for the year, so there would be an excitement building as students prepared for Urbana (where Luke would be taught) as well as so there would be consistency as we did GTA wide ministry and conferences. The exec students were excited about this possibility, and coming out of bible study of Luke, we wanted to model how we engaged people and relationships after Jesus’ interactions as well as pursue issues of justice as an expression of our faith and from these desires we shaped ministry for the upcoming year.
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!
Some Oldies, but oh so goodies!
Hello faithful readers,
My sincere apologies for the long delay in posts. I have many stories to share and hope to have them up with photos soon. In the meantime, here are some stories and highlights from December 2011.
Winter Roadtrip
After a fall semester full of exciting new ministry, I spent some time traveling in the States. I went to visit 2 of my SALI mentees, Pavi in Philadelphia and Sasha in Tampa. And as someone who enjoys the down-time that comes with travel, I decided to embark on this journey with my friend (and sometimes foe) Greyhound.
The journey was long, but I enjoyed the trip down, and enjoyed the books I brought down with me. I was reading the Settlers Cookbook by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, which is a good read but very heavy. One of the things I really appreciated about it was Brown’s migration story, as its one that closely resembles mine, and that mixed with recipes she’s acquired along the way made this read very memorable. Her perspective helped shape and give name to things I inherently knew.
I enjoyed my time in Philly with Pavi. I only spent 24 hours there, but I got to see some of her favorite haunts, check out and hang out at her work, sit in on some meetings, and get a guided tour of Philly. I also had some AMAZING dosa from the Philadelphia Chutney Company.
In Florida, I met up with Sasha and fellow SALI alum Rekha for a quick bite after my very long bus ride. It was really exciting gathering together with my SA sisters and seeing how God had been present and blessing their ministries. Afterward, Sasha and I headed back to her family home. The following day Sasha and I went to Clearwater Beach and met up with some USF students for beach volleyball and a bible study! Afterward, Sasha and I met up with a different group of USF friends to see a street with a beautiful Christmas light display. It was really cool to see but very odd for me to be seeing all these Christmas icons in a place that was so warm that I didn’t need a coat! The next day Sasha and I headed to Orlando, where we fulfilled a dream of mine to visit Celebration USA. Celebration was just as picturesque as I imagined, but still was struck by how friendly the people were and the size and growing diversity. Also that there was a legit university there! To remember my time there, I got a Florida shaped cookie cutter. After Celebration we hung out with one of my SALI staff friends and got a tour of UCF, his campus, and got to hear stories of the some exciting ministries taking place. Following our time at UCF, Sasha and I fulfilled another dream of mine by visiting Sweet, a cupcake shop owned and operated by two-time Cupcake Wars winner, Hollis. The cupcakes were delicious and there were so many to choose from! We took our sweet treats and used enormous amounts of restraint and ate them back at Sasha’s house. The following day, we stayed pretty close to home, and Sasha took me to her favorite rest spot, and while there I finally felt refreshed, and was able to feel really awed at the splendour of God’s creation. I also caught my first fish, and I wanted to cry the whole time. The next day we celebrated Sasha’s mother’s birthday, and we made her a cake. We made a Cashew Carrot Cardamom Cake with almond butter cream cheese icing and topped with chopped cashews. It was so delicious! The following day, my last in Florida, Sasha took me on a tour of USF, her friend Juan who I met while looking at Christmas lights, joined us and offered some of his insightful comments and hilarious experiences during the tour. After our time on campus, Sasha and I made some Florida cookies, some of which, I enjoyed on my bus ride. Then that evening, Sasha drove me to the station, and sent me off.
I began the long, slow journey home. Long story short, the bus I needed to catch to make all my connections was full, and I got put on the next bus, which left 5 hours later; setting back my arrival time 7 hours! Needless to say, I wasn’t impressed with the Greyhound. But it only put a slight damper on my amazing experiences and the wonderful memories from this road trip.
Kingdom Calling
Kingdom Calling happened December 27-31 in Toronto. Kingdom Calling is a conference that replaces the National Student Leaders Conference, which happens to be my favorite Inter-Varsity Conference. Kingdom Calling is a 5-day conference where students in 3rd or 4th year come and receive teaching and vision about what their life could look like post-University and what some ministry options could be. I love this Conference because it was one that had a significant impact on my decision to pursue ministry options with Inter-Varsity, but there’s also this exciting energy as students meet their peers from other campuses and pray and discern for one another as they pursue the next thing God has in store for them. Some of my closest friends in ministry are some of my peers that I met at this conference, so I was eager to be present as staff for this Conference and see the next generation of Kingdom Leaders.
I also had Moses, one of my Ryerson students, attend the conference; and he had a great opportunity to be placed in a small group with fellow art students from OCAD, Emily Carr and Humber. Since the staff from most of those campuses were present, I volunteered to lead a small group of students from another campus that didn’t have staff present. I chose to be intentional and lead the group from Queen’s, as I would be working closely with their Campus Staff this May on a Global Urban Partnership to Bangladesh (more on that here). I had a great time with the Queen’s students as I lead a group with students from three fellowships on that campus; Queen’s Christian Fellowship, Korean Christian Fellowship and International Student Ministry at Queen’s.
Also, I got to spend a bit of time with other students I knew from regional events who either had just returned from Bangladesh or were considering applying for the 2012 team.
The Conference itself offered some great talks and insights. For me, I found it tricky to hear some of the stories and the bold statements of God’s provision, as I was still mourning the cost of saying yes to Bangladesh. Or rather, the talks were propelling me to find out for certain whether I would be celebrating or mourning the costs of saying yes. I found myself with some free time and set aside an hour to find out for certain. Just as I suspected, I found out that I would indeed need more time to mourn the costs. But despite hearing the bad news, it was good to feel supported by some of the staff there who had been journeying alongside me in my discernment. Some of the above mentioned close friends in ministry were there to mourn with me and offer words of encouragement and hope.
Reflections from the Bangladesh GUP
So, each time I’ve been on a GUP, I’ve wanted to make a book of reflections based on my journal entries; something modeled for me by one of my friends after she had gone on a GUP.
However, I’ve always managed the first half, which is writing in the journal daily (or a summary of the week); but I have fallen short of making the actual booklet. Not this time though!
Here is my book of reflections from the Bangladesh GUP; if you’d like to know more or get a paper copy, let me know!
Cooking Group Recipes
Many of you have been intrigued by the Cooking Group that happened this semester.
Here are the recipes we used this semester:
2011 Annual Ministry Update
Hot off the presses!
Here’s my Annual Ministry Update; if you’d like to receive a paper copy, send me an email and I’ll pop one in the mail for you.
Join the Christmas Party
Our last event this semester was our annual Christmas Banquet. We hoped to incorporate the many things we had learned over the semester in our planning of this event. We planned to have a gingerbread house competition, carols, prizes and a potluck meal. We were in the Thomas Lounge, which is right off the main floor of the Oakham House and we left the door open to encourage people to pop in and join our party.
Answered Prayer:
To tie in our vision for the year, we put up posters saying “Join the Christmas Party”, that we had copied onto lime green paper, around the campus. After a semester of postering, and feeling unsure that posters were actually effective in inviting people to our events; many of my leaders approached the idea of postering with caution. After an exec meeting that ended early, a week before the party, I sent out my leaders to poster the campus. I went with Elizabeth to poster the Library building. While we postered, we wondered if they would draw people in. The day before the party, I walked through the Library building on my way to early Morning Prayer. I saw that many of the posters Elizabeth and I had put up had been postered over. I was sad (and angry as they had been postered over by unauthorized groups); and spent time in prayer asking God for our posters to be effective, despite being postered over.
Cut to: Our Christmas party, a student walks in, Vera*gets food and joins our table. In the course of conversation with her, I ask her how she’d found out about the party. She said she had seen the posters in the library building, and then made plans to attend; after the posters were covered she went in search of another one to get the pertinent details. She said she was excited as it was her first Christmas party of the year and was drawn in by our bright green posters. She left our party getting contact information for myself, Lauren and Elizabeth and giving us hers with a keen desire to keep in touch next semester. She is also of South-Asian descent, and when she gave me her contact information, it led us into a conversation where, thanks to my time at SALI I was able to identify and speak with knowledge and affirmation about her ethnic origin (she is from the same region as one of my SALI mentees). Earlier this semester, I had prayed for more South Asian students; including Vera, we now have 2 that are connected to our fellowship; another answered prayer, praise the Lord!
There was much laughter and merriment at our party, as everyone enjoyed the gingerbread house competition and the carol-off. By the end of the night, I counted and saw that over 30 people had eaten a meal with us (and many others had stopped by for a quick bite), and we had received contact information from 7 new people, eager to keep in touch next semester!
I look forward to seeing what God will do with our fellowship next semester!
*name changed
Ministries this Fall
This fall has given rise to many creative ministries, here’s what we’ve been up to this fall:
Running Small Group:
Jenna has been leading a group that exercises together and then does a small devotional on Monday mornings. This group takes place at the Ryerson Athletic Centre. In the winter, Jenna will be switching gears slightly, and will be pursuing Sports ministry, possibly involving intramurals.
Prayer:
I have been leading an early Morning Prayer time at 8 am on Wednesdays. I soon discovered that students aren’t as keen about prayer at that hour; as the time was spottily attended. Despite that, it was really wonderful to start the day with Jesus; and to find ways to creatively be communicating with our Creator. I plan on continuing the prayer group, but investigating new locations and timeslots.
John Manuscript Study:
We have been studying John’s gospel in manuscript-style study this semester. It has been an enriching experience for the leaders and students. I have been preparing the scripture with Jenna and Bethany who have been leading the Thursday evening studies. Over the course of the semester, the study has evolved and became more engaging as students dug into the text. We used media to help aid discussion and understand application of the text. We will be continuing with the gospel of John in the winter semester.
Cooking Group:
Every other Thursday, Lauren and I would lead a group that taught students how to cook using stories from the Bible. We used the website, www.cookingwiththebible.com for recipes, and would lead students in new culinary skills while explaining the significance of the meal we were preparing. We would also provide students with recipe cards of the dishes we prepared with a question that we would either discuss while tasting our dishes or leave students to think about. Lauren, my co-leader has this to say about her leadership role: I have loved being in leadership this year as it has allowed me to grow in my faith through putting me in situations where I have had to put my full trust in God. It has also allowed me to become much more intentional about putting God first in my life, and allowing his love to spill out into the lives of the people around me.
Movie Outreach
This year, Elizabeth was really excited about using movies as an aid to deeper discussions about faith and life. This semester, she lead a movie discussion about the movie Gattica. It went well, and has the potential to be a great tool for outreach. Elizabeth will pursue Movie ministry on a semi-regular basis in the winter semester.
Worship Coffeehouse
Bethany has a heart for creative worship. This semester, she lead a worship event; which incorporated music and visual arts. She put together a wonderful worship team, and made great connections to the gospel of John. Bethany will pursue Worship Coffeehouse events on a semi-regular basis in the winter semester.
GTA FallCon: Mark Our City
“We did an interactive flash mob…which included planking”
This year, we tried something new. Often, we have had out winter conference be something that was a GTA-wide event; but this year we decided to try having our fall conference be GTA-wide. It was September 23-24 and held in city at Stone Church.
We decided to do something simple, compelling and fun; that could help us launch ministries on our campuses. We invited students to see a play performance of the gospel of Mark. The play was divided into 2 acts. The first was performed on the Friday evening of the retreat and the second act was performed on the Saturday evening. During the day on Saturday, we received some teaching on parables, and then applied some of our teaching in the city. We started by re-enacting the parable of the sower in Queen’s park, by scattering grass seed. We then went and did an interactive flash mob inspired by the story of Jairus’ daughter which included planking; which the students loved and were very creative in their positioning (look for the student planking on a bench and garbage can). The planked students were then “woken up” and then would interact with the people who had assembled around them while they planked and offer them a package of water and granola bar, to represent bread and living water. After these live parables we debriefed the experience with the students, and then sent them out to lunch with their campus groups with a few questions to engage people they come across in the city on their way back to the church. These conversations proved very fruitful and life-giving for the students as we discovered during the debrief of the afternoon. Following the debrief, we went into our second act of the play; and ended the retreat shortly after the play’s end.
I had a vested interest in this conference, as I was on the planning committee. The committee consisted of me, my supervisor Jamie, and my friend Dan, staff at York University. We had been meeting and planning this conference since the spring. Dan and I took on roles of emcees of the conference, while Jamie did the teaching. Having already experienced co-emceeing at SALI, I was comfortable taking on this role, but still had some unresolved feelings from my last experience emceeing. I also lead the students in an interactive art piece that we did in response to the first act of the play on the Friday evening. It was exciting to see the themes that came up for the students, as they processed through the questions we asked them. Another role I had as part of this conference was that of “stager”, as I set up the space to create ambience for the play. I really enjoyed this role, and marvelled at how most of the items I was using were revamping pieces from various conferences: I set up a road in the gym out of fabric used at out National Staff Conference, emulating what I saw at Senior Girls’ camp this summer; I flooded the room with sounds before the performance that I’d used for our Kingdom People events; and I used incense to fill the room with smells that I originally purchased for this past Campus Gathering. It was fun re-using these elements and remembering how God moved in the midst of these other events.
We hope to perform the play again in the winter semester, to help us recruit for city/script.
The Arch 