Greetings!
This past weekend was the St. Patrick's Day celebration in Boston, the first city in the US to honor St. Patrick's Day as a holiday. The city was set in the color of green as if the Red Sox had suddenly changed their sox! It is interesting, if not somewhat ironic, that St. Patrick was known for his work in converting pagans to the Christian faith. As we were out over the weekend, the celebration of St. Patrick looked more like an honoring of the preconverted! Nearly 600,000 visitors came to Boston this weekend just for St. Patrick's day.
That is Boston. The convergence of celebration, liberty, progression, pluralism, history, academia, and spiritual exploration. In this short prayer update, the best we can do is give you a brief picture of the big stuff...what we can't reproduce for you is the dozens of conversations and lives of people that are encountering Jesus.
Your prayers are a reminder to us of our dependence on the movement of God in our own lives as we must die daily for Christ to live in us.
Love and Peace,
Tim, Stephanie, Kim, Nathan & Bobby
Sojourn Collegiate Ministry Staff
just follow the link below to the prayer calendar, click on a date, then add your name in the event field.Each day we'll send a list of prayer points and at the end of the week, we'll send an update from the week.
Here are some of the big things that happened in February:
• We had our first meeting with three students!
• We continue to meet with more than a dozen students around the city on 7 campuses.
• We had initial meetings with the chaplains and spiritual life directors at NU and BU.
• We hosted a meeting of regional Christian Church ministers.
• Campus Crusade and Intervarsity have provided facilities and support on site.
• We hosted a four campus ministers who are serving as an informal steering team.
• The Boston Partnership hosted their first launch community gathering.
Please continue topray for God's miraculous favor as we move toward registrationand for God's wisdom for how we organize the gathering component for Sojourn and finally pray for our faithfulness to walk in God's strength.
be in prayer as we begin two studies this weekendcalledLife Generous: one with undergraduates and one with graduate students in the city
free use of their building!) we have started a monthly church gathering, primarily for those interested in being a part of BoPa when it officially launches in September.
At the February gathering, we had about 35 people in attendance and though many people were unable to make it to the March meeting, there were some new faces. So we are very excited about the April gathering socontinue to pray for the Wilson's, Brown's, John Tischer and Phil McCardel as our partner church planters in the city.
Working with the Boston Partnership team is an amazing collaboration that God continues to build and bless. Our focus, as Sojourn, is obviously college students, but the opportunity to link students directly to a city church is important, if not necessary, for our vision of campus ministry in Boston. We desire to integrate the "campus life" to the city life, and our partnership with BoPa is a strong foundation.
March 2006
Prayer Calendar Update by Tim Hawkins
Thank you to everyone who participated in our prayer calendar for February. Nearly 20 different people were praying specifically for God to work through us in Boston! We would like to do this again in April,
First Sojourn Collegiate Gathering
by Nathan
Griffith
On February 23 we had our first gathering of students in the city. We invited really everyone we have connections with, focusing primarily on our BU contacts. As it turned out, we had three people come. Two of them are BU students and one is currently a student at Bunker Hill Community College with aspirations to attend BU in another two years.
Our staff continues to build relationships and meet with students around the city. We will have a follow up meeting this weekend. As a staff we have also been serving with Starlight, a ministry to the homeless in the city and look forward to inviting students into serving with us in the city.
Please continue to pray with us as we seek to be registered at BU as a campus organization. The students God has brought our way are certainly interested in seeing this happen and we rejoice in God’s provision and direction here. We also want to rejoice with you that God has been very faithful in blessing our personal relationships with students.
Finally, please
Church Launch Core Gathering by Kim Conrad
The Boston Partnership [the church plant we are working alongside, affectionately called "BoPa" at this point] had their first gathering on February 19th! Through a great friendship that has developed with a church in the North End called the Boston Worship Center, (including the very generous and
CMSU Spring Break in Boston by Bobby VanBecelaee
We hosted 14 people from CMSU this past week. It was great to see familiar faces from back home, and even meet a few new ones. I feel like I was as challenged as they might have been, watching them willingly question their ideas of what ministry can be. We not only talked about what it looks like from an organizational perspective to be a ministry that exemplifies generosity, beauty and unity, but also with what that look like on a personal level.
The trip was not a mission trip in the traditional sense, but an exploration of what it means to live a life that reflects Jesus day to day, to the point that relationships we have and people we meet see Christ in us, not because we force it upon them but because it is a natural _expression of who we are. Though we talked about all of our core values, the week really became one of service, attempting to connect with as many organizations as we could. We went to Ma Sis’s place at Quincy Street Missional Church in Dorchester, served with the Greater Boston Food Bank, helped with a kids program at the Salvation Army, and simply lived life and conversed with the people of Boston.
tim@sojourn-ne.org
Son of Doug and Donna Griffith and brother of Makila Griffith members of Mt. Hope.