August Ministry Update!

Hello friends and supporters!

It's finally upon us; August is here! With August is the beginning of the Fall semester at Collin College. Every year August is filled with preparing for the school year and rounding up our leaders to form a team of staff and students committed to reaching our campus. It's such an exciting time of year for us because mobilizing college students to be Christ to people is what we live for.

                                                                                    Corefas
We call our student leaders core facilitators (corefas for short). Cores are our small groups that meet weekly on campus. This year we will have 13 small groups on the Collin campus and 2 small groups on the Preston Ridge campus. What?!? That's crazy. God has provided us with some amazing student leaders who have devoted their year to reaching out to their campus. I often speak about corefas because they are the most encouraging part of my ministry. So get ready for a lot of that this school year.

Prep Day
Yesterday we spent the entire day with our staff and corefas. First of all, I can't say how cool it is to see such fired up, serious disciples all in one place ready to do one thing. We spent the day training our 33 person team in small group and one on one ministry, helping them develop schedules, teaching them how to live out mission, and growing friendships between us all. At the end of the day we had a worship session where we all shared our vision for the campus and it was incredibly encouraging to see just how much these students get it! They're hungry to show people Jesus' love and they're ready to do whatever it takes to bring Christ to Collin and Preston Ridge.

Welcome Week 
The most important weeks in campus ministry are the first few weeks of school. It's when students are looking for friends and deciding whether it's possible to find them on campus. That's where we need to succeed every year in order to continue to have an effective ministry. We have so much planned for those first few weeks in order to get students from Focus to reach out and befriend people on campus. But we are fully aware that our own steam isn't enough to get us anywhere really. We rely on God to provide the harvest and we'll be faithful with what he gives us. With that in mind we have a few prayer requests that I'd really appreciate you being in prayer about.

Prayer Requests
1. Pray for campuses, and for receptivity to the gospel, that the Spirit would be moving powerfully on our campus and in our community.
2. Pray for our students to be bold in reaching out to their peers.
3. Pray for our direction as a campus staff, that we'd be leading people to God always.
4. Pray for our perseverance and discipline as we undertake such big work!

Finally, thank you so much for your partnership. Your prayer and support are essential to the ministry God has allowed us to share together. Please let me know if I can be praying for you about anything at all, as well as if you'd like to meet up and talk.

Yours on the campus,
Garrett

P.S. From now on my blogs will be released on the 15th or 16th of every month in order to offset some of the many campus staff blogs!