Stian's Ministry Newsletter

  Yard Sign Fiasco Well, this past month was a whirlwind of activity at UTD. March was filled with lots of fun, fellowship, and theft! You read correctly! We had yard sign thievery! Apart from the excitement of our yard signs, this month we had the pleasure of playing host to out-of-state friends and had a great time of out reaching to the students of UTD.   The Yard Signs A couple weeks ago before UTDs spring break, our team came up with a new and exciting plan to advertise our sermon series that we started for the rest of the semester. The sermon series revolved around the question, "Does Jesus Care About _____". The sermons have been talking about poverty, depression, politics, dating, and so many other topics. Like any good advertising campaign, we took our main tagline question of "Does Jesus Care About ____" and posted yard signs all around campus. Boy oh boy did were we met with a surprising response from the students. Their response came in the form of steal...

  Fun February It was been another incredible month of ministry this month! I hope you enjoy this month's ministry update and are encouraged by all the exciting things going on at UTD! Celebrating Black History Month This month Focus hosted a special event celebrating Black History Month! This was our first-ever showcase celebrating black culture and talent called Release. This year we have been focusing on what it looks like for our community to celebrate and honor the diverse cultures that our students come from. Release was a fun and exciting event to highlight what our students love about their culture and heritage. The event was filled with singing, dancing, and spoken word! It was a hit event! I think our community and the university really enjoyed the whole event. Focus Alumni Something that is really neat about this community is the lifelong friends I have gotten to make. It is such a neat chance for our students to meet and befriend other students who become some of their ...

 NEW YEARS MINISTRY Hello there and welcome to January's blog update! 2023 has already been a roller coaster of events for the UTD FOCUS ministry, including ups and downs, and I'm excited to share with you all what has been going on so far.  Winter Retreat  Every year we start out with our biggest event for all of the FOCUS campuses, Winter Retreat. This year we moved our retreat to a new location and changed the name from Winter Camp to Winter Retreat. This year's retreat was at the Riverbend Camp in Glenrose Texas. We invite all of our FOCUS students from all of our DFW campuses to drive out for the weekend to fellowship, worship and have fun. It was a really successful retreat and so many of our students enjoyed their time at the camp. It is always encouraging to hear about how fired up our students get for camp and after camp going back to their campuses.  This retreat was also the first time I got to lead one of our worship sets! Last year would have been the fi...

  Merry Ministry! December was a short but fulfilling month of ministry! Our students were busy finishing up their finals for the year and getting ready for the Winter break. While our students were busy, their campus pastors were busy as well. This last month marks the end of the 2022 year and a halfway point in the pastoral apprenticeship for myself and my fellow apprentices. This school year has been an exciting time to watch how God has worked in the lives of our students and I am even more excited to see how he continues to work through this next year. Christmas Party What would the holiday season be without a little Christmas Party? Or in our case a very large party! Seeing as how we have about 200 students in our ministry at UTD, our Christmas parties are quite the event to plan. This year I got to see behind the scenes with the planning of the Christmas party and boy were there a lot of things to do. Thankfully I work with an amazing team that loves our students so well. Th...

  Thankful Ministry! The month of November has been another busy month of ministry! I'm excited to get to share with you all the things that have been going on at UTD this month. I hope you have enjoyed these past few months of ministry blog updates, and I'm so excited to share more in the future! Small Group Worship One of our values in ministry is creating an environment where people can make deep meaningful relationships with other Christ-loving students. Building a Christ-centered community is a large part of what FOCUS is all about. You may have noticed in my previous blog updates that we host a lot of events for our students and this is one of the ways we cultivate community. We invite our students to get to know each other outside of their weekly small groups. This past month we did exactly that with a joint small group worship night. It was really great to see a lot of our Tuesday night small group students show up and mingle with people outside of their small group. We...

  Staying Warm! This month has been another wonderful month of ministry! It is always so neat to see our student body start to take shape after our Fall Camp season. We get a better picture of who we have in our community and students who are regular in their attendance to both our Friday Night Fellowship and small groups. We are currently hosting about 150 students at our weekly fellowship night and that has been super encouraging.  Outreach Events Something we have been focusing on this semester is continuing our efforts to reach students through our hosted events after our weeks of welcome are over. We meet a majority of our students during the first few weeks of school and our events are very helpful for meeting new students. We have been continuing that idea with our events after our weekly fellowship and this past month we hosted a video game event in the Student Union. We have multiple TVs set up for students to play several games and this photo is one of a game called ...

HELLO FALL It has been nothing short of an exciting and busy month this past September! Our small groups, large group meetings and one on one bible studies are in full swing and it feels so good to be back in the normal swing of ministry. Our first couple weeks of the month were still filled with a few events to reach out to students walking around on campus and I've been so encouraged to meet so many new people to the FOCUS ministry! FEELING HOMESICK? This past month my fellow apprentices and I started our Evangelism class! One of our assignments for class was to plan and host our own outreaching event to meet new students. My team and I decided on hosting an event we called "Feeling Homesick?". We wanted to reach students who are new to UTD from out of state or our large international student population. Over the past few months of meeting new students, I have met an overwhelming number of international students. It had not clicked for me just how big of a change it is ...