Hi friends!
I wanted to share with you an awesome testimony of what has been happening through the son of one of our soon-to-be staffers. Yay God!
Dear family in Christ,
I want to inform you of what has happened so far at Carnegie Mellon, henceforth referred to as CMU, over the past week and a half. Over the summer, several leaders of the different fellowships at CMU, and a dozen more students who have focused heavily on evangelism during my time as a student, planned and fund-raised for continuous evangelism during the week of orientation for the incoming freshman, aka OWO, as well as the weekend before for the international and minority students' move-ins. They received donations from some of the local churches in Pittsburgh, but apparently also from local businesses (restaurants) who wanted to advertise their wares to the students and provided food for all the events.
Each day for the past eleven days the students have held multiple events across the campus. According to Chris Hsu, a member of IV leadership who served as the main coordinator and statistician recorder, there were between 50 and 250 students at each event, and he believes that the majority of incoming freshman and international students, over 1500, heard the gospel. Dozens of Christian students, I am not sure of the exact number but solidly over one hundred, were involved directly in evangelism, with a core group of over 40 students who lead, trained and organized for the different events. Two other friends of mine I talked to, Aaron Anderson and Amos Evans, told me how their experiences were during OWO. Amos encouraged me greatly, with awesome news I have been praying to hear and see for four years, that the students among the fellowships not only bonded, worshiped and prayed with each other, but that Christian students at CMU actually crossed ethnic lines for the first time en masse, with the different evangelism teams made up of white, black, asian and even a few of the very few hispanic believers at CMU. This happened only once before, at the All Campus Worship this past May, the last, fist and only time I had the opportunity to preach the gospel at a inter-fellowship event at the Fence in center of CMU. I am glad that the believers I have come to know and love are acting as one people, rather than ethnic fragments I saw for nearly four years.
According to Chris and Amos, they were "wierded out" by how hungry the incoming freshman were concerning the nature of God and who Jesus was and is, as well as the curiosity of the international students, some of whom who have never heard the gospel before. Neither had seen so many people asking believers about their faith in the central lawn of the university before. This was compounded by the fact that the fellowships were the only student organizations at CMU during orientation week; usually the two student groups who are present are the Rabbinical Jewish groups as well as the GLBT groups, but for an "unknown" reason neither were present in force this year.
OWO will officially be over this Saturday, with an All Campus Outreach in the center of the university at the Fence, so please keep praying, since it will be the last proclamation of the gospel at CMU this summer. The fellowships will be tracking the number of freshman, international students, as well as upperclassmen who come to the different fellowships/bible studies over the next month, to track how many came because of OWO, and how many have accepted Christ as their savior as well as those who are still coming to learn out of curiosity. None of the believers who took part in this have ever seen response like this before, at least they tell me, and one told me he has trouble believing what he has seen.
Thank you all for praying for my University and myself, I hope to visit the next time during this academic year when the students do evangelism like this again. The students are planning on more evangelism during the year, but are going to be focused on plugging new people into the Christian community over the next month.
God bless and keep you all!
Joseph
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