It's been a while since we've written!
How many times have you seen that in a letter? April came and went so fast and we thought it'd be good to update you on a few things happening on campus as the semester comes to an end (graduation is May 14!).
As you read on, know that your prayers and financial support are a key way that we've been able to be engaged in this work.
And we hope to write again soon to give you more of a year in review and tell you about our summer plans.
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On April 23, we had something we called MISSION(IL) Vision Night. MISSION(IL) [pronounced Mission Illinois] is our pre-school year mission trip to campus to welcome new students to campus and invite them into our lives and to Illini Life.
To excite students about being involved in campus outreach — and to remind our older church members about how they can be a part of campus outreach — we had a vision night focused on this coming Fall's MISSION(IL). This 3 hour event had rapid fire info, envisioning, thanking of leaders, and a lot more.
While we wish even more students would have come, we love to get behind the students who are excited to reach their peers by intersecting lives this Fall. Particularly, one thing we're excited about is that every freshman would get a personal invite from us to pursue Jesus in their college years.
Would you pray that this vision sticks and our students would be bold in Gospel proclamation?
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We don't often explicitly write about it, but we hope that you know that we're a part of a network of churches called Collegiate Church Network. In April, we went to the annual conference for staff in this network. It's a way for campus focused churches to come together and strategize in our unique work. There are different ways of doing ministry to campus, but we love campus-focused churches. And Collegiate has 22 of them (check out the campuses in the pic above!).
Collegiate has had a faith goal of having 25 churches by 2020 and Illini Life has started to have conversations as a church about how our church at the U of I could send a team to a campus to be a part of that.
We're definitely early in the discussions, but we'd love prayer from you for our team to hear from The Lord and be unified in any direction we take on planting a church.
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Lastly, but certainly not least, this Sunday, we're celebrating our school year in our annual Celebration Sunday. While it's fun to look back on the year, something we get super excited about is our baptisms that we offer after the service. We have 4-6 people considering getting baptized this weekend and we're so excited about it!
Would you pray that this faith allegiance declaration to Jesus would lead to life-long disciples?
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And finally, as we'd mentioned, Graduation for the U of I is May 14th. Please be praying for our students as we finish the school year and thank you for your support!
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