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Archive for the ‘Illini Life’ Category

April 2011 Update

Posted 08 Apr 2011 — by nick
Category Friends, Fun, GCM, Illini Life, Jesus, Ministry, Photos, Running, Scripture, Spirituality

Hello friends below you should find our update letter for April 2011.

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Beautiful Things

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Posted 24 Mar 2011 — by nick
Category Fun, Illini Life, Ministry, music, Spirituality, Videos

Recently I was introduced to the song “Beautiful Things” by Gungor. It was in a worship set when I was back home with Illini Life Christian Fellowship at University of Illinois. Since then I’ve heard it in several other churches as I’ve met with folks around the Chicagoland area.

It’s catchy and I love to simplicity of the chorus

You make beautiful things,
You make beautiful things out of dust.
You make beautiful things,
You make beautiful things out of us.

On Mission in Haiti and Memphis

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Posted 21 Mar 2011 — by nick
Category Friends, Fun, GCM, Illini Life, Jesus, Ministry, Photos, Social Justice, Spirituality, Technology

As some of you may have noticed in our last update letter Illini Life sent off two different missions teams over Spring Break this week. Amy is currently in Memphis, TN with a team of 30 Students and 5 Adult leaders serving and sharing in the community there with SOS. They arrived on-sight Sunday afternoon.

Another small group of 15 headed to Haiti around 2:00AM CST today. They’re working with Mountain Top Ministries just outside Port-a-Prince. One of my ministry passions is helping engineering students find places to serve in the church and use their gifts. This trip allows quite a few of them to do just that. The 15 are divided into 3 groups:

One group will be helping to set up a school’s computer lab & provide training for the equipment.
One group will be working alongside a Haitian construction team to build a hospital.
One group will be partnering with a team from UIC-Chicago to run a medical clinic.

We’re excited to be providing 15 laptops and wireless internet in the computer lab. You can have a look at some pictures a few of my friends took as they prepared the computers for travel and lab installation. If you’d like to follow along with the Haiti trip subscribe to the trip blog.

A Spirit of Unity

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Posted 24 Feb 2011 — by nick
Category GCM, Illini Life, Jesus, Ministry, News, Spirituality

Not long ago I received word from the GCM office of an agreement made between the 17 dominate missions groups focusing on reaching college campuses (of which GCM is one). It’s being referred to as “The Chicago Agreement: Unity in Mission” you can read it here, or below.

It excites me knowing that the common ground we have in Christ can spur us on together to reach our campuses for Christ despite our theological, worship and stylistic differences. In matters of faith and Christian brotherhood, I find it more profitable to find the common ground we share rather than drawing lines and defining who is in the club and who is out. I find the spirit of this agreement to be the same.

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Support Raising: By the numbers

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Posted 27 Jan 2011 — by nick
Category GCM, Illini Life, Ministry

Awhile back I posted giving a brief rundown of the process of raising support most missionaries go through. It’s a long process, one where I feel God does more preparing and readying me for ministry than I anticipated He would and/or needed to.

I’m asked to be faithful, to continually step into uncomfortable situations for a introverted engineer. I get to meet new people constantly and hear their story and share mine. Along the way great friendships form and some folks even decide to support the work God is doing in and through my life.

You know I’m an engineer at heart, so numbers a thing for me. So I figured I’d give you all another batch of support raising numbers here:

1250 – the number of times we’ve tried to initiate with people to see if they’d like to meet. That could be anything from an email thread, a text message thread, facebook message thread, phone call or in person.

161 – the number of people committed to praying for us regularly.

123 – the number of appointments kept. Quite a few of those folks were couples.

53 – the number of people supporting us financially with a repeating gift. There are 16 additional people that have given special gifts with no commitment to repeat.

9 – the number of homes stayed in besides ours along this journey.