fall semester is coming fast.  it always seems that it comes quicker than it should.  classes end in may and already we’re working on finalizing everything for the coming fall.  let me give you all a break down of what our fall is going to look like.

first, we have asked all our chi alpha student leaders to come back a couple days early in order to do some final prep work and to prepare ourselves as a ministry for what God wants to do next year at missouri state.  this year we spent a lot of time developing our student leadership structure and discipleship process and we feel that the ministry is in a good position to grow both in number and spiritual depth.  i’ll write more on this later.

next we have freshman move-in.  at missouri state, every student organization that wants to help move students in must do it through the university.  this means that the university mobilizes student groups to help with the actual move-in process of meeting students at the curb, helping them move all of their stuff to wherever they are living, and sometimes helping them set their rooms up.  the university requires every person helping to wear one of their shirts that lists all of the organizations who are help on the back of it.  as well. the university asks that those helping refrain from recruiting people to join their groups while they are moving the students in.  while this is a noble opportunity to help the university, it also hinders meeting people and inviting them to events.  as a solution to this dilemma, a former director of chi alpha at missouri state came up with an idea to shuttle parents and students between their cars and their dorms with golf carts.  the university agreed to allow us to try it and we have been doing this now for several years with great success.  to make it even better, the university only allows our group to do this.  they didn’t want a bunch of groups driving golf carts around the campus and increasing the possibility of problems and accidents.  in return for the exclusivity of driving golf carts all around campus shuttling people around, the university asked us to help shuttle military veterans around campus for their veterans celebrations every november for veterans day.  it’s great to shuttle people around and talk with them and it opens up the opportunity to invite the students to some of our other activities going on.

that brings us to the next event we are hosting.  our large group weekly gathering happens every monday night during the school year.  so on the first day of class, which is always a monday here, we host a huge free barbecue for the students on campus and then we invite them to all join us for our first gathering of the year.  we have free food and games and then we go directly to our gathering in the student union.  this year we are trying to secure a ministry that will come an grill food for you so we can focus on meeting students.  last year we had staff grilling for hours on little home grills.  if the ministry (light for the lost is the name of it) agrees, they will bring in their huge grilling trailers and grill all our food for us.  we supply the food and they grill it.  also, we are trying to line up some other fun activities for this year.  we may have access to some inflatable games and we are looking into getting a junk yard to donate an old car so we can have students smash it with sledge hammers.  We’ll have some other crazy food games going on as well.

this all takes place in the first weekend plus monday.  after that we have the semester launching off and gearing up for some major connecting points with the larger student population.  our fall retreat is the beginning of october and we hope to bring a couple dozen new people to the retreat this year.  we also have some special events we are working on for the semester.  i’ll give you the bring concept and write more about them later.  we are working with the assemblies of god world missions to put on an africa experience at missouri state.  we’ve in process of solidifying the date.  we will be working with the international organization on campus and the africa student group.  the experience is something that was at the world missions summit this past year.  i’ll tell you more about it later.

also, we are putting together and night where we make a major focus and emphasis on inviting and bringing new people to are weekly gathering.  we are trying to mobilize our students to build relationships with the people around them and then invite them to check out our community.

beyond that, we are also making a concerted effort this year to develop more relationships with the international students on our campus.  their are over 800 international students here from all over the world and we want to befriend them and serve them all.

all of this is on top of our regular weekly stuff.  it’s going to be a fun year.  God is already working to bring things together to this next year.  pray for us that we hear God and and effective in building relationships with students so we can introduce them to Christ!

peace,
c & j