Ministry Encouragement

Of course it's true that “numbers aren’t everything” but as we labor to put the gospel within arms reach of thousands of students, it’s good to take account every now and then to see how things are going. So as this semester and year come to an end; how many people are involved in our ministry? The difficulty lies in both knowing who exactly we should count, and then figuring out how to count them. The fast paced and organic locomotion of this ‘movement’ compel us to operate mostly on estimates. But there are some solid numbers that we find encouraging as we praise God at the end of this semester.

We had over 105 people at our Christmas party! (We lost count at 105) Our end of semester party numbers serve as a pretty good ball park figures of how many people are involved with us. Our weekly large group meeting attendance fluctuates anywhere from 70 to 150, so the parties usually give us a nice number of how many people are most connected to Cru at Cornell. Many people came and brought friends.

This semester we had 9 Community Groups. We have been emphasizing the importance of small groups as our primary vehicles for both evangelism and discipleship. Every community group had at least 2 leaders and a couple of them had even larger leadership teams. This year we started our first grad student small group lead by one of our great friends Barrett Keene. Our small groups have an average of 8 people in them, and a vision to reach out to those living around them.

One of our most rockin’ small groups has over 20 girls! Abbi is a junior who went on the Yellowstone summer project this past summer. She is a hotel management major and she co-leads this group with one of her sorority sisters named Nicole. Their leadership and enthusiasm are blessing many of the women and most of our freshman girls are hooked up with them.

Back in September we had over 50 students go with us to our fall retreat. That retreat always serves to help students bond together and get a bigger vision of God.
We’ve got 5 Cornellians coming with us to the Boston Winter conference and two of our students will actually be playing in the BWC praise band!

Two of our staff will be going to Haiti over Winter Break. Edgar and Nic will be traveling with a team to help serve the people alongside the Campus Crusade ministry there.

Last year we took 11 students down to Florida for our Spring Break mission trip. This coming spring we are planning to drive a bus down there and we already have 26 students pre-registered for Big Break as well as 10 students gearing up to serve in Guatemala.

This semester, a group of Cru students re-launched “weekly EV”. This is a scheduled time when students gather together, pray and then go eat dinner intentionally striving to engage others in conversations about Jesus. A few weeks ago, they had 20 evangelistic conversations at dinner time.