Summer is a time to be refreshed after the school year, but also a time to meet new freshmen and gear up for the fall. Three days a week Georgia State offers student organizations opportunities to set up information tables at freshmen orientations. We usually have around 150 students sign up for more information about InterVarsity. Once school starts we throw huge parties, offer lots of free food, and make many phone calls to further introduce these new students to the InterVarsity community and our mission on campus.
This past year our efforts to reach new students was very fruitful. We welcomed 30 freshmen into our chapter last fall, almost doubling the size of our chapter. Here’s the story of one of those freshmen, Jules, who stumbled upon one of our events last Fall, and had she not, would probably have walked away from her faith like many others do in college:
“A year ago I would have called myself a Christian by name: I went to church, went to my youth group, and went through all of the motions, but I did not have a relationship with God and I did not fully live out what it meant to be a Christian. When one of my really good friends, Cole, gave me a very vague description of the event he was about to go to, FreshStart, I decided to go with him and give it a chance. I went and met some really awesome people and thought that it would be just exactly the same, or very similar, to the type of group I had experienced in the past. Little did I know that over this year God would truly show himself to me.
I learned what it meant to live a life that was dedicated to Jesus and his mission and how I could carry that out in my life. I am still learning and building my relationship with God. I am so thankful to have had God’s kingdom shown to me and it has helped me through a lot, including the death of my grandma. InterVarsity and the friends I made through it have truly been what I needed being 16 hours away from home. They have showed me how to love and how God’s love for me is never ending. The friendships I have made this year will never die and the relationship I have built with God will only grow. “
I show a picture of her rock climbing because she and Cole are both avid climbers and having both really been moved by God’s desire to see all be in relationship with Him are leading a campus mission team next fall. In this they hope to build relationships with other climbers and start a group for rock climbers where they can begin to check out who Jesus is in a setting perhaps more comfortable for them than a worship service. It’s amazing to see God grab a hold of students like Jules and then use them in big ways for his Kingdom. Pray that God would use Jules and Cole to lead lots of rock climbers to the Lord and that this coming Fall we would connect with many other Freshmen who like Jules would become missional Christians at Georgia State.
