Catch-up

Hello again from the Vinelife Student Blog! Sorry it’s been a quiet few weeks on here recently – hopefully you’ve all been enjoying scouring through the backlog of articles and recommendations. If you haven’t, you really should – there’s some great stuff to access.

We’ve had a really exciting start to the term student-wise. Campus Breakouts (every Wednesday, 2pm) have been a lot of fun. Just last week we went out and did “Buckets of Love”, where we simply shared encouraging words from God with people, and the Lord was up to some cool stuff. Even before we went out, a guy approached us in KroBar and we ended up chatting with him for ages; encouraging him in his current struggles, praying for him, and sharing God’s truth about his life with him. It was awesome to see just how much the Holy Spirit was obviously impacting him – and especially awesome considering he found us… it’s a lot easier that way! Then when we out and about, we saw a number of people get healed including one guy whose knee got completely better. Awesome.

We had our Student Alpha Launch last week as well – Week One, “Who is Jesus?” is happening this week at 7.30pm in Happiness Café. It’s not too late to invite your friends, so get on that!

Finally, RSS (Reach Saturday Studies) started back with a bang this past weekend. RSS is our fortnightly time to get together and delve deeper into God’s word. It’s led by Chris Foster, a PhD student from Nazarene Theological College, and is just generally fantastic. Every other Saturday (next one is 30th October), 10am, Manchester Academy. Well worth a couple of hours of your time!

In the mean time, I’m just about to release something very exciting into cyberspace: Staff Intern Jess Felstead’s first post on the Student Blog. Stay tuned, it’ll be here this afternoon!

Lift off!

So we had the Student Alpha launch night last night… it was great! Loads of people came, the entertainment was awesome and hopefully many people left with the intention of coming back next week for the start of the real thing. Thank you so much to everyone who prayed/invited/helped/well-wished – please continue to do so for the duration of the course, we really need all your support. And just so you know – week 1 kicks of Wednesday 21st October, 7.30pm at Jabez Clegg. Free food and everything!

Another thing that’s really beginning to “take off” (i’m sorry.) are the student treasure hunts that we’ve been doing for the past few weeks. We were out again yesterday afternoon and it’s really exciting to see everyone’s confidence growing a bit more. But it’s not actually about us, it’s about seeing people encounter the love of God, which is why the most encouragement always comes from the people we get to chat and pray with. Once more we uncovered some more of God’s treasure (whether they knew they were or not!) and it was awesome to be able to pray with a number of people – the appointments that God sets up are just mind-blowing sometimes. Right now we’re still fighting with our natural urge to run away from most encounters that start up as soon as we can, but gradually we’re learning to have more faith and stick around a bit longer to see what God’s up to!! I guess the key is recognising that this isn’t just an event we do on Wednesday afternoons, but a lifestyle that we’re trying to develop – one in which we are open to what God is doing and then going and getting involved, whatever the context. So it’s definintely a journey we’re all on… and an exciting one at that!

If you haven’t been out on a Wednesday yet you should come do it… this week in fact. It’s just so exciting to see God stuff happen out in the real world. It’s awesome to pray with our family in the church, but it’s absolutely wicked cool to pray for some random* on the street who might not even heard of Jesus before – that’s the whole living it out part, right? Even if you think it’s all completely nuts and you couldn’t think of anywhere else you’d like to spend your afternoon less, just come and give it a try – God’ll surprise you. (And we’ll walk you through everything, explain all the “american” buzz words etc etc). Just do it!

* random to you, not random to God.