64159

action


here are some of our UMB students in our "office" space on campus which happens to be right out in the open with all the other campus organizations. it is a great place to be and wonderful conversations and life happen right here. i appreciate our students so much for being present and for being fully "in" at school. love these kids!

63159

kickoff


another full and fun week of launching sojourn expressions all over the city. here are a few pics from a kinect event at UMASS (my favorite moment is documented here: the solo approach was rejected in favor of group participation). the rest are from our city-wide kickoff event. enjoy!

60859

summer


on friday the umb leadership crew went on a boston adventure that ended with brazilian barbecue being consumed. a bittersweet moment as it means the semester is finally over and we are now in "summer mode." there is still plenty of work to do for us during the summer, but the rhythms and schedule change and take on a different feel. i can't stop marveling about what a great semester it has been and i really can't wait for september to come around so we can get back in to it! 

60559

endings...


we are coming in a for a landing on the semester and school year. enjoy some pics from our umass leadership celebration...

our NEU leadership celebration:

and our incredible staff:

what an amazing year it's been. i'll be blogging a bit more over the next couple of weeks with reflections on the year, but for now its enough to say that it has truly been awesome!

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tutoring

this completely hilarious picture was taken last night at our first "real" gathering of students and tutors at St. Mary's in Dorchester (St. Mary's is where we had our recent ReadRetreatServe and with whom Sojourn has been developing a partnership over the last year). St. Mary's has been a focal launch point for Episcopal City Tutoring. our students at UMASS-Boston have jumped on this program and are helping run a supplemental aspect of the tutoring curriculum over the next ten weeks.

this has been a long time coming for us and it is encouraging to see these UMASS students stick around long enough to see their faithfulness and hard work rewarded. i am also really impressed with the high school students we get to work with (two of whom you can see on the right...the others bailed on the picture!). these are some driven, hard working, ambitious young people!!

it's going to be exciting to watch this develop and I am eager to see this great group of people work together (although it is pretty clear we struggle to make a good picture happen).

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pics from umass-boston this week.

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kinect

*my apologies to youth pastors*

one aspect of collegiate ministry (that i enjoy) is that it is not youth ministry. again, no offense to youth ministers, but ym always fights a battle with entertainment (the best youth pastors take this battle head on and do a great job with a huge challenge). but, campus ministers don't have to do battle with entertainment the way youth ministry does. college students have a million things to entertain them...they get involved with campus ministry because they have questions, they are seeking something, they are looking for purpose, etc, etc. that gets me excited in ways that wacky games and cool videos don't.

when we decided to do an event at UMASS-Boston this semester called Kinect with Sojourn I cringed a little. pizza, xbox kinect, dancing...sounded a lot like a youth ministry cliche to me. this probably says more about me than anything else.

nonetheless, we knew we needed to do something as a "middle step" event for all the people we've connected with who wouldn't jump right in to our weekly conversation (which is more of a bible-study type gathering).

in the end, the event was a great success...we had over 50 students show up, we have a ton of people to follow up with, and our core students were super stoked with the energy and excitement of the day. UMASS is longing for anything that brings students together and creates a sense of community on campus. i think we accomplished that.

and i think i learned a lot (again) about how often i can get in the way of what God is doing with my preconceptions and prejudices. God is definitely moving at UMASS-Boston. it is a diverse campus in every sense of the word, and it is the school where the kids who grow up in this city go to get a college education. 

i am humbled and honored to be a part of this work and to help UMASS students on their journey back to God. 

56859

progress

If all the news you have of my life is culled from my recent twitter and facebook updates than you might think that the Giants are the only thing going on right now. As fun as it has been to watch them make this run, there is actually a lot of really great stuff happening in ministry!

Our northeastern group is growing numerically and deeply. This last week we had a bit of breakthrough with them: the first girl joined our weekly meeting and we had one of the best “honesty” moments of the year as they wrestled with the story of Joseph in Genesis. It was awesome to see them move beyond easy answers and sit in the tension of messy stories.

We have our first Read.Retreat.Serve. event coming up next weekend. The response so far has been great...it looks like we could have 20-25 people attend this event which would be a new record. I really love RRS because of the way it demonstrates our values so clearly to students and it raises the question of how to engage culture for students in a fresh way. 

I am probably most encouraged by our progress at UMASS-Boston. A month ago we nearly lost our RSO (registered student organization) status, but now, for the first time, it feels like we are really starting to gain momentum.  We’ve seen new people join our weekly meeting and it seems like this is a time that students are seeing as really valuable to them.

We are (finally) launching our SAT tutoring program next week at UMASS, and I am excited to see students take ownership of this and get involved. I love seeing students get passionate about an idea that helps promote kingdom values (The “hope” bracelet you see pictured is something I bought from a girl in our group who is raising money for a students without borders project.)   

UMASS-Boston is still a work in progress as we try to figure out effective ways to minister to students at that campus. Our experiment of the week involved setting up “baggo” in a central location and inviting people to play with us (picture is of the game but not on campus).  This went remarkably well and we played for over two ours and met about 15 new students. Slowly but surely we are establishing a presence and becoming part of the fabric of the campus.

A month ago I was in a bit of a funk trying to see the “win” but right now I am feeling super encouraged about Sojourn’s progress on campus this semester!

Also, go Giants.

56359

miracles


the theme of our semester is discipleship: becoming compelling disciples of Jesus. in order to lead others into this kind of discipleship we need to be followers first. first followers...compelling disciples...major goals for the next several months.


last friday i did a short case study for our leaders on peter as a first follower who became a compelling disciple (did you know people lined up the sick next to where he walked to try to get them healed...crazy...acts 5:5). one of the things that stood out to me (again) with peter/the disciples in acts is all the miracles that are going on. sometimes i think we get bummed out because we don't see these kinds of miracles going on today, but i also wonder if we don't know how to accurately label miracles either. 


with that in mind, i've been feeling a lot of weirdness at UMASS Boston recently. weird conversations with other groups, one-on-ones that fell through at the last minute, even a crazy preacher who yelled at people for six straight hours last week. weird spiritual stuff.


and yet, i continue to feel strongly that this is an important campus in the city and an important campus for us to invest in, especially if we say we want to care about the neighborhoods of boston (lots of kids from these neighborhoods go to umass...for example in our core group right now we have two kids from dorchester, one from eastie, and one from cambridge...all local kids). furthermore, last week i had great meetings with two students that affirmed how good it is for us to be at UMB.


so, late monday when i checked my email and discovered a paperwork miscommunication that threatened to dissolve our organization on campus at UMASS I freaked out, but i also saw pretty clearly that, indeed, there is some spiritual stuff going on here. i am always hesitant to play the "spiritual warfare" card, but sometimes it is undeniable. 


we needed to prove in less than 24 hours that we had an accurate number of people connected to our group. at umass this involves an incredibly un-user friendly website that very few students use. before getting in to bed for an unrestful night of sleep I prayed, "the only way this happens tomorrow God is if you come through in a big way." it seems dumb because all we were asking people to do was get on their computers and press a button. and yet, i cannot understate what a difficult task this can be given the culture and nature of the school and the software.


most of tuesday was spent furiously writing emails, texting, making phone calls, praying, brainstorming names, facebooking, and worrying.  at 3, two hours before the deadline, we were still several names short.


somehow by 20 after 5 we were one over! people i hadn't been able to get in contact with for weeks suddenly were returning messages and following through. tim remembered a nursing student, tony, that we had forgotten about and tony came through with several people and is now one of my hero's. i was checking my email at one point and a confused student happened to be on g-chat and i was able to walk him through the registration process.  


in the end it all worked out. somehow. on the one hand it's such a simple thing, but given the context this was nothing short of a miracle. 


thanks to all of you who prayed for us throughout the day. miracles happen more often then we think, i think. maybe we just lack the courage to call them what they are. 

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umass_pics

photos from welcome week at umass-boston.  tabling is never my favorite thing, but we connected with a lot of new students and have over 30 contacts for the start of the year, which is great and makes it all worth it!

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story_pt_23590


got an email from a umass student who took one of the books from our table two weeks ago.  she read the whole thing and loved it! hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about it soon.

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umass_table


there's that phrase about how "a picture is worth a thousand words."  this picture is worth maybe twenty...makes it look like our umass table was in the middle of some kind of lonely, sterile nowhere on campus.  not true at all.  we had a great day passing out books, talking about SAT tutoring, and getting folks to sign up for more information about sojourn.  super encouraging!

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spring


glorious spring/summer weather today.  spent some time at the beach (where this picture was taken) and then a cookout at the nelson's.  fun to be back at the nelson's...haven't been there since we moved out.  also, great to hang out with some umass students who work at the paper with caleb.  pretty awesome day...plus baseball starts tomorrow!

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2_things


great meeting this morning with eric, mac, and nathan regarding a potential partnership between sojourn at umass and eric and mac's church.  we're trying to help them start an SAT tutoring class for students in the upham's corner (dorchester) area.  very exciting!


our newly multiplied community group is going really well.  i feel like we've found our rhythm now and i am so pleased with our 5 minutes/5 questions approach to the text that is helping us approach the text in a fresh way.  good stuff!

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blogs_and_stuff


...lost in the shuffle of all the excitement of yesterday...while umass is in spring break we've spent some time setting up our webpage and blog.  still both works in the progress but off to a good start!

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official


official indeed.  we found out today that our application for a student organization was approved at UMASS-Boston.  i am so excited and relieved.  i have no doubt that we could have done some cool stuff with students even if our application was rejected but it is so good to be affirmed by the school, to see all of caleb's hard work pay off, and to have some more opportunities to get the word out about sojourn and hopefully connect people with our community.  furthermore, this should also put some energy behind an initiative we've been working on to pilot an SAT prep class for youth in our greater neighborhood area.  all of this is wonderful stuff and huge opportunity to tell a good story in a few different arenas.  big win!

36459 Day 171

umass_update

here's the word from the school:

"due to the unforseen snow day last Wednesday (when committees typically meet) the long holiday weekend, and a heavy volume of budget requests for SEOC, the final vote on club activations has been moved to the March 3rd General Assembly agenda."

so, we wait some more.  thanks for praying...keep up in mind!

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umass-boston


tomorrow we make sure all of our paper work is set in hopes that we get recognized as an official group on campus next week.  pray for us!

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new_community


last week we multiplied our original dorchester community group and so this week began a new chapter for us.  the intention here is to create a group for UMASS students.  so far it looks like we could add two people as soon as next week.  also, our application to be a registered student organization comes up soon and the outlook is pretty positive.  i feel like we are starting to build a little moment at UMASS.  good stuff! 

33659 Day 143

old_guys

swimming runs in my family. i've never done it competitively but when i was in college i swam laps, mostly during my junior and senior years before i hurt my shoulder, for exercise. as an aside, i did so many more active things in college: lots of soccer and ultimate frisbee, weight lifting, racquetball, basketball, volleyball, etc. not so much anymore.

which is why i am trying to make 2010 the "year i got back in the pool." second aside: umass allows clergy a free community pass to their athletic facilities, which i discovered thanks to my industrious wife. time to take full advantage of that!

anyway, when i swam in college there was this group of old guys (60+ years old) who swam at the same time as i did. they swam very, very slow laps, and then retired to the locker room where they would sit around naked and complain about politics and the giants and whatever else was going on in the world at the time. not to brag or anything, but i was in way better shape than them (it's simple age physics: 21 year olds have "better" bodies than 61 year olds). nonetheless, i always felt very self-conscious and would often take a locker as far away from them as possible.

yet, i was strangely attracted to this subculture. here were guys who were totally comfortable around each other, probably due to the fact that they had shared this routine for about 25 years. i admired that...and still do.

so far, if this subculture also exists at umass, i have not found it. in fact, the sample size is small at this point, but it appears that i am actually the oldest person using the pool between the hours of 10 am and 12 pm.

perhaps it is part of my calling to initiate this tradition at the clark athletic center =)