Fabulous in February
Hello everyone!!
February is now over, which means it's time for another ministry update!
This month has been full of events on top of events, through which God has been moving in impactful ways.
Firstly, Jessica and I developed and launched an outreach event for the month of February called Lunch Buddies. What if your first interaction with someone was over a meal? Where would that interaction lead to? These are the questions we based our outreach event on, which involved eating lunch with a random stranger and seeing where that took the both of you. Our main goal for this outreach event was displaying John 13:35 (“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”) to students all around campus. On any given day, you can walk into the Student Union (SU) at UTD and you will see a lot of people sitting by themselves, eating alone. Instead of ignoring these people and opting to only hang out with their friends, we wanted our students to see this as an opportunity to actively engage with, befriend, and truly see others — sharing Christ with them even if God or Christianity is never explicitly brought up in the conversation.
Secondly, Andrea and I hosted our first Mi Gente event for the spring semester! The event took place the day before Valentine's Day, and we made friendship bracelets and Valentine's cards. I ended up making Angela a bracelet and she loves it! Overall, the event was a success — a fun, casual, crafty event where I was able to dig into my more creative side while also meeting more Latino UTD students. I really enjoyed it and I think the students did too!
This coming Saturday (March 2nd), we will be hosting our second Mi Gente event. This time, we'll be making gorditas! If you don't know what a gordita is… google it; you're missing out! It's a fairly easy process, but we're making the dough (masa) from scratch, so stay tuned on how that goes…
All of the FOCUS pastoral apprentices drove up to Wichita Falls for a preaching lab last week. We met up with an instructor to hone and practice our preaching skills. Each of us was assigned a passage from the Old Testament to base an expository sermon off of. My passage was Jeremiah 29:1-9, which I didn't like initially, as I had no idea how to even begin writing a sermon on it. Slowly and steadily, I was able to come up with a decent sermon that I am proud of — feel free to ask me more if you’re interested in hearing more about it! I am looking forward to incorporating the feedback I got into my next sermon, which I will give in May / around the end of the school year. (If you're interested in attending or watching the sermon on the livestream when it happens, just let me know!)
Another exciting event that occurred this month was A Night of Black Church. BLISS (Black Lives In Soulful Solidarity) — the FOCUS cultural subgroup of Black UTD students — hosted this event to help celebrate Black History Month. There was singing, dancing, preaching… all of which was just amazing and so impactful to not only the Black students in attendance, but also the community at large. I feel so blessed to have been able to attend, and I could feel and see the Holy Spirit move powerfully that night. Lailah (a Black pastor at UTD who leads BLISS) and everyone in BLISS did an amazing job.
Last but certainly not least — Pizza Theology! Pizza Theology happened on the last Sunday of this month. It's a four hour long event that FOCUS hosts each semester, where students are able to dive deep into a Biblical topic that is taught by either a guest speaker or FOCUS pastors (hence the “theology” part of the title). In the middle of this event, we take a short dinner break to fellowship and eat pizza together (hence the “pizza” part of the title).
This Pizza Theo was entitled “The B-I-B-L-E — Is That the Book For Me?” and focused on the Bible — what it is, who wrote it, how it applies to modern life, etc. I really loved seeing how the Bible became the Bible.
Overall, this month was busy but so fun and filling! I hope you enjoyed reading about it all. Thank you so much for your support, whether financially and/or by prayer — it all means a lot to me.
As we move into this next month, join me in praying that more students get to encounter Jesus and His love, and that our students continue to pursue Jesus even with all their homework, exams and work.
Thanks for reading, and thank you for all of your support!
- David Galeas
Student Testimony Time!
Every month, we feature a student’s testimony of how their time in FOCUS has grown and shaped them. Here is this month’s:
February is now over, which means it's time for another ministry update!
This month has been full of events on top of events, through which God has been moving in impactful ways.
Firstly, Jessica and I developed and launched an outreach event for the month of February called Lunch Buddies. What if your first interaction with someone was over a meal? Where would that interaction lead to? These are the questions we based our outreach event on, which involved eating lunch with a random stranger and seeing where that took the both of you. Our main goal for this outreach event was displaying John 13:35 (“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”) to students all around campus. On any given day, you can walk into the Student Union (SU) at UTD and you will see a lot of people sitting by themselves, eating alone. Instead of ignoring these people and opting to only hang out with their friends, we wanted our students to see this as an opportunity to actively engage with, befriend, and truly see others — sharing Christ with them even if God or Christianity is never explicitly brought up in the conversation.
Secondly, Andrea and I hosted our first Mi Gente event for the spring semester! The event took place the day before Valentine's Day, and we made friendship bracelets and Valentine's cards. I ended up making Angela a bracelet and she loves it! Overall, the event was a success — a fun, casual, crafty event where I was able to dig into my more creative side while also meeting more Latino UTD students. I really enjoyed it and I think the students did too!
This coming Saturday (March 2nd), we will be hosting our second Mi Gente event. This time, we'll be making gorditas! If you don't know what a gordita is… google it; you're missing out! It's a fairly easy process, but we're making the dough (masa) from scratch, so stay tuned on how that goes…
All of the FOCUS pastoral apprentices drove up to Wichita Falls for a preaching lab last week. We met up with an instructor to hone and practice our preaching skills. Each of us was assigned a passage from the Old Testament to base an expository sermon off of. My passage was Jeremiah 29:1-9, which I didn't like initially, as I had no idea how to even begin writing a sermon on it. Slowly and steadily, I was able to come up with a decent sermon that I am proud of — feel free to ask me more if you’re interested in hearing more about it! I am looking forward to incorporating the feedback I got into my next sermon, which I will give in May / around the end of the school year. (If you're interested in attending or watching the sermon on the livestream when it happens, just let me know!)
Another exciting event that occurred this month was A Night of Black Church. BLISS (Black Lives In Soulful Solidarity) — the FOCUS cultural subgroup of Black UTD students — hosted this event to help celebrate Black History Month. There was singing, dancing, preaching… all of which was just amazing and so impactful to not only the Black students in attendance, but also the community at large. I feel so blessed to have been able to attend, and I could feel and see the Holy Spirit move powerfully that night. Lailah (a Black pastor at UTD who leads BLISS) and everyone in BLISS did an amazing job.
As we move into this next month, join me in praying that more students get to encounter Jesus and His love, and that our students continue to pursue Jesus even with all their homework, exams and work.
Thanks for reading, and thank you for all of your support!
- David Galeas
Student Testimony Time!
Every month, we feature a student’s testimony of how their time in FOCUS has grown and shaped them. Here is this month’s:
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