Friday, November 30, 2007

Reviving the Campus Ministries in Europe - article



I have written an article for the Mission Minutes recently and wanted to post it on my blog.

As disciples we are aging (that is very natural), people graduate from College and go on with life, get married, have children etc. This process in the European churches this left us with none or very small Campus ministries. And while on one hand it is encouraging to see the maturity and stability that comes from older Christians and Christian families the lack of young people in our churches are alarming!
Last spring Shawn and Lena Wooten suggested for me and my wife to go back and focus our efforts on strengthening and converting young people in our church. I got convinced that this is what our church needs to have a bright future. Most of the children in Budapest are under 6 years old. In ten, fifteen years from now they will be looking at our youth and campus ministries for help in becoming Christians.


So last September we started a Campus Bible Talk with two full time students. We went on Campus, shared with a lot of people, organized Bible Talks and apologetics presentations on hot topics, like the Da Vinci Code, the question of origin and the reliability of the Bible. After studying with about 40 students in June we finally saw the first baptism, Gábor, an engineering student. He is 207 cm tall and started attending our Bible Discussions in January as an atheist. It took him three months and a lot of reading to gain faith in Jesus being the Son of God.

Our Bible Talk on a Retreat at the CountrysideThe turning point in my faith was the in July 2007 International Campus Ministries Conference that was held in Boston. Seeing about a thousand young people being zealous for God gave me faith and a vision. With God we can do great things. We will find open college students in European Universities and we will see them do great things for God. After a great summer we started out with renewed effort as the schools opened again. This fall God brought another engineering student, Oliver to salvation. He has spent most of the summer hanging out with us and after being Buddhist for five years he learned to appreciate that God is very personal and that we can have a relationship with Him. A month ago Oliver invited his friend, David to be at his baptism. David was very open to see the relationships and our “living faith” as he commented and started studying the Bible. We’ve just studied about salvation and he wants to become a Christian. Now we have two women (both freshmen) studying the Bible one of them will be baptized this Sunday. I look forward to seeing more and more young people decide to follow Jesus and devote their lives to spreading the gospel.
Another exciting thing is to see leaders across Europe get excited about restarting or reviving Campus ministries. I am very excited about my relationships with these ministers, Christoph Muller in Zurich, Vangjel Kojku in Tirana, Gyuri Orsós in Bucharest and Ronny Yttrehus in Bergen. When we meet at the Evangelsit training we share what we do and gain faith and ideas to keep building a great movement of youth for God. I see the day when there is a Bible Talk of true disciples of Jesus on every major university in Europe.

Peti Szabad
Budapest, Hungary