Meet the Freshers

It's been a pretty busy week in Accra. On Monday, the six of us that remain met at the Navs office to have a devotional time, pray, and talk about possibilities for the last two weeks. It was great to be with everybody again after a long weekend apart. Plans were still up in the air, though, after our meeting. So we prayed that we would not get frustrated and that opportunities to serve would come up. That evening, while Matt and I were hanging out at the house, James and Tom called us to let us know that we would be meeting with the University of Ghana Navs on Tuesday morning to make plans to help with the freshmen move-in. It was a good feeling to see plans coming together so quickly.

Tuesday morning, Matt and I took a taxi to the University of Ghana and found everybody else ok. For about two hours, we threw around ideas about what we could do this week on campus. The Navs have a ministry of about 60 people here, a pretty healthy size. But in a country where 70% of the people would call themselves Christians, there is plenty of room for growth. They wanted to reach out to the freshers, as they call them, and invite them to get involved with Navs. The Ghanaians were looking for creative suggestions as to how to do that, so we shared some of the things that we do to reach out to freshmen. We finally decided to make a brief survey that just gauges where people stand in their willingness to get involved with an on-campus ministry and gets their contact info. We don't use that method at UC, but a lot of other schools do it and it's a very helpful tool to get to know people.

On Wednesday morning, we all came back to the University, took some surveys, and broke up into groups to go welcome students at the different halls. My group was at Sabaah Hall, in the court yard. By the way, the campus is beautiful and all of the dorms have these great courtyards at the center of their facilities. As students waited in the long lines to get their keys and everything, we would just walk up and start chatting with them. Almost everyone was more than happy to talk with us and willingly filled out a survey. Sometimes, the Ghanaian Navs students would exchange numbers with them and offer to help with any registration issues that came up. It was a really great time to build friendships and just get the word about Navs out there.

When we all met afterwards, we had gotten about 80 surveys back from people after only two hours. Since follow-up with all these students would be a lot of work, we decided to take Thursday off and determine later whether we would come back on Friday to do it again. Despite the fact that not all 80 of those students surveyed will end up being in Navs most likely, even if just 30 of them got involved, that would already be a 50% increase in the number of people involved and we wanted to give them a chance to figure out what they would do about that. In the end, the Navs country leader, Uncle Joseph, asked us to do it again on Friday, because he didn't want resources to be a limiting factor in the number of people involved. He promised to recruit leaders from other branches of Navs in the country, if need be. So we went back today and did it again, and it went equally well. Please be praying for the Navs ministry on campus at the University of Ghana. It's a really great group of students and, with some of the fresh ideas that they've developed even just this week, God can do some pretty awesome stuff through them. We're going to meet with them one more time before we leave to help them brainstorm some more for the first semester.

On a personal level, the last week has been a really great thing for me. I re-read Crazy Love by Francis Chan this week, which was really a good kick in the rear. My time praying and reading the Bible has been rich, the result of being in an environment with a lot less of the typical distractions. And my conversations this week have been really encouraging, definitely some good talks with Matt, other all-stars on our team, and the Ghanaians. It's always cool to see that I go on trips like this expecting to be used to help others, but God always turns it around and works on me dramatically. It just makes me feel even more pumped about getting back to Cincinnati and keeping this going.

Lukewarm people are continually concerned with playing it safe; they are slaves to the god of control. This focus on safe living keeps them from sacrificing and risking for God.
-Francis Chan in Crazy Love