Spokes

There are 9 colleges within a 9 mile radius of Oakland, plus a slew of business institutes, career schools and other specialty schools, with a total of nearly 100,000 students.  One-hundred thousand!  All of these students live, study, and work in and around Oakland and downtown Pittsburgh, and many of them have no idea what it truly means to follow Jesus.  Cru is in a unique position to directly impact the lives of these students, and each of you who are involved in Cru have daily opportunity to influence hundreds of these students toward Christ.

Students are the future.  Many of the world's revolutions in government and politics have come through students.  Nearly all of the significant spiritual revivals in the church in the past 500 years have come through students or college-aged people.  Students will lead, govern, run business, and shape culture for the next generation.  What will we do as a ministry to influence these students toward Christ?  What will YOU do as a student to influence your peers toward Him?  These are significant questions, and your answers will determine the depth of the eternal impact of your college career.

As a ministry, we're seeking to set ourselves up in a position where we can relevantly impact as many students as possible in the Pittsburgh area for Christ.  In the city, the direction we're going is to build a centralized place where students from campuses all over Pittsburgh can be a part of a vibrant, healthy community, connect to life-changing discipleship, and be equipped and trained to have a personal ministry on their campus.  The weekly Cru meeting is developing into that, and we will be intentional this year about making Cru a multi-campus gathering.  We hope that Cru will become the hub of the wheel, so to speak, with spokes reaching out from there to every campus of the city.  These spokes are students taking the Gospel to the people they spend every day with - the people you sit next to in class, work out with at the gym, work with on projects.  We hope to plant some sort of ministry - small groups, book discussions, even ping-pong or X-box clubs - on every campus in Pittsburgh.  We just need people to take the initiative to do it; you're the spokes on the wheel.

For schools outside of the city, we're seeking to do the same thing - build healthy communities and plant ministries of some sort where students can connect to a life-giving community and learn about Jesus in relevant ways.  

So to start the year, we're going to publicize Cru all over the city, to campuses and places where students hang out, to let people know that we're here, we're a fun place to be with good, loving people, and we're a safe place to explore faith and encounter Jesus.  You can help - invite your friends from schools near and far, use facebook, tell people you live with and go to class with.  Begin to meet people from the very beginning of the year, build friendships, and make yourself available for Jesus to use you in those friendships to point people to Him.  It won't always be easy, but it will be exciting, it will be fun, and God can and will use you.  Be ready, it's going to be a great year.

--Jason