Post-LAUP Devotional...John 21

Hello LAUP Alum!  God put this devotional on my heart at the end of the summer...an invitation into letting God continue everything he began this summer, or whenever your LAUP experience may have been!  (Pardon the jungle animals surrounding me...my office used to be a nursery..:))

Following Jesus, Redefined

This month marks the end of my role as the LAUP director, and the beginning of my new role as InterVarsity’s Associate Director of Urban Projects.  This summer has renewed and clarified my role as one who helps to redefine what it means to follow Jesus for this generation.

The summer team I led into learning about mass incarceration

In my 20 years of InterVarsity staff work, I’ve never seen a summer like this.

In our final LAUP meeting Lydia stood to share that she’d been a Christian her whole life but it took LAUP to help her see what that meant.  Feeling the tangible reality of poverty around her, seeing the suffering of her neighbors and experiencing God’s compassion did something to her. In our final meeting Lydia proclaimed that she was now giving her life to following Jesus for the first time.  Lydia’s story captures the whole summer.

Students entered the summer focused on how different the poor felt from themselves:  they were unable to relate, and thus unable to empathize.  But as they saw Jesus’ compassion for the poor in the Scripture, and began to feel his compassion for themselves, they heard God’s invitation to join him in that compassion.  Students learned to look for the similarities between themselves and poor people.  They learned to lay aside the fact that they didn’t have all the answers so that they could dare to feel the pain of the poor, even if they weren’t sure if they could handle it, or what they would do with it.  And God showed up.

Students opened their hearts to the pain of the poor and the presence of God became real.  Students were moved into practical compassion:  they gave away the little income we have them live on to their neighbors, they fasted and prayed for families around them, they wept over the pain of poor children who have lost fathers to deportation, incarceration, and murder.  They followed Jesus into incarnating the love of God to their poor neighbors, and they were never the same.

As we ended students committed to selling their cars to give the profit to urban ministries, to living and ministering in urban poor neighborhoods for two years after graduating from college.  Eleven of them pledged to live the rest of their lives ministering among the urban poor.  Their poor neighbors who felt so different had become friends, family, brothers, sisters.  Students were launched into bringing all of who God is into all of the pain and brokenness of our world.  Just like with Lydia, following Jesus became real.

I take this experience with me as I venture into my new role.

It is now my job to develop a generation of world changers who live as good news to the poor across the nation, and to build the foundations of such an experience in Seattle.  I will be strengthening our existing urban projects, and helping launch new ones so that every InterVarsity students can experience their faith as something that engages not just the spiritual realm, but every aspect of brokenness in our world.

I’ll spend the next months building a network of ministry partners in Seattle—urban ministries that can host our students, and donors who can fund the work—and getting a feel for what’s happening in urban projects across the country.

Over the next few months, I’m seeking to develop partnership with 25 new organizations in Seattle and to find $30K of new financial support to fund this work.

I need your prayers like I never have before!  I need new leads and contacts like I never have before!  I need Jesus like I never have before!  It’s a time for faith…and a time where I have been invited to see God work as I never have before.

Scott