We’re going to the Land Down Under!
That’s right! We have been given an awesome opportunity to join some of our closest friends, Mike & Bec Shepski, in Melbourne (pronounced mel-bun), Australia, for a year in 2011. We’ll be doing campus ministry there, just like we do in Pittsburgh, alongside a team of other American staff and Australian national staff. We have been praying for an opportunity to have an international ministry experience and we think the time is right! We’ll leave in early January 2011 and return late December 2011. We’ll be leading a team of staff & recent graduates from the US to help coach movements at the “Unis” there.
While we are in Melbourne doing ministry, our staff team will continue their work with the movements we have launched in the last few years. We’re hoping to have several interns joining us in Fall 2010 that we can train and prepare to walk with Jesus and launch new movements in Pittsburgh while we’re gone. Please pray for a smooth transition and good communication between Michael (local leader) and our Pittsburgh Metro staff team. We’re believing that we are not indispensible to the team and the ministry here, so we’re expecting the Lord to move in awesome ways on the campuses of Pittsburgh while we’re gone!
Cru in Australia is known as Student Life. There are students involved with SL from various or no church backgrounds, similar to Cru here in the US. There are SL movements on about 10 campuses in Melbourne right now. There are about 135 students actively involved in Student Life, with 30 of them being international students, mostly from China. We’re excited to help continue developing student leaders and launch new movements so that every student in Melbourne has a chance to know someone who truly follows Jesus.
Here are some more details about ministry in Melbourne:
- 1 out of 4 Uni students in Melbourne is an international student, almost all of them being from Asia. There are about 300,000 students in Melbourne, representing over 150 different countries. (Huge potential for the gospel going from Melbourne to every corner of the world!)
- The biggest challenge to starting a new movement is spiritual apathy. Most Christians are not interested in sharing the gospel (many Christians are interested in social justice and there can be a tendency in some circles to focus exclusively on that).
- Non-Christians really don’t care about spiritual things – not worried about after death, etc.
- All campuses are commuter campuses, so ministry activities usually have to be done during people’s lunch/class breaks. Most students live in the suburbs with their parents and take the train in for classes daily.
- In our daily work, we’ll mostly be sharing our faith and coaching student leaders (very similar to what we do in Pittsburgh!)
We are excited to take this journey of a lifetime with you! We’d really appreciate your prayers and feel free to share any thoughts/concerns you have! Thanks for partnering with us in ministry to take the life-changing message of Jesus around the world!
for His glory,
Jason & Maria