Bonins in Belgium

As I was walking on campus today, I came across a sticker on the window of a student’s room. It screamed, “NO GOD, NO STATE, NO LIES”. Today’s students often deplore the failure of institutionalized religion and national governments to match rhetoric with deed. As a result, anarchist sentiments spring forth like the ones proclaimed by this sticker. At a time when young people are in the prime of their lives, they are not finding the role models they need. That’s why we do what we do!

The Students for Christ-Europe team engages students in dialogue and creative ministry brainstorming from a biblical worldview while helping them strategize how to go back to their own mission fields of campuses & cities to reach students for Christ.

This task can be quite daunting in their own eyes, for as Jeff Fountain of the Schuman Centre for European Studies states,

“In many European schools and universities these days, believers in God are dismissed as mental dwarfs and intellectual wimps. Yet from ancient times right up to the present, many of history’s greatest and most influential minds have wrestled with the question of God. Reason and faith, they concluded, were complementary, not contradictory.”

Not only are we committed to training students, but through SFC-Europe, we also help to train nationals who are leading student ministry in their respective nations, like those from the staff in Belgium (photo). Additionally, training ourselves and other missionaries to impact our host cultures through an annual equipping conference is a parallel priority.

Mega thanks for assisting us in training others to influence individuals, families, institutions of higher education, nations and cultures. With God’s help, together we are making a difference in Europe!

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One of the most delightful aspects of working with our various colleagues, both nationals and missionaries across the great European landscape, is the diversity of the gifts that each one brings to the Students for Christ-Europe family. It has been such a privilege to be able to experience interaction with these splendid friends on individual and corporate levels. As our travels this year have taken us from Brussels (Belgium) to Budapest (Hungary), as far east as Warsaw (Poland) and Russia to as far west as Toulouse (south western France) and south to Athens (Greece), one thing has been constant – the beauty of God’s family fitted together in what the apostle Peter calls the “living stones” of God’s house.

After SFC’s summer student training conference in Hungary, attended by over 20 nationalities of students and workers, replete with great training and community building, the “living stones” performing their precise purposes to effectively pull off such an event, I trekked on to Poland. My task was to communicate on the theme “Passion, Calling, & Friendship” within a campus ministry context. Additionally, through Curt Hobbs, veteran student ministry colleague and servant-leader extraordinaire, we were able to initiate an official collaboration with the Petra student ministry led by young businessman and national Polish leader, Szymon Kruba and his exuberant co-worker Anna Zablocka. What a privilege!

Toulouse, France was my latest destination where I was hosted by José and Sonia Ruiz. As an entrepreneurial couple directing the RESET ministry and a local food bank grocery store for students, they are shining in their respective niches of outreach. My visit found me speaking at a student meeting, having lunch with a young Frenchman who came to faith in Christ through the influence of the Ruiz’ via the food bank store and strategizing with this ministry leader couple about future collaborative efforts in their region.

The latest good news is the newly acquired place for the SFC group to meet on the campus here in our city of Louvain-la-Neuve. After 11 years of praying and petitioning the university, the group was finally accorded an academic room for a meeting space!

Thank God with us for this favor and for TEAM Europe. And thank you for being part of our much needed team of support in every way that you are – all of us serving as living stones in God’s house. We appreciate you!