The room was calm, and Holy Spirit empowered our team, but that didn’t stop our students’ nerves from shaking.

It was the big day! After years of praying and planning, God finally allowed our student leaders at Seton Hall to present our case to a board of elected student officials.

Our student president, Josh Rodriguez (whose story I first shared back in September 2013; left with microphone at our statewide worship gathering) spearheaded the presentation and did wonderfully!

I coached Josh for many months leading up to this, and we, along with other student leaders (bottom photo) and my staff team prayerfully developed our reasons for why we wanted to be formally recognized on campus.

1 – Cru is caring community passionate about connecting people to JESUS CHRIST. God sent His son so lost college students in NJ could come to know Him!

2 – We build leaders and send them as effective laborers in the workforce. Spiritually, this means more lost people in neighborhoods and workplaces can hear about Jesus from students who graduate on mission. Josh also communicated that these Cru leaders would be from Seton Hall, gaining the university more prestige, which the board liked hearing.

3 – The Seton Hall community will benefit from our formal presence there. Spiritually, this means we can post flyers for evangelistic events. Even a simple flyer brings unbelievers to a place where we can share the gospel with them! Josh also communicated that with more effective leaders built in Cru, the student body will grow and become more mature as well.

Josh was gracious enough to write out his feelings going into and coming out of the presentation.

“I know that if we were recognized, the reach we have would be far greater and many more people would have the opportunity to get to know Jesus. God has given us favor with students, an amazing staff person on campus, and it seems that way with SGA (student government) as well. I would ask for prayer that God give us favor with the director of campus ministry and that we would be able to connect with him well, sharing with him that all we want to do is see more and more students at Seton Hall come to know Jesus.”

>>Pray with us for favor! The main reason we want recognition is to share the gospel with even more students at Seton Hall! We are thankful and optimistic moving forward, but we still must get approval from the Office of Campus Ministry.

>>Pray for our other schools as well! God is working! At the end of January, we had our statewide prayer and planning summit, where close to 70 students leaders gathered to seek Jesus’ face! One from MSU named Julia, recently shared the gospel with her classmate Carolina, who wants to meet weekly and talk about Jesus and the Bible! Pray the Holy Spirit wins Carolina over for Jesus!

>>Please pray also for our mission trip to Maracaibo, Venezuela, from May 22 – July 2. We have already accepted 5 male and 3 female students from 8 schools in our region! We are already mentoring and getting to know them! Pray for the political turmoil in Venezuela. Thankfully, Maracaibo has had mainly peaceful protests!

Thank you so much! We’re so grateful to Christ for you!