On Friday January 23rd, we will have our first on-campus evangelistic dinner for international students at Stevens for the spring 2026 semester! Please pray for another fruitful time where we eat, have fun, and share the gospel through simple Bible discussions. It’s always a bit nerve-wrecking moving into the spring semester because we never know how many students will return. Praise God for seven churches in the rotation to bring food and volunteers for our Fridays, but also for hosting home groups – in addition to helping with transportation for field trips!

I also want to praise God for a new student eBoard team. As an official club at Stevens, we need to have a four member executive board. Praise God for these four committed Christian students of our team! Although most of the students who join our Friday dinners are non-believers from Hindu, Atheist or Muslim backgrounds, the Lord has blessed us with enough Christian international students to have a club in good standing. We were able to meet several times over the break to pray, fellowship and plan – including Friday 1/9 for a delicious African dinner.

            In fact, we have such a decent contingent of Christian international students that the student eBoard had a new vision to begin gathering with only the Christians to motivate them to be missionaries on their campus! This is the kind of “peer pressure” we like! To aid the eBoard in their vision, we helped host the first one on Friday 1/16. It was a great time of worship and fellowship!

This is not to say we do not already make space for believers. Of course we strongly encourage them to join our church partners as committed members (where many of our staff or  volunteers go). But also, we have always offered deeper, more intimate Bible studies during the week. Since early December I have been meeting every Tuesday with three Christian students. We are able to get into the meatier topics of scripture. I have greatly enjoyed getting to know these three in a more intimate setting. 

Another praise and prayer request is that right before Christmas, four Italian international students had family visiting from Italy. They asked me to stop by and I made sure to bring plenty of food to share! It was basically a party. A very cool time where I met parents and siblings and shared briefly about who I was. All four students went back to Italy over the break but brought me and Jenn some imported goods. Fast forward to Tuesday January 20th, I was able to stop by and get the imported goods! We chatted about a number of things, but when it turned to how scary the economy is, I made sure to reassure them of God’s goodness. I was not able to fully share the gospel, but I messaged them later that next time I want to chat a little more about spiritual things. Please pray that this works out and I am able to fully explain the good news to these four. Unfortunately they do not join us on Fridays, but we met on campus, and because of our Italian heritage, we have connected since !