Increasing Time for Students

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Nate Miller
Winter Conf Meeting

Twelve hundred Cru students worship at one of ten Cru Winter Conferences.

 

Thousands of students attend Cru conferences every year.

A freshman might attend a Fall Retreat and make his first Christian friend on campus.

A sophomore might spend a summer in South Africa tutoring and loving on orphans because he heard a call to missions at a Winter Conference.

A junior might spend her spring break at an evangelism training conference in Panama City Beach, Florida, being equipped for a lifetime of sharing her faith.

This past fall, Nate has worked to improve Cru’s system for handling the finances behind the scenes for these conferences.

In a helpful—though admittedly unscientific—survey, we’ve found that this has given Cru staff an additional 439 hours for ministry per month!

Those are hours our field staff are freed up to spend with students, not slogging through a muddle of finances.

Hours for sharing the good news with students.

Hours for building them in their faith.

Hours for preparing them for a lifetime of serving Jesus.

Thank you for partnering with us so students can know Christ and share Him with our world!

 

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Feeding the world

Posted on November 9, 2015 by Nate Miller

2015 Seed Packing Group

Beets, cabbage, okra, tomatoes. This may sound like the list of things most hated by small children, but it is actually a list of the vegetable seeds packed at a recent Seed Packing Event hosted by the Global Aid Network (GAiN).

As a ministry of Cru, GAiN’s mission is to “express the love of Jesus Christ in the toughest places on earth by relieving suffering and restoring dignity.” It is also one of the ministries Nate’s team helps behind the scenes with financial administration.

Each year, GAiN partners with churches around the country to host seed and meal packing events. Nate’s team helped set up and run a recent seed packing event here in Orlando.

Over 500 people from a local church volunteered their time to assemble more than 216,000 seed packets bound for Zimbabwe and other third world countries. Each seed packet will produce about 50 pounds of vegetables, resulting in 10.8 million pounds of food for this nation!

Years of civil war in Zimbabwe have destroyed many farms and most farmers have no seeds to start new crops. These seeds from GAiN will enable many families to produce a sustainable crop of vegetables and income.

In addition to food, GAiN makes and distributes water filters and personal hygiene items to people in need around the globe. Kim has helped to cut old towels and flannels to be used for reusable sanitary pads for women around the world. Most girls in developing countries are forced to miss school for one week a month without these.

Local Cru teams in each country participate in the distribution, while building relationships that open doors for spiritual conversations and result in many coming to Christ.

Your partnership allows us to serve ministries like GAiN, so they can bring the love and hope of Christ to the marginalized and forgotten of the world!

You can help…

To host a Seed Packing event in your church or community or make reusable sanitary napkins for women in developing countries visit www.gainusa.org. You can directly change the lives of people around the world.

2015 Seed Packing Family

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Global Gospel Impact!

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Nate Miller
The 45 participants in the Cru Leadership Development program gather for a retreat.

The 45 participants in the Cru Leadership Development program gather for a retreat.

This year we have the privilege of serving at our headquarters as part of the Lake Hart Stint Leadership Development program. We are receiving personal and professional development and meeting critical staffing needs to serve our global ministries reaching 191 nations!

We are excited to see how the gospel is expanding through the work that happens at Cru’s world headquarters—also known as “Lake Hart.”

On our first day of work, we toured Lake Hart. We walked through the “Jesus Film” department which is responsible for billions of people hearing the good news of Christ through the translation and distribution of the “Jesus” film.

We passed by the National Campus Office which resources campus ministry (including colleges and high schools) across the globe with new tools and strategies for evangelism and discipleship. It was here that we read a sign above a person’s desk, “Because of what I do today, people are coming to Christ!”

Those on the front lines of the field are better trained, equipped, cared for and made more effective because of the work that happens here.

Another department at Lake Hart develops strategies to spread the gospel on the internet.

In the last three months, the website Everystudent.com was visited by over one million people in closed countries.

Recently, this website helped connect a high school student in Hungary with a staff member there. In the process that student placed his faith in Jesus! He continues to meet with our staff member to study the Bible and grow in his new relationship with Christ.

We are humbled to be a part of this ministry and to help meet critical needs within Cru for the next year. Thank you for being a part of this ministry. Through your partnership we are making a global impact for the gospel!

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