For ten days in mid-July, a team of five students, two staff workers and one relay worker went out from the Central region to partner with the CU movement in a closed Eastern European country as part of UCCF’s annual summer team send-out.
This longstanding partnership, which involves the sharing of stories, ideas, encouragement and prayers between the two movements throughout the year, manifests most tangibly during the summer, when staff and students from both movements work, pray and worship together in the same place, united in the same goal of proclaiming the Lord Jesus Christ and helping university students to live for him alone.
Evangelism illegal
The Central region’s destination has to remain vague because evangelism in that country is illegal. The CU movement there is unregistered and underground. Staff workers and students have to be pioneering and creative in inviting unbelieving students to meet Jesus through his Word. This means that a week-long camp in the countryside during the summer offers a vital opportunity, away from the eyes of university and government authorities, to get Christian and non-Christian students together for a concentrated time of relationship building, Bible study and fun.
The UCCF team of eight arrived to the warmest welcome and a challenging level of courage and vision displayed by the host CU movement. A big highlight for the team was a two-hour daily Bible study with mixed groups of university students – a refreshing lack of apathy led to lively discussions and amazing progressions in understanding of Christianity for many who had never heard about Jesus before.
One girl, Gail*, said during the first study ‘you can have your Christianity on the side, as an add-on to make life easier, but you don’t really need it’. By the end of the final study, having seen the way Jesus interacts with a variety of people in the Gospels, she admitted that ‘if this is what God is like and who God is, then it is fair and good that he would demand your whole life’.
Coming to faith
Wonderfully, seven students prayed prayers of repentance and faith for the first time, and will now be followed up by staff workers and students in their university cities. The UCCF team returned home challenged to speak of Jesus more boldly and relevantly in our contexts, as we had seen our partner movement do, and refreshed in our expectations of seeing God save.
*name changed
