China Partners News

This past school term one of the things that we've been looking at for our whole team is taking risks. Our leader was thinking about the past few years and had commented "We haven't really failed much these past few years, which probably means we haven't been taking enough risks." So, starting in small ways, we've been trying to take more risks.

We've been putting aside "the way we've always done it" to try and figure out just what exactly will reach college students now. We've been trying out a few different things to see what kinds of things will peak students interests. A couple of times I've invited students to have coffee with me and just chat, and through that I've discovered that sometimes you can have deeper conversations when it isn't a planned "bible study" time but simply a safe place and time to share about their lives. We've had times of "free talk" where students can come and hear us talk about a topic and then practice their English. We had one night that was about love and relationships; we shared biblical and personal thoughts on true love, dating relationships, marriage and family, and found that the students were eating it up.

We still don't know if this will lead more students to being interested in the gospel or to following the Lord, but it's been exciting to start taking chances in small ways and to see how they've worked out. We don't want to just keep having normal bible studies with the students if it's not going to work, and we certainly don't want to keep doing it simply because it's the way we've always done it. We want to be willing to take risks, to be willing to fail even, for the glory of the Lord.