Since my last email I’ve been on a mission trip to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere as well as a trip to the most populated country in the world. Stateside I’ve done outreach at America’s most applied to public university as well as the world’s top film school.
                           

To clarify deeper, I took my 15 trip to Haiti, my first ever mission trip to China as well as helped start a ministry at USC alongside everything we’ve been doing at UCLA this fall!

Click to Join the Haiti Experience Devotional

Since my last trip to Haiti I have been working on something called “The Haiti Experience” and I want to invite you to be a part of it. It’s a free 3 week daily email devotional series that follows the entire trip. I took a video each full day I was there and am in the process of creating the devotional series. You can sign up for this HERE.

I’m not automatically adding everyone to the series so you have to manually sign up at the link above.

As you probably know, they were hit with a pretty devastating hurricane recently. This has left some of our friends homeless. We almost took an emergency trip down there but at the last minute we deemed our resources would be best allocated if we sent some funds down there in advance and waited to personally go until December. This will be my 16th trip and if you wish to contribute to this disaster relief fund you can do so below. My expenses are already covered and this is going to help those in need.

Click to help with Haiti Disaster Relief

 
Click for Photo Album

When was the last time you were able to get 160 people to go anywhere… much less college students off campus on a Friday night?!

Alongside the ministry efforts we have been doing at UCLA we recently started reaching out to international students at USC. Yes, thats right… UCLA’s rival that’s so intense that it boasts its own wikipedia page.

For 13 years straight USC has been deemed the number one university for international students in the United States (Now it’s number 2, barely behind New York University). Our first outreach on that campus was an american picnic. We started with no email list and just started passing out flyers the week of the event (2 hours on Monday and Wednesday, 1 hour on Thursday). We also had students sign up for our email list which we used to send out a reminder for the picnic that Thursday.

Our first outreach table at USC resulted in 120 students signing up for our email list! That campus is so ripe for the harvest! To offer a comparrison, the next day we were at UCLA and only 10 people signed up in a similar time period.

In the midsts of all this we had no clue how the event would turn out… and we were shocked! At least 125 people came to our first event! 

These international students were hungry to get to know Americans and experience the American culture, yet for some of them they said we were the first American friends that they had made. What excites me the most is that many of these students are in their masters and Phd program and will be in Los Angeles for 3-5 years. This really gives us some time to develop deeper relationships, get them plugged into our church services, and disciple those who become believers before they return to their home country.  

Later that month we hosted a Fall Party to introduce these students to the American tradition of pumpkin carving. We had a joint event with our international friends at UCLA off campus and at least 160 people came to the event with 125 pumpkins to be carved.

Click for Photo Album

I saw the multitude of international students at our last event and my heart was filled with compassion. I remember praying “Lord, send us laborers!” For there was so many international students ready to connect with Americans, learn about our culture, and ultimately be introduced to Jesus. It gave me a whole new appreciation for Jesus’s heart in Matthew.

“But when He saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd. Then He said to His disciples, “The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.” – Matthew 9:36-38 NKJV

Next semester we are looking to start having a Bible Study or service on the USC campus to invite these students to.  This coming weekend we are hosting a traditional Thanksgiving celebration for international students. We have so much momentum it’s incredible!

Finally, if you want to hear about my trip to China I would love to tell you about it. Send me an email and we can talk on the phone about it. It’s a closed country to the gospel and I don’t want to post anything online about it.