Hello New Zealand

With our beginning-of-the-year outreach, we use a survey to gauge the spiritual interest of students on campus. In the survey we ask 4 questions, which are:

1. Where’s the coolest place in the world you’ve been?
The reason for this question is to get it started with an easy open ended question. It also goes along with our theme of “On The Journey” and learning about people’s spiritual journeys.

2. I’d like to get some help on my journey with a free magazine about: Studying Successfully, Having fulfilling relationships, Answering life’s big questions.
Students can answer anywhere from none to all of these options. If they check any of them, we try to meetup and offer the free magazine to them.

3. On my spiritual journey I’d like to: Find out more about my options, Hear more about StudentLife, Grow closer to God, Go nowhere.
This questions makes things a bit more specific and gets them thinking a bit about their own spiritual lives. They can only choose one answer.

4. How interested are you in having a chat about how to begin a journey with Jesus Christ?
Students can choose between 1 and 5 for this question. Now we’re getting really specific in finding out about interested people are in hearing about Jesus. This is the question we look at the closely for deciding who to follow up with.

So, how did students respond to each of these questions? Here is the survey data for questions 3 and 4 in 2012. Results are from both Massey and Victoria University in Wellington.

1411 Responses
713 Female, 698 Male
768 were 1st year students
303 2nd year students
189 3rd year students
151 4th year or postgrad

For the question, “On my spiritual journey I’d like to…” students responded:
48% Find out more about my options
21% Grow closer to God
18% Hear more about StudentLife
14% Go nowhere

The “Find out more” response is most likely the highest due to its ambiguity and openness. A student can choose that response and not be committing to any actual desire for their spiritual journey. However, it is still encouraging to find it higher than the “Go nowhere” option.

For the question, “[From 1 to 5] How interested are you in having a chat about how to begin a journey with Jesus Christ?” Students responded with the following:

45% 1
14% 2
23% 3
08% 4
10% 5

The response that stands out the most is the 1. 45 percent of students in Wellington said their level of interest in chatting about Jesus is a 1 out of 5. Students could put a 1 for a number of reasons. First, they could actually that uninterested in Jesus in this stage of their lives. This speaks to us the great need for us to represent Jesus well on campus and show his relevance to the life of every human being. Second, they could be trying to strongly avoid having someone contact them about Jesus. Possibly they have had a bad experience with an evangelist or Christian friend, or just don’t like meeting strangers. Lastly, we sometimes find Christians mark this response because they have “already begun” the journey. This definitely is a small percentage of the 1′s, though. A 3 was the second most chosen option, again most likely due to it being the most neutral response.

However you read the results, the fact that “the harvest is plentiful” remains true here in Wellington. To date, we have seen 4 people make decisions for Christ, more than 100 hear the Gospel, and started 14 Bible studies as a result of this survey/outreach. If you’d like to check out the survey for yourself, visit otj.studentlife.org.nz.

This year’s On The Journey campaign was a great success for our team. Just over 1400 people filled out a survey and received a pair of jandals. From those contacts, we’ve been able to start 14 Bible studies and 4 “Explorer” groups for non-Christians. Also from the contacts, our team has been able to share the Gospel close to 100 times and seen 4 people make decisions to follow Christ. One thing that has been exciting for myself is the opportunity I’ve had to share Jesus for the first time with 3 different students. We’re very encouraged about what the Lord has in store for Victoria and Massey University this year and see the response so far as a sign of that. This year, we made one big change to our outreach by using iPads, iPhones, and laptops for our survey instead of paper surveys. It turned out to be very popular! Here are some photos from this year’s event:

Students signing up on an iPad and their own iPhone

Lauree helping out some students with iPad signup

Ryan juggling an iPhone and chatting with a student

Katie passing out the jandals

Student Adam Li (right) helping out with iPad outreach

Student Leaders Zoe Cook (left) and Harriet Campbell (right) manning the indoor table

If you’re interested in checking out the online survey for yourself, go to otj.studentlife.org.nz .

We have been back from our summer project in Thailand for exactly one month now. The experience is still fresh in our minds and we think often of the friends we made and the lives we impacted.

It’s difficult to describe a 7-week trip in a single blog post, but overall we loved our time in Hat Yai and Bangkok. For the few days of the trip, we spent time getting to know each other as a team and preparing students for what was to come. We arrived in Hat Yai, Thailand on November 17th and received a few days of orientation from the local Thailand staff. The following Tuesday, we began the work that we came for by meeting students at Prince of Songkhla University and sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ with them.

Most people in Thailand are culturally Buddhist. Much of their identity is tied to Buddhist principles – making it extremely difficult for someone to decide to follow Christ instead. One of the lasting images I have of Thailand is the amount of idols and images of the King scattered throughout every road, building, and hilltop. (Katie wrote a blog on idols based on a devotional I gave to our team one morning – check it out on her personal blog: Cast Down Your Idols.)

Though they are culturally or actually Buddhist, a vast majority of Thai people were interested to hear about exactly who Jesus is and what we as Christians believe. Most students I met had never heard the gospel before. To start conversation, we would often ask what they thought the meaning of Christmas was. Common answers included “The Christian new year”, “A day of gift-giving”, or “Santa Claus birthday”. Less than five students I met knew that it was the celebration of the birth of Christ. However, during the trip, our team of 18 had more than 1,000 spiritual conversations with the Thais. More than 40 individuals said that they wanted to know Jesus and learn more about following Him.

There are countless stories from this trip to share – both by us and the rest of our team. The team put together a newsletter that you can download in PDF here: Thailand Newsletter . Below is a photo recap from the trip for those that might be interested. A special thanks goes to those that supported us specifically for this trip, as it was not part of our original plan when coming to New Zealand . If you’d like to hear more about the trip, please let us know and we can set up a Skype appointment.

Here’s a quick video I made from the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. Katie and I walked this with my parents (Dave and Kathy) back in October when they came to visit. The Tongariro Alpine Crossing is in the middle of New Zealand’s North Island and is considered one of the world’s best one-day hikes. Enjoy!

Soularium is a tool that we often use on campus to start conversations with students. The goal is always that these conversations would lead to an opportunity to share the Gospel – or to at least begin a relationship that could lead to sharing Jesus with them in the future. During our first week back in the second semester, we tried out something different with Soularium to begin conversations with students at Re-Orientation Days. Check it out.

Here’s some video from our outreach before the Easter break. As you can see, we had some fun with the costume on campus; but, we also had some great conversations and met close to 200 people over the 2 days. Enjoy!