La Fe

Becoming Courageous at Fresno State

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Mon, 22 Sep 2014 16:54:40 +0000

Amy Hauptman

Becoming Courageous at Fresno State

Before Santa Hernandez had ever stepped foot on her college campus, she already knew that she wanted to get involved with ��ñ��. She even knew what manuscript Bible study was!

“During my senior year of high school, my friend Timmy would meet up with me to see how I was doing as the new Christian club leader,” said Santa. “One day, we met up to get coffee and then he started talking about the manuscript Bible study that ��ñ�� would do.”

When Timmy actually led Santa through a manuscript study, she loved it—especially the way that the method helped her go deeper into the Bible.

Finding ��ñ��

After Santa graduated from high school and started college at California State University, Fresno, one of the first things she did was find ��ñ��’s table during New Student Outreach.

She got involved right away and wasn’t shy about her involvement. During her first semester she would often talk with her friends about God and invite them to check out ��ñ�� too.

“Every time I would talk to someone on campus about God I would get more and more excited,” said Santa. “Each time felt like a challenge but it was something I was willing to do for God.”

Growing as a Leader

This year, Santa, now a sophomore, is taking even more risks for God.

Fresno State is part of the California State University system, which has refused to recognize Santa and her ��ñ�� chapter as an official student club on campus (see news coverage here). “Since we can’t technically do normal student outreach like the rest of the student clubs, I was given the challenge to wear an ��ñ�� banner backpack one day and to make an announcement about ��ñ�� in one of my classes (while wearing the banner backpack),” said Santa. “I didn’t want to do it at first, but I also felt like I needed to do it. My motivation all comes from God.”

After Santa gave the announcement in her class, one student came up to Santa and said that he was interested in getting involved!

Santa has also stepped into a leadership role this year, becoming a student leader with ��ñ��’s LaFe ministry. A conference she had attended her freshman year, the Mosaic Conference, had increased her desire to reach out to her Latino peers on campus.

“I learned so much at this conference,” said Santa. “I learned that my cultural identity was important and as a Latina I should embrace who I am. I didn’t realize how loss of cultural identity was a huge crisis. It made me want to immerse myself in my own culture and love my own culture.”

New Challenges

Becoming a student leader has brought with it some new challenges for Santa. “I’ve been a high school student leader, but that is very different from what I’m doing now,” said Santa. “I feel like joining leadership with ��ñ�� is a whole new step, and frankly it’s a bit scary and overwhelming.”

But she can also see how much she’s grown spiritually as a result of ��ñ��’s presence on campus.

“It feels like I’m no longer eating baby food, because I want more than that,” said Santa. “I want solid food now as a Christian. For me this is a huge transition, and it’s because of ��ñ��.”

Santa has also grown closer to God from being mentored and discipled by an ��ñ�� staff. “Christina Quintanilla has challenged me to spend every day with Jesus,” said Santa. “She’s guided me through being a leader with LaFe. I am thankful for the ways that she has shown me that I can’t live, even a second, without God.”

News Keywords

La Fe

Fresno State

Creating Space for Latino Fellowship

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 13:51:36 +0000

News

Amy Hauptman

Creating Space for Latino Fellowship

Only 10 of the 600+ Latino students at Brown University were involved in any Christian fellowship on campus.

Why was this?

��ñ�� student and junior Monica Perez wrestled with this question during the Katrina Relief Urban Plunge. She met students from 10 other campuses with thriving Latino ministries in their ��ñ�� chapters. After hearing these students’ stories, Monica sensed God was inviting her to reach out to Latino students at Brown University.

“God showed me that Latino students didn’t have a space on campus where they felt they could be understood or learn more about Jesus,” said Monica. “And I knew that this shouldn’t be.”

So Monica decided to take a step of faith and started a LaFe ��ñ�� Bible study with the help and guidance of her ��ñ�� staff. The Bible passage that God kept putting on her heart was the passage about Jesus inviting his disciple Peter to walk on water (Matthew 14:22-33).

Stepping Out In Faith

“I believed that God was calling me into leadership, but I needed to actually step out of the boat and see that he would carry me,” said Monica. “I didn’t know much about leading a Bible study, and I also didn’t know who would attend. But I knew that I just needed to step out in faith.”

So what did Monica do?

She started passionately inviting Latino students to study Jesus’ life together in community through inductive Bible study. She wanted to provide a space that would satisfy Latino students’ hunger for Latino fellowship at Brown University, as well as address their spiritual hunger.

Today, over 25 Latino students are involved in Monica’s Bible study.

“We went from 8 committed members in the beginning stages to now over 25 students,” said Monica. “We have seen members come to faith this semester. People are excited about inviting their friends. And we have built a lot of trust with other students.”

Remarkable Latino Fellowship

But what’s even more remarkable to Monica is that these Latino students “probably never would have gotten involved in any sort of Christian fellowship if it had not been for LaFe.” And the students involved in her Bible study are also really close friends—they hang out outside of Bible study.

Each week, Monica and her co-leader challenge their Bible study to do something in response to what they learned from Scripture that week. Week to week, the challenge may include striking up a conversation, praying boldly, or reflecting on a specific biblical passage.

“Through our friendships, we have been able to keep each other accountable to the Scripture that we learned that week,” said Monica. “It’s been a blessing to see the eagerness that God has placed in all of us. The discussions are always vibrant and life-giving, and we have seen a real transparency and trust in the group.”

The group is growing quickly, and Monica and her co-leader are praying about what their next steps should be as they expand LaFe’s outreach on campus.

“In the end, I couldn’t be more excited for what God’s been doing at Brown University,” said Monica. “We have been seeing momentum, and Latino students are getting excited to grow in their faith.”

News Keywords

Brown University

Bible Study

La Fe

Empowerment Through Jesus

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 15:04:11 +0000

News

Kathryn Brill

Empowerment Through Jesus

It’s far too easy to be a compartmentalized Christian—someone whose faith is only apparent on Sunday mornings. But Jesus came to redeem every part of our lives. ��ñ�� student and University of California-San Diego (UCSD) senior Iris Delgado knows this is true because she’s experienced the whole-life redemption Jesus offers. In this video, she shares about one part of this transformation—but God’s transformation in her life has gone even deeper.

Encountering Jesus

Iris first experienced Jesus’ transforming power in high school when a friend took her to church. Not a Christian at that time, Iris was initially very uncomfortable. When the pastor gave a call for anyone who hadn’t yet accepted Jesus to come to the altar, she moved forward, mostly out of a desire for the pastor to stop insistently asking. But then, when she began to repeat a prayer after the pastor, everything changed.

“God broke down every wall, every barrier I had put up,” Iris said. “I stood up and I was God’s pure, worthy, and loved little girl.” This encounter marked the beginning of an ongoing commitment to give God her whole life.

A Community of Faith

When Iris arrived at UCSD, she wasted no time in finding a place where she could grow in her faith. On her first day as a freshman, she came across some students running a table with information on ��ñ�� and asked them if they had a Bible study for Latino students. At the time, UCSD did not. “I told the students, ‘Well, I’ll start one!’” said Iris. “I would later find out that UCSD staff had been praying to start a LaFe [Latino Fellowship] ministry for nine years.”

The LaFe Bible study that sprang from that conversation and from discussions with staff worker Julie Day has been a great source of support to Iris during her time at UCSD, helping her live out her faith on campus. “��ñ�� has completely transformed how I see and experience Jesus,” Iris said.

Faith and Activism Together

One of the areas where Iris was most eager to live out her faith was in the campus activist community. During her time at UCSD, Iris has been involved in many activist groups working on a variety of issues, from immigration rights to educational equity. But her roots in the activism world go deeper than her college career: “I became an activist the moment I was born to an undocumented woman and ran the risk of being separated from her merely because she was born on ‘the wrong side of the border.’” It was important to Iris to bring together these two parts of her identity—her faith and her work for social justice.

Iris got the opportunity to do that during the Students of Color Conference in 2012, a yearly gathering hosted by the University of California system around issues that minority students face. Students who participate in the conference can lead seminars on topics of interest to the conference participants—usually issues of inequality, reform, and identity.

Iris led a seminar titled “Empowerment Through Jesus.”

The aim was to explore the ways that ethnic identity intersects with spiritual identity, and how Jesus uses our circumstances for his glory. “I talked about Moses and how God empowered him in all aspects of his identity to take action and free his people,” said Iris. The positive reaction she got was a far cry from the hostile one she expected. “I think that those in the workshop were mind-blown,” she said. “They had never been exposed to God or to the Bible through a social justice lens.”

Identity in Christ

The positive response to “Empowerment Through Jesus” inspired Iris to facilitate a workshop about spiritual identity at the 2013 Students of Color Conference. She hosted a dialogue, inviting others at the conference to talk about how they feel when sharing their faith in politically charged situations. “Many times, the only identities we talk about in these spaces are ethnic identity, sexual identity, and gender identity,” Iris said. “Spiritual identity is not validated, especially when that identity is Christianity, which is inevitably tied to privilege, patriarchy, colonialism—everything we are trying to dismantle.”

By holding this dialogue, Iris was able to help conference participants understand that Christianity is more than its stereotypes, and that Jesus is greater than the misinformation spread about him and his followers. “Many people were open to hearing more about how Jesus is an advocate for us,” Iris said.

Seeking God’s Justice

Although Iris was surprised so many people attended her seminars, she isn’t surprised when activists are drawn to Jesus. “God exists in the person who won’t stand for injustices,” said Iris. “That’s a very Christ-like characteristic.” She sees an opportunity in this to bring people to Christ and show them the source of the justice they are searching for. “Without God’s love and compassion, the justice that activists seek is incomplete,” she said. “I want to see complete justice.”

It’s God’s heart for justice that drives Iris to pursue activism and advocacy as well as spread the gospel on campus. In fact, Iris encourages other Christian students to bring together their faith and social justice: “If we hope to be Christ-like, our heart has to align with God’s heart. And God’s heart is for the marginalized. Our margins are his center.”

News Keywords

University of California-San Diego

spiritual identity

La Fe

La Fe

Becoming Courageous at Fresno State

Becoming Courageous at Fresno State

Finding ��ñ����

Growing as a Leader

New Challenges

Creating Space for Latino Fellowship

Creating Space for Latino Fellowship

Stepping Out In Faith

Remarkable Latino Fellowship

Empowerment Through Jesus

Empowerment Through Jesus

Encountering Jesus

A Community of Faith

Faith and Activism Together

Identity in Christ

Seeking God’s Justice

Finding ��ñ��