January Prayer Letter

Here is our January Newsletter:

Dear Ministry Family,

Happy New Year! My how the holidays came and went so quickly! We pray that God lavished each of you with precious family time, sweet time celebrating our Savior, and plenty of laughs as we closed out 2011 and launched this new year. Our holidays were spent back with our two families in Holden, MA, and then we had our own small New Years’ party before heading out to Albany, NY for our week-long winter conference with the students. But before the holidays we had to wrap up the semester with the students and what an ending we had!

Preaching the Gospel and telling our life story to non-believers is and always will be a central effort of our ministry. A large part of our training entails learning how to use different tools and learning how to read the tone and progress of a spiritual conversation so we can learn how much to say and how to carry a conversation over multiple meetings with a student. A growing portion of our weekly schedule is dedicated to going out on campus – together and with students from our ministry – to preach the Gospel to other students. Our main difficulty with this at the moment is that the student body seems completely uninterested in what we have to offer, so please pray that God will show us how to effectively present His Truth in a way that will powerfully impact students and that He will care for the seeds that have been and will be planted.

Students developing a passion and a drive to share their faith makes this part of our ministry even more rewarding! In mid-December, the students put on an Open-Mic Christmas party to which they invited their friends and roommates. Students then got up and sang worship songs with explanations of why the songs mattered to them, shared artwork they had made that expressed their faith and struggles, read poetry that beautifully encapsulated the Christmas story and how it looks forward to Easter and salvation, and read fictional stories that rang with the truth of Scripture. At the end, one student even stood up unexpectedly and spoke for several minutes on the importance of the true story of Christmas. Watching students merge their passions, schooling, and talents with their faith filled me with awe and I know that many of the friends who attended were impressed and interested by what they saw and heard. Please pray that many more such opportunities to use their gifts to share their faith will occur for the students!

The chance to inspire students to take hold of the Gospel and share it boldly continued at our most recent conference last week. One day of the conference – called “Storytelling” day – challenged the students with turning their powerful testimony into a three-minute story. Not only does this force the students to become intimately familiar again with what really matters about their story, it helps them gain clarity and focus in what otherwise can seem like a jumbled, chaotic story about life. Seeing the excitement to tell their stories to others well up as they completed their task pointed to the success of the idea – some students even video recorded their testimonies so they could post them on Facebook and other internet spaces so as to rouse up Gospel-centered discussion. We hope that the students will continue to boldly witness in whatever means and media God opens to them!

May the passion to preach the Gospel catch fire at UMass Dartmouth, at colleges and universities across the country, and in your hearts as well! God has left us here to be storytellers and we are each a small part of the Greatest Story ever told. Pray for us as well, now that we clearly feel the Lord’s leading to commit ourselves long-term to this ministry working on college campuses and begin the process of applying to join staff. Thank you for your prayers and for joining us on this adventure! We pray that God continues to bless you and strengthen this partnership!

Serving with you in Christ,

Matt & Rebecca Litchfield

P.S. – Two housekeeping matters: 1) Some of you might prefer an e-mail copy of this letter rather than/in addition to the hard copy. We’re happy to send you either or both! Please just send an e-mail to matthew.k.litchfield@gmail.com letting us know if you want to add/change to e-mail format.