Yabuki Breeze Blog

Future pastors and missionaries… future gatekeepers for international ministry… that is the target as every semester Roy shares with Dallas Theological Seminary and Southwestern Baptist Theological seminary students about international students and gives them the opportunity to volunteer to help out with the ministry.

This semester 50-60 American seminary students signed up to be friday night helpers, friendship partners, retreat volunteers and english partners. The result, students being touched and hopefully future pastors and missionaries who see the strategic nature of international student ministry who integrate this sort of ministry in their churches.

I ran into two guys at DTS this time around who volunteered three years ago and they are still in contact with a couple of Saudi students they befriended and still meet with them on a regular basis. One other DTS student is going to be our spring retreat speaker. A SWBTS student is going to meet with us to integrate our adopt a people strategy into Texas Southern Baptist Churches. God uses these short term “missionaries” in a big way.

Tags: DTS, Seminary, Southwestern, volunteers

“The TCU ministry is going better than I expected… Relationships are happening…” went a discussion in a recent team meeting with TCU volunteers and students leaders. The semester has begun at TCU and we have hit the ground running. Darren, our International Christian Fellowship (ICF – ISI’s name on campus) President represented us at the TCU Activities fair with several signups.

The Moores, a key volunteers couple for the TCU team hosted a Labor Day Party at their home. In addition to many “old” international student friends of theirs, three new Japanese students came as did one new key volunteer.

Several mission minded American students have joined us and have done a wonderful job as we have tried to implement our rallying cry for the school year, “relationships!” They, with our key Christian students, are also working to develop Life Transformation Groups (LTG) for the purpose of discipling students.

In addition, we continue to meet weekly on Friday nights. Twice a month, we join with the UTA ministry at the Yabukis’ On the other months, we have a TCU Bible Study on campus and a fun event with the Moores. (see www.tcuicf.com for our schedule)

We are excited about what God is going to do through this ministry.

Tags: LTG, Moores, TCU

“I want to study Revelations…” said TCU Junior Darren from Malaysia when he and Roy first started a Life Transformation Group (LTG) at Einstein’s Bagels next to TCU. ISI DFW has adopted LTG’s as a significant part of its discipleship strategy. This is because it teaches students to grow on their own, mixing the concept of community and the the Body of Christ in their Christian DNA. Roy & Darren have been meeting for the last couple of months and it has been an incredible time of learning and growing. It has been fun watching Darren ask difficult questions and really look at his life in light of the scripture that we have read.

According to the literature, Life Transformation Groups are “groups of 2-3 people that get face to face weekly for discussing the Bible, accountability, and prayer. LTGs are self-governing, are not controlled by any outside leadership, and follow no specific curriculum. By design, LTGs encourage the participants to discover the Word of God by themselves, with the Holy Spirit and one another to guide them.” In these groups students read 20-30 chapters of scripture a week in an accountability relationship. In addition they share their struggles and hold each other accountable and pray for each others and their lost friends.

There are at least 5 groups at UTA with more forming all the time and one more at TCU. In each case, we have seen significant growth and greater involvement in the students involved.

Tags: Life Transformation Groups, LTG, TCU

Roy met with around 60 new Indian students as he was invited to share about the Big Howdy with the Fine Arts Society of India. It was truly and honor to be able to share with the largest “ethnic” or any club on campus at UTA. In addition, another church was invited to share about a picnic the following day and over 60 students showed up. We are beginning to sense some new openness with Indian on multiple campuses.

Tags: Fine Arts Society, India, Indians, UTA