Prayer Time at Matias

Worshiping together at Matias.

We spent the afternoon today prayer walking at Matias. This is finals week, so the campus was pretty empty. As we enter into the student’s vacation time, we’re praying about plans for next year. We found out today that we may have a few minutes to speak to all the new freshman in each major when the new school year starts. This would be a huge blessing to our ministry. The earlier we can reach students in their college career, the longer time they have with our ministry. It’s so fun to think about all these new freshman starting school!

Marijke and Bean (Christine) praying together.

Girls at Matias

There are probably about 15 girls who we have some kind of ongoing relationship with on the Matias campus (Evangelica is out for Christmas Break). Aside from sharing the Gospel on campus, we’ve been able to spend more time just building friendships with students. We sit in the cafeteria and our friends find us, excited to talk about their days. Or we visit classes, where professors are surprisingly fine with the disruption of random girls wandering through their classroom.

Two weeks ago, we sat down and shared the Gospel with a couple of girls through the Soularium survey. We started out in our semi-broken Spanish until one of the girls said, “I’m American. I grew up in San Bernadino. I’ve actually really been wanting to meet you guys. I’ve seen you on campus, and my friend Gabby knows you. Every time she sees you she says, ‘Oh! There are my friends! I know those girls.’” Wow. Okay then. I was thrilled at the fact that this girl was clearly all about getting to know us. More than that, we’d been wanting to develop a deeper relationship with Gabby and her friends for a long time, and here was one more connection. It felt like a puzzle piece falling into place.

My teammate Christine (Bean) and I have also been spending a lot of time with Jenny, the girl I mentioned in this post. Jenny was one of the first people I shared with on campus. She met me when my Spanish vocabulary was at about the level of a three-year-old, but with far worse grammar. Thankfully, she is eminently patient with Bean and me. She’s our biggest fan as far as language goes, often reminding me of that day a few months ago when I barely said a word. But she also talks about that day, and a meeting a week later with a national staff woman, as a kind of spiritual wake up call. Bean and I have been meeting with Jenny for two months now, and it’s one of my first experiences at seeing such powerful life change in such a short period of time.

We met for coffee last week. Jenny walked up as Bean and I were finishing our quiet times in the coffee shop. “What are you doing?” She asked, not wanting to interrupt. “Oh, just spending some time with God. I’m done now,” I answered, closing my journal. “Maybe sometime I could do that with you,” she said. “Absolutely you can!” I told her, probably a little too eagerly.

We spend a lot of time talking about life, and God, and how things are looking different for her. She wants to come share the Gospel with us on campus. She is already being bold with her friends. It’s just really, really fun.

Ministry Overview

It seems that all of my longer or weightier posts end up in my drafts file, incomplete. But I realize that I’ve been lacking in actually talking about the ministry we’re doing on campus. So, in hopes of giving a more complete picture, I thought I’d share about our ministry week.

Our larger team of ten has been split into two ministry groups, with five people on each team. Each of the teams works on two campuses. Our team works on Evangelica, a small Christian school with about 3,000 students, and Matias, an Opus Dei school with about 3,500 students. These two private schools are generally viewed as the top universities in the country, and they serve the wealthiest students. On Mondays and Tuesdays, we work at Matias from 9-3. Wednesdays and Thursdays are spent at Evangelica. Outside of our time on campus, we have daily debrief time with our team of five. We also have team times with our larger group of ten.

Our team is the first Campus Crusade group to work on Matias. Ministry started when we arrived. On Evangelica, there was a summer team of about 20 people working on the campus for a month before we came. On Evangelica, we have a weekly meeting every Thursday where we generally see about 20 students. On both campuses, we spend our days building relationships with students, evangelizing, and following up with students who want to learn more about living out the Christian life. At this point, we don’t really have a “typical” day on campus, and we’re just figuring out what it looks like to do ministry in this culture. A lot of times, it just means being available. If students don’t show up for appointments, which they often don’t, it means looking for them on campus later in the day and just hanging out. As much as I like schedules, and knowing how my day is going to flow, ministry here often means letting go and spending time with whoever happens to be on campus.

So, that gives the framework of what we’re doing, but it doesn’t really get at the heart. Right now, we’re in the pioneering stages of our ministry here. We don’t have a lot of in-depth relationships with students. I feel like I had more exciting stories during my summer in East Asia, and it’s easy to forget that we’re doing a different ministry here. It would be easy to evangelize the campus and report encouraging numbers. But we don’t want numbers, we want a sustainable ministry that others can build on. That means doing a lot of the work that just needs to happen in order for a ministry to continue. It’s a lot of figuring out logistics, a lot of long-term planning, and a lot of trial and error. Sometimes, it just feels painfully slow.

Still, there ARE good things happening. A couple of entries ago I mentioned “Soularium,” a tool that uses pictures to help us enter into spiritual conversations. Jenny was one of the first girls I shared Soularium with at Matias. She didn’t seem overly interested, and I kind of wrote her off after that first conversation. But another staff woman from Panama (Selegna) followed up with her and they had a great meeting. They talked through assurance of salvation, and it was clear that Jenny was still holding on to a works-based mentality. She still felt that she could erase her salvation with sin.

I met with Jenny the next week, and we talked through our position in Christ, versus our relationship with Christ. Once we have found our salvation in Jesus, we are children of God, a position that doesn’t change. But when we are living with sin it makes it harder for us to come to God, and it damages our relationship with Him. At this point, Jenny’s face lit up, and she said she understood what Selegna had been trying to tell her. She couldn’t lose her salvation based on what she did, or did not do.

I’ve only had two meetings with this girl, but she keeps having these small revelations that blow me away. Last week she brought up one of the Soularium pictures that she’d picked out the first time I met her. That “waste” of a conversation turned out to be something that has stuck with this girl for over a month. It’s encouraging, and relationships like this one get me through all the times that feel like a “waste.”

Evangelica

As promised, better pictures of one of the campuses where I work:

Edificio cuatro. The building where we have our large group weekly meeting.

The cafeteria where students hang out.

Awning that runs the length of the very steep hill we climb multiple times a day.

Overlooking the cafeteria.

Campus Life in El Salvador

Every college campus needs a cow skeleton. At least I didn't include a picture of the cadavers I'm subjected to every time we pass the anatomy lab. More flattering pictures of the campus coming soon.

Language

“How’s your Spanish?” was definitely among the top five questions people would ask when they heard about my El Salvador plans. My response was usually, “Not great. Ask me at the end of next year.” It is encouraging to see how quickly language comes in an immersion situation. After just over a month here, I can already understand most conversations, or at least pick out the important words. I can hold my own in restaurants, taxis, and shoe stores. Even on campus, talking with students, I can get pretty far in Spanish. Still, the word “immersion” feels so appropriate for the way it feels like everyone is talking underwater. If I work really, really hard I can understand, and make myself understood. But it is tiring work that can feel relentless.

One of the ways we share the gospel with students is with a tool called “Solarium.” It’s basically a set of 50 pictures that students use to answer five questions. The questions are things like, “Which three pictures that describe your life right now?” “Pick three pictures that describe what you would want your life to look like.” “Which picture would you use to describe God?” It is so interesting to see which pictures get picked over and over. There is a picture of little girl running through a park with a bunch of balloons in her hand. Everyone loves this picture.

Solarium is great on a spiritual level, because it seems people will tell you anything if they have a picture to pair it with. Art students tend to have especially deep and soulful answers. But it’s also great on a practical level, because if a student is holding the picture of the old couple walking hand in hand, they probably aren’t talking about their struggles with faith as a child. So, I sit there and listen with such intensity that sometimes it feels like I can hear my brain trying to process the words. I grab onto the phrases I know, and try to fill in the blanks quickly enough to nod in the right places.

I’ve learned to hide the fact that I’m usually only understanding half of any given response, depending on how fast the person is talking. It bothers people to be misunderstood, and when the national staff were still on campus with us, students would simply direct all conversation to the person who clearly understood them better. As soon as I started faking it, acting like I understood what was happening even if I had no clue, girls started opening up to me as well. If I really didn’t catch any of it, I could ask them to repeat it more slowly. Or I could simply say, “bueno,” and let it go at that.

This morning, I led a small group Bible study with six girls. As I fought through with terrible grammar, limited vocabulary, and awful pronunciation, I felt embarrassed and exhausted. These girls are studying engineering at the top university in the country. They are smart and well spoken. Not only that, they have cute clothes. And I can barely string a sentence together. But I’m learning that sometimes it doesn’t matter what I can’t say. In fact, sometimes it’s better when I don’t speak. I have a Bible in Spanish, and I know how to say, “Here, read this.” For now, that’s enough.

The Vision

When I arrived in the sticky nighttime heat of El Salvador three nights ago, I was greeted with this card:

“Brenna, Welcome to El Salvador…and to the most fun, challenging, life changing, fruitful, and blessed year of your life.–Layo & Luchy Levia, El Salvador 08″

Tonight, our team had dinner with Layo and Luchy, the area directors for Campus Crusade in Latin America and the Caribbean. They shared their vision for reaching the country for Christ, and it brought tears to my eyes. Really, it was the same basic vision that Campus Crusade has in the US:

1. Connect students to Jesus.
2. Create life-changing discipleship relationships.
3. Build multiplying leaders who will develop others.
4. Create self-sustaining movements.

But the way that Layo explained how he hoped to see this play out in his own broken and hurting country was deeply moving. The truth is, in El Salvador, the missionaries have come to the poor, and many have trusted Christ. But these missionaries have altogether missed the influential people in the country. They have ignored the executives, the business owners, the politicians, the very people who can initiate change on a mass scale. Who did God tell Moses to go to first when he was called? Pharaoh. And the Jewish leaders. Who did Paul go to when he did his ministry? He went to the synagogues and pagan temples. He went first to the people of influence. It’s true, we need to care for the orphans and feed the poor. But Paul wasn’t neglecting the poor when he went to the most powerful people with the message of Christ.

So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to try to find the people who can bring a new morality to a country where alcoholism, rape, and murder are far too common. A morality not forced by outsiders, but brought on by heart change. It’s the kind of vision that hardly has a starting place. But we are starting. Even learning how to communicate, and buy groceries, and get around is a part of the job of reaching students. We’re getting to a place where we feel functional, and we are ready to get into our ministry.