Story by Andy D.
Andy Donaldson is a campus missionary at Sydney University.
It’s an exciting week to be on campus! O Week is full of energy and excitement. Everyone is here to meet people, find their community and get connected.
I often think back to my first week as a new student. I’d never heard of Power to Change and I was only on campus for an hour during O Week. But what an hour it was! A Power to Change student surveyed me and I got involved. Now I’ve been with Power to Change for nearly 20 years.
That’s the impact that this can have, and you just don’t know who that same person might be this week.
Sydney Uni doesn’t call it O Week anymore. It’s now Welcome Fest. I think that really reflects the feeling of the week; –it’s a festival vibe with lots of fun things happening, including a stage with bands playing in the afternoons.
We are doing ‘broad sowing’, a strategy that will engage as many people as possible. We then filter using a survey, to find out whether or not they’re interested. As we follow up with people during the semester, conversations will go deeper.
Students like free food, so on Tuesday, we have a pizza party in the middle of the day. It’s something low-key that is easy to come along to and doesn’t cost anything – not just in terms of money but also in terms of time or expectation.
At the pizza party, we’ll do a brief explanation of the different activities that we offer on a regular basis and hope that the relationships and connections we’ve made with different people will lead to them taking next steps.
A bunch of students will be exploring faith and asking questions. Over the course of the semester, we will go through the Gospel of Mark and talk with them about the relevance of Jesus.
The following week we’ll start our Bible study groups. We’re wondering who’s a Christian; we want them to get involved and, through that, find community and feel like they belong.
This can be a launching pad to help them take next steps in their journey of following Jesus, like learning how to share their faith, and getting involved in some sort of one-on-one discipleship mentoring-type relationship. But Bible study is the entry point.
I feel like Welcome Fest brings a lot of possibilities. When you’re here this week, you just don’t know who you’re going to meet or what’s going to happen!
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