pictures – Brandon and Ansley Hammond

It’s been a month since the beginning of school and i we feel like this has been the first 20 laps of the Daytona 500, that fast. I hope to be able to give you a glimpse into what has happend both in Cru and our family in the next couple of posts.

What does every freshman in Charleston want to do the first weekend of campus…..THE BEACH! Yep, everyone is living for Saturday to go spend the day at the beach, the reason most of them choose to come to school here 🙂 So our team decided that because interest is so high we should capitalize on that and provide a place to hang out for the day and provide food too.

We had over 200 people attend! This was by far one of our best welcome events, praise God! Throughout the day, as we looked at the massive amount of people out on our section of the beach, we saw our student leaders engaging with the freshman and making them feel so welcome. Because we had a house for the day, the environment was great even for those that don’t really like the beach, by staying in and playing board games or just relaxing on the porch.

This event has generated so much momentum for this fall. I’ll write more about what it has done specifically later.

Here are a couple of pics from some of our Cru Beach Bash. Enjoy and thanks for praying.

b and ans gettting ready to welcome the masses

the parking lot – the masses

the line for food

B sitting with a freshman guy

lowcountry staff team

On May 28th, we packed up and headed north to the great city that is Brooklyn. Leading the summer project this year gave us opportunity to serve the city by bringing up 25 staff and students to help launch new Cru movements and help build up existing ones. For the first time the project was housed in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan which proved to be a good move by allowing the participants to experience an established neighborhood in NYC verses living near midtown where only tourist stay. If you’ve ever been around Herald Square or Times Square you know that it doesn’t matter which way you are walking it seems like everyone else in the world is walking the against you 🙂 But moving out to Brooklyn was different, much more calm and enjoyable for a long period of time. The hotel that the students stayed in was the same one we used for our spring break trips back in march. We are praying that a consistent relationship will blossom to provide a stable housing spot for all of our future spring break and summer mission trips.

This year our group consisted of mostly upperclassmen. Out of the 15 that were students, 6 or 7 of them are considering moving back to nyc to either serve with Cru or just live life in the city. This is the biggest response we’ve had for those who have come on our project who want to come back. I think a lot has to do with living arrangements this year like already mentioned. But God is at work! 3 students made decision to place their faith in Jesus this summer and there were around 600 people that our group had conversations with. Here is one of the stories:

Brooklyn College had been a challenging school for the ministry team to reach people because of the lack of places to find students. In fact, most of the buildings were impossible for us to get into, which had proved to be a trend with most NYC colleges and universities. Two Project students were about to wrap up on the last day when they decided to talk to one last person. They went through Soularium with a guy who was willing to talk. As they shared about Jesus, they learned that many other people involved in his life were Christians and had already shared with him including one of his friends, his

football coach and family. It was obvious that God had been doing a work in the heart of this man and, in the quad of Brooklyn College, he eagerly placed his faith in Jesus!

Thank y’all for praying and giving towards this effort. The real measure of the impact of this project and the others taking place this summer we won’t know til heaven!

Here are a couple of photos from the summer: