Top Picture: The Texas team serving with Global Gates.
Bottom Picture: Henna outreach at a park in Jamaica, NY. We used Henna designs to tell Bible stories to the Muslim and Hindu ladies at the park.
Much of the Summer at BSM is about planning and prepping for the fall. Since many students are away from campus, the days are not as full of discipleship groups, leaving us time to become better equipped ourselves. This last week, I had the opportunity to participate in a cross-cultural training and mission week hosted by Global Gates in New York City. Global Gates is a church planting group that focuses on Gateway Cities, large North American cities where people groups from the ends of the earth now reside. I joined five college students from Texas and the associate director at the Aggie BSM to be part of a Sifting Week. This means that each morning we went through training on how to share the gospel and disciple people in cross-cultural settings and then in the afternoon, we would go out and share what we had learned with others in the community.
Our team focused on reaching out to Jamaica, a neighborhood in Queens that is predominantly comprised of people from Bangladesh and Guyana. Global Gates has a list of apartments with Hindu and Muslim residents, and our goal was to break into small teams of 2 or 3 and knock on these doors to host a survey to learn how Global Gates could better serve the community. In the process, we were able to share the gospel with many people. Some politely turned us down, but others listened and engaged in spiritual conversations about Jesus. Our hope was to find people of peace interested in the gospel and then connect them back to Global Gates church planters.
You can engage the world by traveling the New York City area and engaging other gateway cities like Houston, San Francisco, LA, Chicago, and Toronto! I learned so much this past week and am excited to take many of the teachings back to the BSM students. Now I just have to be patient since I won't get to share this with the students until they are back on campus in early August!
- Kaitlin