Ben is a student worker in Portsmouth and has an amazing story to tell.
Two years ago I was in my third year of University. It was fresher’s week and I was on the streets in the middle of the night helping out with club mission, handing out doughnuts and water to students who were leaving the clubs with my friend Zoe. After some time we started talking to a couple of lads about their night. They had told us that they had been kicked out of the club. One of the guys was called Matt, and he was a fresher. He has been at university for less than a week.
As it turned out, Matt had come from a church background and was really responsive to what Zoe and I were doing. I was able to share with Matt that I hadn’t gone to church in my first year, about how my life fell apart and about how God picked me up and put me together again. After a long conversation with Zoe he agreed to come to church the following Sunday.
Matt showed up to church that week and really enjoyed the service. He even claimed to feel that getting kicked out of the club may have been part of God’s plan for him at University to ensure he got stuck in with a church. Zoe and I were really encouraged by what he was saying and by the fruit of the club outreach.
We told everyone we could about Matt and about how God had worked in his life. The thing is that soon after that Matt stopped replying to our messages and texts. He didn’t come back to church the next week, or the week after.
As student workers, we hear these kinds of stories a lot. How many times has that really encouraging fresher decided that church wasn’t for them? How many times has that student who has come through the Alpha course stopped coming to church? Our response to those situations is always to pursue those people, but when they stop replying to your texts or don’t answer the phone what do you do?
Fortunately for Matt, that wasn’t the end of his Story and God wasn’t finished with him yet.
In September this year the student team began to regularly check the list of students that Fusion was passing on to us. One day, Matt’s name appeared. The student team sent him a message through Student Linkup.
She sent him a message, part of which contained something like...
‘It may be coincidence, but I'm wondering if you may have signed up to Student Linkup’
It turned out that he had signed up to Linkup. We asked him how he had found out about Fusion and he told us that over the summer a member of the Fusion team had started to follow him on twitter. When he was looking at their profile he saw a link for the Student Linkup app. He downloaded the app and had a quick look at it, but decided that it wasn’t for him and deleted the app.
While he was there, Zoe and I had a good chat to him and about the things that God had been doing in his life. He told us that after committing to come to our welcome event, he headed off to the Isle of Wight festival so he could ‘have a bit of fun first’. After he got back home, Matt told us that he was convicted about the way he was living and found himself at the point of decision. He could either continue living the way he was living without any idea of where he would end up, or he could seek God and let his life be changed.
Matt told us that through tears and guilt, he apologised to God and decided to commit his life to following him. Coming back to our church was the next obvious step and getting Matt involved felt natural and effortless.
I think that for Zoe and me, Matt is a great example of God using us to plant the seed, but using other means to grow it. I felt so discouraged when Matt didn’t come back to church. I wondered whether there was something I had done wrong. I wondered whether I should have done something differently.
Fortunately God doesn’t see situations like these in the same way that we do. While all we see is the individual, God see’s the whole body. He uses every opportunity to call his children to him and relentlessly pursues them, weaving an individual story of love and compassion for every individual that accepts him. Fortunately, that isn’t limited to any one person’s abilities, efforts or achievements.
Paul writes this to the church of Corinth ‘After all, who is Apollos? Who is Paul? We are only God’s servants through whom you believed the Good News. Each of us did the work the Lord gave us. I planted the seed in your hearts, and Apollos watered it, but it was God who made it grow.’ The reality is that our church had done its part with regards to Matt’s journey. We had given him a taste of what life with a saviour is like. It was that taste which eventually brought him back to church.
In the last few months we have learned more of Matt’s story. From bar fights to being threatened at knife point, the one constant in Matt’s story was remembering the taste of relationship with God in all the hard moments and the pull of the Holy Spirit to return to church.
Today Matt is plugged in to church and he recently sent me a message which said this-
‘I've found out so much more about myself, about God and about my relationship with him. Whilst making new friends within church, going to small group (leading it last night), praying out loud and having the courage to speak up. I can now chat with non-Christian friends, feel confident about chatting about the bible and prayer, with them actually taking me seriously and realising that this is what I am about. This is something I think in first year when I first met you would never have been imaginable... And as I write this now looking back it makes me so excited for God’s plan for me with what he’s done so far, and what adventures will be in the future, but this time on the right path with God on my side all the way.’
So don’t give up the pursuit of students. God is the one who gets the glory when people are saved and all he needs is a simple seed of love and faith to do great things.
That and Luke Smith's twitter feed.