Campus Harvest 2007

Had a wonderful time during the last 2 days @ Campus Harvest 2007 in Kings Park Internation Church down at North Carolina! It's a youth conference where Every Nations Campus ministry of colleges and high schools throughout the whole United States gather together in on place, listening the word of God, praising and worshipping together. My key take-aways is that praising God should be so free! I was so amazed seeing the American students grooving and dancing to the beat! While I've seen the setting before in my local church @ Singapore (CHC), the participative audience, who are awesome and brought up the atmosphere of happiness and delight, is something which made me stood in awe!

The messages were awesome too! The senior pastor's wife, Lynette Lewis, shared a brilliant message of sealing and securing your calling. Also, in a seminar entitled "Career Minded, Kingdom Focused", she reminded me that everything is about the people. She inspired me to engage with the people I work with, be really interested in their life (something which is lacking in this "self-centered" world). Also she taught some tips of staying motivated, and also urged us to be excellent in everything we do, even though the work might not be what we expect from the calling.
She defines kingdom focused as 1) royalty: we are all leaders and people are watching us and following our lead; leadership is not a destination but a journey and God will impart skills along the way. 2)People is the bottom-line to everything. She describes how she engage with her fellow collegues in her workplace. It's all about sowing seeds to people, listening them talk their problems, empathising together with them and just be a friend.
Career minded is defined as being excellent, having a strong prayer life and being a producer.
She has an awesome book called "Climbing the ladder in stilettos" which many had recommended for the working ladies out there to grab hold of it.

Another message from Pastor Jim Laffoon was inspiring too! He taught us that while we bring the lost into the Kingdom of God, we ought to be open to them, open up our lives to them so that Jesus can come into their lives. (Matt 21:5-9) This verse shows that the disciples of Jesus took the donkey (a symbol of the lost and broken) and place their cloaks (symbol of opening up of the believers life to the new converts) before Jesus ride on the donkey. Also, he urges us to let Jesus have 100% control of the "reins" of our lives.

The message of prayer and loving the Word of God is echoed thoughout all the seminars from the various speakers. I also learnt interesting and creative ways of how campuses reach out to the lost. There was one initiative done about "Playing it forward" and the best student will get his/her tuition fees paid! Awesome! How it works is putting others first and get them do the same. Issues of life such as pornography and other social issues are raised. A classic example is the person ask a guy is pornography acceptable, then ask would he like his daughter to be a pornstar. This is the website for this initiative: Every Nations Campus Ministry of UT . How did the ministry have the funding is that a rich tycoon's daughter got touched by the ministry and the dad simply gave them a yacht, which they sold it and used it to do such creative things to preach the gospel to the students in UT.