Report from Peter Dishman, 2/27/09

Note: Peter is Reformed University Fellowship / Mission to the World Campus Minister to the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City.

http://www.rufmexico.org/

The fall semester of 2008 was a semester of change at the UNAM. While we continued our second semester of large group (I taught through the gospel of John), as well as small groups located in three of the "faculties" of the school, our student makeup shifted towards newer students (both new converts this semester and Christians who for the first time discovered a Christian group to support and encourage them at the university). These students are now owning the group and developing relationships with one another, which is making for some good movement forward as we we enter the end of the first month of the Spring semester of 2009.

This semester I am teaching on the 10 commandments, and how the law points us to our need for Christ and his grace and teaches us to respond to our salvation with love for God and others. We also have five small groups, including one new study that began this week among the "yearly calendar" students (in the schools of Medicine and Dentistry) and another in the national school of Social Work (spearheaded by a new Christian who wants a Bible study in her faculty). Pray that the new small groups will catch on (especially the experimental one with the "yearly students"), and that student leaders will continue to emerge to direct these small groups.

We continue to have our English conversation clubs on Wednesday and Thursday, where we make many non-Christian contacts during the semester who often show interest in finding out more about our main activities. Last semester several English club students made their way into the RUF group, and at the end of the semester, several others asked to meet with me personally to talk about struggles with depression and decisions. English club attendance started out small this semester, but has grown to around 20-30 students, which is good especially since we have half the native English speakers we did last semester. Pray that God will send us some Christian exchange students (perhaps even from the PCA as he has in the past) to help our with the clubs. Pray for students from the clubs to take an interest in their spiritual lives by connecting with RUF students and checking out different avenues for involvement where they will hear the gospel.

This semester we have added a Friday social time called "a moment with RUF" (it sounds much better in Spanish), where students lead a community building activity (get to know you, discussion, etc.) and then we eat and do something informal (last week we played soccer, other weeks we have checked out different cultural activities at the UNAM). We hope this will enable students that cannot come to our Tuesday large group to get integrated, and for the students to build relationships with each other (remember that no one lives on campus, so most students have 2 friends from the UNAM, 2 friends from high school, and two friends from Junior High). Pray for this space to grow and for students to bring their friends.

Not only has our student group shifted, but our staff group has changed as well. Interns Josh and Amy Oettle headed to Austin at the end of the year, and we will miss them and their gifts and service, especially in developing the organic feel of our group and our outreach through the English clubs. Intern Jared Weatherholtz is engaged to be married to a Mexican girl who was working on staff with another campus ministry in Puebla, and will finish up his service in August. In addition to meeting with students, especially in the English clubs, and leading a small group Bible study, we are also excited about a CD of RUF hymns in Spanish that Jared is producing as part of the RUF music project in Spanish. Pray for more connection with RUF in the US through visiting campus ministers and groups at Spring Break and during the summers.

We don't have our budgets met in terms of support here, and need to work on building and growing relationships with givers. The financial situation in the US makes this a lot more difficult. Pray for us to be diligent communicators of what God is doing in Mexico and relationships builders, and for the Lord to provide the support we need to keep working in the church and among the 178 thousand students here.

Beginning of the Year Wrap Up

From Peter Dishman, RUF @ UNAM

The best way that you can see the first few weeks of the year at the UNAM has to be via the updates from Josh and Amy Oettle on their blog. There you can see some pictures of our kickoff party, and if you scroll down far enough, of our pre-semester retreat as well.

It has been a good semester so far - sadly, a bunch of our regular folk are starting to disappear as they move into their thesis and social service phases (in some cases, students in this fifth year phase have lots more time, but generally they have a lot less as they move towards post-UNAM life); at the same time, however, we have also seen a number of new faces at our group as people discover our group and begin to become part of it (one of the new things that we tried this year was having an information table set up outside of one the main entrances of the UNAM - we have never seen a Christian group do this before, but we have garnered a lot of confused looks and a good amount interest in “Christian community at the UNAM”).

This semester at our Tuesday large group, we are working through the gospel of John, and last week we talked about the mystery of the incarnation - how Jesus the divine missionary enters human history to redeem a people for himself. We are still learning what that missionary invasion means in our lives as well as what it means for our lives at the university. We also have student and intern led small groups going on Ephesians, the letters of John, and the Foundations of Christianity in Filosophy and Letters, Engineering, and Sciences.

English Club has been big this semester - a lot of new faces among the 40 or so that have been coming out on Wednesdays and Fridays to learn to talk like “real gringos”. Lots of relationships beginning to grow there, and you can pray that our group draws positive attention from the administration and from students alike.

Posted by Peter Dishman on Sunday, August 31st, 2008 at 3:10 pm.

Holy Week (2)

from MTW / RUF missionary Peter Dishman @ UNAM, Mexico City

We had a good time with the group from Trinity U in San Antonio last week, and I hope they enjoyed their time of learning and serving here as well! Because there were no classes (Spring Break = Holy Week in Mexico every year), our rhythm was a bit different than usual.

We started each morning early helping a community service/outreach program that our local church does every year called “extend your hand”. We probably helped serve about 1200 breakfasts over the course of the week, and got to know a lot of the neighbors. Some people came for the first time to the breakfasts, while others had been coming for more than a decade! I met people from the neighborhood behind the church, parents whose children were in the local hospital, and a whole lot of police officers toting their machine guns and shotguns. Each of these groups is part of our local demographic.

Next we headed to my apartment, where on Monday and Tuesday we had a “mini-retreat” for our RUF students on “relationships”. We had decent participation, and Justin’s talks and especially the question and answer times helped clarify a lot of questions, from what it means that marriage is a covenant to the difficulties of leaving and cleaving to the role of emotions in dating and tying the knot. On the other weekdays during this time, people rested and spent time meditating on Scripture and praying, and then we talked through the story of scripture from beginning to end.

In the afternoons, we did English Clubs, and in spite of their being no classes in session, we had a really good turnout - 50 the first day and 30-40 for the other days. We had good topics and good discussions (Amy Oettle really has become the queen of English Clubs), and afterward had long hang-out times playing soccer or capture the flag with those competitive gringos (myself included!), visiting at the Oettle and Dishman apartments, eating tacos, and going to the tourist market. Holy Week is nice (and exhausting!) because no one really has to go anywhere, so you can talk the hours away.

So, that was our week - long, a little intense, a few health issues, but a lot of learning and growing because God is at work, by and with his word among his people and beyond them. It would be great if any Trinity U folk wanted to comment on what they thought of the week since I have just scratched the surface here!