Spring! (March Update)

Happy Spring!! 

First things first, I need your help.

On February 21, the U.S. Department of Education announced that it intends to remove regulations that explicitly protect religious student organizations like FOCUS.

These regulations say that public universities and colleges cannot deny us the rights and privileges afforded to other student groups because of our beliefs, practices, policies, speech, membership standards, or leadership standards. 

The public has until March 24th to comment on the proposal, and we are asking everyone in our network to do so--staff, students, ministry partners, and partner churches.

Click Here to get to a webpage that we’ve set up that explains the situation further and make it as easy as possible to comment!

This could have real consequences for our ministry, so please rally with us and share with others who care about protecting religious groups on university campuses across the country.

If you have any questions, you can reach out to Casey (casey@anyfocus.org).

February was a great month with lots of cool stuff!

Release

One of our campus pastors at UTD, Lailah, has started a group called B.L.I.S.S. (Black Lives In Soulful Solidarity). In order to celebrate Black History Month, she put on an INCREDIBLE event called Release! She had some of her friends and connections, as well as FOCUS students, in the black community perform pieces and share what they loved about being black. It was really neat to get to experience different elements of black culture. She had an African drumming troupe, dancers, Spoken Word, singing, and even a New Orleans second line band! It was an awesome event. I’ll attach a video of the second line so that you can get a taste! 

Worship Team!

One of my tasks working for FOCUS is running and developing our worship team! We have about 25 student volunteers on the team this year. I create a schedule for them to rotate through playing at our large group service every Friday. We also have meetings once a month during the school year where we talk about the purpose of worship, and some logistical things for music and arranging a band. 

For our meeting this month, we did a “jam session” where we plugged in all the instruments and picked typical songs we do at our services. It was SO fun and neat to get to worship together! Here is a pic of my crew that was able to come :)

Prayer Request!

We have a group of students from a sister ministry in Washington coming to spend their Spring Break doing outreach on our campus! We are so excited to host them. Please pray that for boldness for them to converse with students on our campus about God, and for the people they talk to to have a receptive heart! 

That’s all for this month. Thank you so much for everything you do to partner with me!!

Love,

Kylie :)