The Christmas story is full of miracles: A virgin becoming pregnant; God being born as a baby; angels appearing to shepherds. Across the country, God is using InterVarsity staff, student leaders, and ministry partners to bring about miracles in students’ lives as they meet Jesus through Bible studies, Proxe Stations, and conferences.
Paula joined the InterVarsity chapter at the University of Maryland–Baltimore County as an agnostic. At Fall Conference, she gave her life to Jesus. “I’ve found a family in this fellowship,” Paula said. “I can’t wait to go to Large Group to see everyone.”
At UCLA, Kelly asked God to draw more students to their chapter from different ethnicities and campus groups. During Fall Conference, a Chinese student and 50 Black students joined in worship to Jesus. Two students from secular fraternities, as well as an openly gay student, also attended. Kelly sensed God saying to her, “Look around the room. My promises to you are coming true.”
Mary, a student at the University of Chicago, said that God has used InterVarsity to change her more than anything else on campus. She explained, “In place of a broken home and a faithless 18 years, my InterVarsity chapter has shown me what godly love is like.”
These are just a few snapshots of God’s visible work on campus. We know he’s active in countless invisible ways too, as he was before Jesus’ birth, miraculously working out every detail, drawing students’ hearts to himself in unexpected and specific ways.
On December 27-31, his work will be on grand display as fifteen thousand–plus students gather in St. Louis for the Urbana 12 Student Missions Conference. What visible and secret miracles will he do there in students? And then, as students go to the corners of the earth in obedience to his call on their lives, who will be lifted from poverty through sustainable practices? What people groups will hear the gospel? Which children will be rescued from slavery?
Our finite imaginations can’t comprehend the scope. We can only look back with gratitude at the powerful ways he’s worked at the past twenty-two Urbana Conferences, and look forward with great expectation for the ways his kingdom will be advanced through this Urbana.
As you invite the miracle of Jesus’ birth to transform you anew this month, in particular, consider inviting students you know to join us at Urbana to discern God’s call on their life, to worship, to pray, to soak in Scripture, and to imagine together the miracles he wants to do through this generation of students.
