Now that I am a full-fledged campus minister one of my priorities is facilitating mission opportunities for my students. One of the organizations I think does this best for students is called Let's Start Talking (LST), which helps organize, train, and send teams overseas for six weeks during the summer to help non-native English speakers practice their conversational English. We do this by using the book of Luke as a basis of reading and conversation sessions with individuals for upwards of 10 hours per day, five days a week, for six weeks.

Thankfully, my ministry, Cats for Christ, has been working with LST for almost 15 years so Cats for Christ and the Manhattan church is already deeply invested.

This is where you come in. My goal is to join my students in this work overseas every summer, or at least every summer that it is practical for me to do so. Being part of an LST team requires raising $3200 in funds. This money facilitates every part of the project, from travel to housing to food.

I am in the beginning stages of my fundraising efforts for the summer of 2008 and would like for you to consider how you can help in this effort in any way. To make it easy for anyone who visits this blog, I have placed a ChipIn widget on the sidebar (please click here if you are reading this on an RSS reader) that makes donating very easy by allowing you to safely and securely use your credit or debit card through PayPal. Also, any money that is contributed over $3,200 (which will also include direct payments to LST on my behalf that I will solicit through the mail) will go towards the fundraising efforts of the students involved.

Please pray and consider how you may help in this effort. I have worked LST projects in Germany and Ukraine and they have changed my life in profound ways and I have seen the lives of students transformed by relying solely on their faith to journey across the world into strange and amazing places to share the story of God with people eager to learn.

Thank you very much for considering this.