GroshLink

Last week I visited Evangelical Theological Seminary, Myerstown, PA.  As many of you know, Spiritual Formation continues to be my primary interest in exploring seminary studies for equipping in the call to serve as a husband, father, member of InterVarsity's Graduate & Faculty Ministry team, neighbor. ...  Evangelical offers a Master of Arts in Religion in Spiritual Formation. I think that I may have found a match and it will have been worth the wait. Praise God!  

Pray for discernment regarding timing and the provision of finances before taking next steps.  At present, my best guess is a few classes here and there before enrollment in Fall 2011.  A big factor in the timeline is how well Eden transitions into Kindergarden this fall.  Pray for Eden's continued growth, development, and smooth transitions in the educational process.

Below is an email which we sent to our partners in ministry.  If you are not receiving e-updates and have interest in receiving them a 1x month, drop us an email.

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But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.  Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.” When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.  -- Ruth 1:16-18

Dear Partners in the Campus Mission, 

Below are some highlights of family and ministry from the past several months:  

1.  Pray for Tom to have the stamina and the ability to make wise decisions as he directs "Being Hospitable," the Mid-Atlantic Graduate Student Winter Retreat this weekend, http://www.gfmma.org/retreat.  Please visit/print the Winter Retreat Schedule in order to join us in prayer for the retreat.  Note: the weekend will be formed by material/insights from the book of Ruth.

2.  Pray for Theresa to manage household affairs as Tom's away, particularly since all the girls have 'off school' Friday and Monday.  Praise God for friends and family who are helping this come together!

3.  Praise God for His financial provision!  Through the gifts of His people, we met our 6 month fiscal year budget.  Pray for the next 1/2 of our fiscal year, which ends June 30.

4.  Praise God for his amazing work at Following Christ 08. Audio of main sessions is available here.  It was a great joy for both of us to serve on the intercessory prayer team.  Thank-you to all who helped care for our girls during the conference.

5.  Another update will come after the retreat to share with you about the gathering and provide info on Andy Crouch's visit to Central PA on Sunday, April 19.  Andy will be coming to Elizabethtown BIC to talk about his book, Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling.  On-line information can be found at here.  Below is a picture of Tom with Andy, taken at the Following Christ conference in December.

 

 

May God richly bless you as you grow more and more into the image of Christ Jesus,

Tom & Theresa Grosh
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship
Mid-Atlantic Faculty Ministry Catalyst
http://www.groshlink.net
http://blog.emergingscholars.org/author/tomg/

PS.  Financial support for this strategic ministry should be directed to "InterVarsity Christian Fellowship" P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895.  Please enclose a separate piece of paper indicating that the gift is for the work of "Tom Grosh."  On-line giving can be found at http://www.intervarsity.org/donate/to/Tom_Grosh

'Students and Faculty Transformed, Campus Renewed, and World Changers Developed.'

Dear Partners in Prayer,

Your prayers were greatly appreciated as Ellen was sick the whole time I was in Chicago for meetings with InterVarsity's Graduate & Faculty Ministry (GFM)  and InterVarsity Press (IVP).  Theresa pressed on w/grace, patience, and strength.  Pray for Eden to overcome her current bout w/the illness which has swept through our family.  Pray for both Theresa and myself to press on, by God's grace, through Holy Week . . . setting our eyes on and reflecting the hope/joy of Christ Jesus.

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As GCF's considered how to redesign U-Connect PGH into a more interactive site that reflects the conversation on campus regarding our fall topic What is Revelation and summer book discussions of The Gospel in a Pluralist Society we've found Goodbye, Blog quite an inspirational piece. Thought I'd bring it to your attention. More later, including where we're going w/U-Connect PGH and also where you are right now, groshlink.net

The CMU faculty discussion group recently discussed A New Kind of Urban Christian by Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, NYC. We found this an excellent piece, but hard to put into practice. Part of the time I gave testimony to the social, cultural, and spiritual impact of our family's local congregation Allegheny Center CMA. Toward the end of the conversation, one faculty member asked us to consider the University campus our neighborhood. And to ask the question, How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good? I really like this analogy b/c it is very much the case as the city/campus goes, so goes the culture.

Our next phase of pioneering ministry will explore how followers of Christ called to be lifers in the academy must prayerfully embrace their Kingdom responsibility in these strategic cultural-shaping centers. Please pray for doorways to relationships and conversations in which we can borrow/modify some of the below talking points from Tim:

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If you're in the Pittsburgh area, please come out to our July 9 Taste of Lancaster for a time of food, friends (including a number of alum such as Andy and Jodi who just purchased our house, Mike and Shayna Bowling all the way from Canada, Peter and Kelly, hopefully the Daleys with a new born . . .), fun, and sharing as to our next stage of life and pioneering ministry which will seek to redemptively engage the whole campus through university academics and professionals. The whole of Schenley Park is available for us to enjoy: playgrounds, tennis, Frisbee golf, or bring your own lawn games.

2-4pm, drop-in, rain or shine, w/a little program at 3pm

Schenley Park Ice Rink Meeting/Banquet Room, directions and RSVP info below.

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Dear Family and Friends,

Our first decade with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA (IVCF) has been a great joy. By God's grace, we can testify to seeing Students and faculty transformed. Campuses renewed. World changers developed. As our next step in ministry, IVCF has asked us to become catalysts for the further development of workshop and networking models for faculty ministry in the Mid-Atlantic area. We are enthusiastic about this opportunity to use our gifts and experience to inspire and equip faculty to engage the whole campus with the whole Gospel through their whole lives . . .

As part of this new assignment, we will be relocating closer to family to receive support for Eden's care as Tom focuses time on an itinerant pioneering ministry, which will serve both the Lancaster County, PA, and Pittsburgh areas. For us, returning home evokes memories of idyllic rolling countryside and quaint Amish farms. Since farming is so central to the identity of Lancaster County, we have adopted the theme of barn-raising to represent our transition.

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Yesterday, I participated in a seminar on the deeper journey led by a vetran IVCF staff. She defined spiritual formation as the process of being conformed to the image of Christ for the sake of others to the glory of God. With regard to encouraging growth in the lives of those we work, with she suggested the metaphor of a 3-legged stool comprised of the habits of faithfulness (i.e., spiritual disciplines), intentional relationships (i.e., several mentors with encourage and direct personal and professional growth), life events responsibly chosen as formative. So how do we discern what God is saying to us individually and collectively about our own deeper journey?

We took some time to pray through and reflect upon the last 24 hours of our life. Through this time various threads of God's work and counter influences to His work emerged. For me, this year's graduate and faculty ministry staff team meetings have been a great blessing and affirmation. As I reflected upon the privilege of living one more day in the Presence of God to glory of God, I rejoiced in the opportunity

Please pray for Theresa as she and Eden were sick yesterday. Thankfully Ellen rose to the Mommy role and my sister Amanda will be taking the time to cross the state to help out for a day -- thank-you! Gotta go to breakfast as there is much conversation today as we wrap up our national conference and transition into a more specific consideration of work in the Mid-Atlantic.

Jim Sire's new piece Why Good Arguments Often Fail came in the mailbox over the weekend. I took a look at the Preface and am ready to go, follow the link for a PDF version of the Preface . . . but I'll have to wait a few hours as I'm taking part in a conversation regarding the first chapter of Sears and Osten's The Homosexual Agenda and leading one on the various women of Proverbs 1-9.

Add on a few conversations afterward, dinner, watching the kids while Theresa's at Pilates, then it looks like an after eight. Please take a moment to pray for healthy conversation and insight into the topics under consideration. I'll keep you to up-to-date on these readings. If you're reading along and have comments to share, let me know.

Citlalli and Grace pose during the hike.

Check out more winter retreat pics here.

By 1877, there was enough evangelical activity that students from across Cambridge's 17 colleges organized the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU), which focused on evangelism and encouraged students to pursue missionary careers. CICCU president J. E .K. Studd invited D. L. Moody and Ira Sankey to Cambridge in 1882. Studd's father had earlier professed faith in Christ during a Moody visit to London.

Ever asked where your organization came from? Well, here's a brief history of the roots of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship from a recent Christianity Today piece. Thought you might be interested (note: alum should feel free to post some any memories/stories they'd like to share). I have some notes laying around that I'll try to 'get up' in the coming month . . .

after we recover from all of Eden's appointments, the next MRI being January 19th. Please pray for a clear diagnosis and a timeline for future treatment.

Hope the snow melts for our 9:30am Narnia outing tomorrow (a partnership with Bellefield Presbyterian Church, Church of the Ascension, and Shadyside Presbyterian Church), followed by a lunch which will include a presentation by Geneva College's Terry Thomas (one of my Higher Education Professors, fellow Grove City College alum) exploring a follower of Christ's understanding of imagination/wonder, informed by some of Lewis' insights and including a first reaction to the film.

Pray for the interactions at the theatre, the debrief afterward, and future conversations regarding the meaning of Christmas.

Here's a clip from the NY Times Review:

The supposed controversy over the religious content of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" may be overhyped, but a particular question of faith nonetheless hovers around the movie, which was produced by Walden Media and distributed by Disney. Anyone who grew up with the Narnia books is likely to be concerned less with Lewis's beliefs than with the filmmakers' fidelity to his work, which was idiosyncratic and imperfect in ways that may not easily lend themselves to appropriation by the shiny and hyperkinetic machinery of mass visual fantasy. But if a few liberties have been taken here and there, as is inevitable in the transition from page to screen, the spirit of the book is very much intact.

Please continue to pray for our students, faculty, and ministry to find helpful ways of entering the conversation regarding the an appropriate articulation of how beings created as men and women in the image of God can relate in a healthy manner in a public/secular forum such as CMU. A number of articles can be found at http://www.thetartan.org/ (note: type tba film in the search feature on the top right of page) and there will be a campus forum on Sunday, December 11.

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Encounters with the Word of God among the people of God, remind me what a blessing it is to be an instrument of God's grace on the University campus.

Not many have the opportunity to be in the midst of a vocational forming institution, holding forth the Bread of Life to all who acknowledge their inability to feed themselves and to prophetically call to the attention of all those who will hear, that the God-shaped vacuum in our person, can only be filled by the Love and Presence of Christ.

. . to learn more about our work, check out our most recent newsletter.

A lot of people ask me what it is like to be about ministry on a campus like CMU. I think CMU's culture of competitive complaining belittles us all has some helpful insights regarding the campus community and ideas on how well meaning students (and others) try to make it a better place from a humanistic perspective. The campus tension between peers reminds me of a comment by a CMU Professor that pointed out that instead of celebrating our ability to understand (and build upon) what is shared by cutting-edge colleagues, we tend to be envious of those who have achieved just a little more than us (especially if we were close to similar insights).

But one has to keep in mind that our sinful nature is always with us and respecting/listening to one-another is never easy, even when filled with the grace of God. This morning one of the students led a consideration of Jeremiah 17:9, Matthew 15:19, and Romans 7:15-25. What a wake-up call!

He sent us off w/the question, How have you been able to preach the gospel to yourself daily? How can we today? Pray for followers of Christ to be a redemptive influence among the people, ideas, and structures of the campus as long as they are called to be a part of it. That the light of the Gospel would shine through their hearts, actions, conversations, and vocational decisions as individuals and as part of larger campus/academic entities.

At the end of this week 20+ graduate students and professors from the Pittsburgh region will come together to explore Success and Failure in the University. I am very excited about the opportunity to coordinate this endeavor as I believe this topic is one which academic wrestle with day by day. Please pray for

1. our speakers, Terry Morrison, Director Emeritus of InterVarsity's Faculty Ministry, and Gary Willingham-McLain, Pastor of Friendship Community Church and former CMU professor, to deliver with clarity and participants to engage with the material presentated.

2. last minute registrations to be processed efficiently in order for us to prepare a helpful layout and quantity of materials for those in attendence.

3. the Friday dinner to provide a framework for how to be a godly Influencer of Change in Higher Education.

4. insights into future designs for this conference and related efforts in order to best utilize our time and resources to advance our efforts of being a redemptive influence among the ideas, people, and structures which make up Higher Education.

Dear Brothers & Sisters in Christ,

Yesterday, Ryan suggested we take 15 minutes to reflect upon how we understand Freedom in the Gospel. A number of things came to my mind:

Freedom to be children of God, to find/root our identity in Christ Freedom to love, our blindness toward others/neighbor taken away (More)

W/the new academic year, the Graduate Christian Fellowship (GCF) has taken off. Above is a picture of some of the grad students at a Labor Day weekend picnic. The conversations about following Christ in graduate school led to the formation of an Intentional Christian Community which meets daily (Monday-Friday, 8:30-9:30am) for prayer, Bible study, conversation, seeking the Lord's direction. Please pray for the 8 or so of us who are part of this endeavor. Other opportunities to water the seeds of faith include a Wednesday discussion of Colossians Remixed at CMU, a Friday Bible study at Pitt, and a Sunday social . . . for more specifics on our work and those of sister ministries click here.