5 things to pray for CU mission weeks

Over the next couple of months, something really exciting will be happening on university campuses all over the UK: Christian Union Mission Weeks. Last year, 35 000 students went to mission week events. Some of those people were my friends at the University of Manchester; and it was a great privilege to be involved in organising our week.

CUs are engaged in a whole range of outreach activities all year round, which come with their own set of baffling Christian jargon: ‘bottle drops’ (handing out water to students coming home from nights out); ‘tea and toast’ (handing out tea and toast to the aforementioned inebriated students); ‘text-a-toastie’ (CU members deliver the toasties and answer questions about God); 'carol services' (which are… carol services).

But CU mission week is where a year’s worth of work comes together. Most CUs will invite a speaker, or a team of them, to come for the week. Typically, they’ll put on lunchbars on campus each day, where students can come in between lectures, get a free meal and hear an apologetics talk on questions like ‘why doesn’t God stop suffering?’, or ‘does God even exist?’. Then in the evenings, there’ll be another event with a longer talk from the Bible which explains the gospel in more depth.

So I want to encourage you to get behind your local CU in prayer. Here’s five things you can pray for your local CU’s mission week:

1. Organisation: Mission weeks are organised by a committee of students. Pray for them as they finish up all the organisational jobs in the run-up to mission week and try to avoid anything going wrong: For food to be where it’s needed; for technology that works; for posters to come back from the printers on time; for enough money to cover expenses; for good relationships with the Students’ Union and venues.
2. Invitations: Pray for CU members who are inviting non-Christian friends to events—that they will be brave enough to do it, and that their friends would say ‘yes’! CUs will also be flyering around campus. Again, pray that Christians will be bold and effective in this, and that God will use these chance encounters to “open a door for [the] message” (Colossians 4:3).
3. Speakers: Pray for the speakers, that as they preach the gospel they would “proclaim it clearly” and faithfully, and that their conversations with students would be “always full of grace, seasoned with salt” (Colossians 4:4, 6).
4. Fruit: Pray that many students would “repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15).
5. Follow-up: When mission week is over, keep praying! There will be some who make a profession of faith after coming to one or two events during the week. But there will be many more who will take a lot longer to come to that point. After mission week, guests will be invited to do a ‘seeker Bible study’ over the following weeks. Pray that many people would take up this opportunity with “great eagerness” to read God’s word for themselves (Acts 17:11).

Why not find out exactly when your local CU’s mission week is and what their specific prayer needs are by becoming their ‘friend’ via the UCCF website?