Recap on the Display
We promoted a really cool event last month held at the University of Washington, by our friends Chad and Desi Meis called The Display. It was a time of worship, encouragement and sharing the Gospel. We asked Chad if he would follow up on what happened, and are happy to share his report with you.
On October 2nd, we were honored to host one of the largest outdoor Christian gatherings at UW in the past decade! As most of you know, Desi and I have been building friendships across the region (specifically with college students and ministries) and helping to catalyze prayer and worship at the University level. If you remember our posts from earlier this year, we hosted a leaders retreat in April and have been ramping up to this specific event all summer. In collaboration with dozens of campus ministries and local churches, we worked with the UW admin at The HUB (Husky Union Building), and we were able to reserve the outdoor lawn for our event. God opened up Friday Night, October 2nd, which was the last day of welcome week – Dawg Daze. This was a perfect time to engage the campus, since thousands of new students were on campus preparing for a new life in college and probably wondering how they were going to spend the next 4 years. We were so blessed to have a worship team from Bethel Music (Redding, CA) as well as help from the Circuit Riders (they’ve helped with the Northwest Awake Tour, Carry the Love, and other campus gatherings). The night of The Display, we had over a dozen ministries and local churches partner to set up the staging, combine 5 different sound systems (praise the Lord this worked out) and set up tables as a place for new students to get plugged into ministries and on-campus communities. During the event, we had 2 pieces of spoken word by recent UW grads, followed by 4 unique student testimonies from the microphone about how Jesus has impacted lives at UW. In response to these testimonies, we saw dozens of people receive Jesus, get physically healed (What? Yes!), receive emotional freedom, and get plugged into local campus ministries It was such a fun night! We were blown away by God’s faithfulness in everything from logistics to funding to student response! He even held off the rain despite every weather forecast predicting rain all day (it held off until literally 5minutes after we ended).
Beyond any events, we are more excited to see a network of campus leaders from multiple ministries working together to love their university and unite a region! Christianity is about family, not events! While it’s definitely fun to gather with hundreds of believers in prayer and worship, our heart is becoming more and more convinced that God really does care about relationships. Revival and awakening cannot be sustained by events, but it does grow and thrive from friendships which turn into family. We are so blessed to be part of this growing network, and to simply ask students what their dreams are. Why not dream big? Why not step out with no backup plan when God gives you a vision for your city? Something changes when you realize that fear isn’t a valid excuse to not act. Something is different when you truly begin to believe that God is a good Father, and that He really does encourage the deep dreams of our hearts J This picture below is from the morning after The Display, where we had a small breakfast gathering of student leaders to recap the night and talk about this coming year. Do we have any specific plans? NO. Do we have a thousand dreams and ideas? YES. Weekly campus prayer, regional 24hr worship nights, large gatherings, small discipleship groups. We’ll see where God leads, and above it all we will seek to honor and bless the existing campus ministries! Thanks for everything you guys do to support Desi and I, and to support what God is doing in this region!
-Chad & Desi Meis
