November 16, 2006

UM Students Glorify God
Through Urban Plunge

University of Mobile student Micah Gaston of Mobile, Ala., draws in symbols the contrast between a life with Christ and a life without Christ, at a Florida coffee shop during Urban Plunge, UM’s 48-hour inner-city mission trip.

Inside a Florida coffee shop, two college students applied bright pastels to a canvas, creating intriguing symbolic images. Whenever a curious onlooker asked them to, they explained the significance of their colorful design.

The story their pictures told was ultimately the story of the gospel, and this visual evangelization was just one way University of Mobile students spread the good news of Jesus Christ during Urban Plunge, a 48-hour inner-city mission trip sponsored by UM’s Campus Ministries.

“It was good to see how God uses each gift to help in His kingdom, in order to spread the gospel,” said senior psychology and sociology major Wilmer Trotter, who served on the Pensacola trip.

Spreading the gospel was the top priority this year for the steadily growing mission trip. A record 104 participants traveled to seven cities across the Southeast—Charlotte, N.C.; New Orleans, La.; Atlanta, Ga.; Gulfport, Miss.; Auburn, Ala.; Birmingham, Ala.; and Pensacola, Fla.—Nov. 3-5, working to improve communities and sharing Christ.

According to Neal Ledbetter, UM’s director of spiritual life, “Urban Plunge is designed to make students aware of the spiritual and physical needs around them, to provide students with an opportunity to serve others, and to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Many students go on Urban Plunge to get a feel for mission work, which may give them courage to be more involved in missions throughout their lives.

“For many, this trip is their first experience with missions and evangelism. Hopefully they take the small step with Urban Plunge, and then maybe they’ll be less intimidated to take a larger step with University Missions, UM’s international missions program, or The Bridge trip, a week-long missions trip over spring break,” said Ledbetter.

“One purpose of Urban Plunge is to be able to show our group the importance of missions, and I think a lot of them got excited about it and will want to do more in the future,” said junior Amanda Green, a communication major and group co-leader to Birmingham.

The students ministered in the communities through a wide variety of activities, including painting houses, bagging groceries, doing yard work, cleaning parking lots, serving food at soup kitchens and cleaning up hurricane damage. Thanks to a committed and intentional focus on evangelism, students also conducted evangelistic surveys and backyard Bible clubs, and spent time talking to people about Christ at every opportunity, whether in coffee shops or on the city street.

Green said, “As Christians, we aren’t supposed to keep to ourselves what we know about the love of God…Urban Plunge is a great opportunity for people to put into practice what they say they believe.”

“Service is a practical way to show people that you care about them. You don’t just tell them everything about God, you show them. People might not want to hear what you have to say until they see you’re willing to get your hands dirty,” she continued.

“It’s important that people know why you’re doing what you’re doing,” added Mat Alexander, co-director of Urban Plunge 2006 and a junior theology major at UM, who also helped lead a group to Charlotte, N.C.

As always, using community service to tangibly demonstrate God’s love was vital to this year’s groups. And in addition to the evangelistic focus, Urban Plunge 2006 leaders prioritized partnering with local churches to find projects rather than independently finding them. The goal is that showing others God’s love will draw them to Christ, and their spiritual growth will expand in a local body of believers.

“Urban Plunge seeks first to meet spiritual needs through Jesus Christ, and then to meet material, physical needs. We’re trying to spread the gospel, and a good way to initiate this is by showing love and meeting physical needs,” said Alexander.

By working with churches, he said, “students get to see how the church is reaching out, and it’s a lot less about us and a lot more about what God is already doing” in the community.

Junior theology and art major Micah Gaston, who has participated in every Urban Plunge since his freshman year and co-led the Pensacola trip, added, “When we humble ourselves and are willing to serve others, Christ is allowed to demonstrate a difference in our lives.”

The hope, said Gaston, “is that anybody we minister to, anybody we help, connects to a local church,” so they have a means to continue Christian growth.

One church students worked with was First Baptist Church Indian Trail near Charlotte, N.C. UM alumnus Kevin Wilburn, minister to senior high students at the church, was one of the UM students who founded Urban Plunge at the University of Mobile in the late ’90s before graduating in 1999.

His connection to this year’s Urban Plunge was Alexander, formerly a high school student at First Baptist Church Indian Trail under Wilburn, who interned there this summer. It was during this internship they decided an Urban Plunge group should come to Charlotte.

Wilburn thought it was a good idea for students to visit multiple states so they could learn to minister in different cultures. He said he also welcomed the idea of students coming to serve with and in his church “because I knew I was going to have an opportunity to invest in these students.”

“We started Urban Plunge because we wanted people to know about where we went to school, and we wanted to tell people about Christ,” said Wilburn. “A missions trip is not a missions trip unless the gospel is being spread…If we want to bring God glory and honor, we need to give people the opportunity to respond to Him.”

“I would recommend Urban Plunge to students who have never gone because this could be the first exposure for some students to any kind of missions,” he continued. “You don’t have to be a theology major…There’s always something to be done, always a place you can serve.”

While the students learned a lot about evangelism from the minister, Wilburn took something away, too.

“This year’s trip helped me understand that what a college student is doing is just as important in the kingdom as what I’m doing,” he said.

Marilyn Foley, wife of UM President Dr. Mark Foley, appreciated the value of the humble service Urban Plunge participants provided. She joined a group of students that traveled to New Orleans, where she had lived for 13 years.

“I love New Orleans… a lot of my heart is still there,” said Foley.

The group she worked with helped with repair and clean-up at a house in a neighborhood hit hard by Hurricane Katrina. Foley said she felt the work the group did “was a very relevant way to express our faith.”

“We do things not to deserve our salvation, or grace; but because we’ve been given that, we do these things in gratitude to the Lord,” she added.

Foley, who called the trip “very well-organized and well-orchestrated,” said she enjoyed it immensely and was “inspired” by the students she worked with.

“I’m so encouraged by the type of students we have at the University of Mobile, and so encouraged by this generation of young Christians,” she said. “Their heart was to serve and love people and to share their faith in a relevant way.”

The students’ passion for loving others and seeing them accept Christ was made clear by their words and works throughout the trip.

“I love to evangelize, I love to minister,” said Trotter, reflecting on the Pensacola trip. “I love to see how God works. Even though you don’t always see the fruit of your work, it’s good to lay down the seed, and you believe with confidence that God will make it grow.”

She added, “It’s not only that needs be met, but that God get the glory in the end.”