University of Mobile students serve on 48-hour, inner-city missions 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 (UM) students spread the good news of Jesus Christ during Urban Plunge, a 48-hour, inner-city missions trip sponsored by UM’s Campus Ministries.
  
Spreading the gospel was the top priority this year for the steadily growing missions trip. A record 104 participants traveled to seven cities across the Southeast — Auburn; Birmingham; Charlotte, N.C.; New Orleans; Atlanta; Gulfport, Miss.; 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.”
  
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 streets.
  
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 Mat Alexander, co-director of Urban Plunge 2006 and a junior theology major at UM.
  
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. (UM)