YTL STUDENT MINISTRIES
Reaching today the leaders of tomorrow!
Almost every students grew up without any knowledge of Jesus in our post-communist country. They are very hungry for the gospel and most of them wants to talk about God.
Every year we give out about 10,000 Evangelistic Student Survival Kits (SSK) to freshmen in the Universities. Because of YTL we get special permission to distribute those even in campuses where normally they don’t allow any Christian activities. A survey is attached to the SSK that the students need to fill out. In this survey we ask them if they would like to talk with someone about God! Every year at least 1,000 students give their contact information and indicates that they would like to talk with someone about God. We meet with each one of them personally through the semester. Many of them are becoming Christians.
There are many other outreaches we have for campus students. We use YTL lectures in clubs and follow it up with a new club-strategy called “Story of the Soul” (SOTS) which was developed in Hungary as well. This is an interactive coffeehouse where we talk about the needs of the soul and what their soul is saying to them. 65% of the students who prayed to receive Christ prayed at that event. Check out our SOTS website: www.storyofthesoul.org
Beside of evangelism we emphasize personal discipleship, too. Every students are involved in small groups and someone is responsible for them. There are special events to accelerate discipleship, like student retreats.
After starting YTL and getting a lot of access to high school students with the support of their educators we wanted to utilize and maximize this credibility and open door. The main goal of our ministry is to evangelize and make disciples mainly among the future leaders. God opened the door for us greatly in the high schools. We regularly give lectures in dozens of classrooms every semester. The students are very much opened to talk about these topics we address in the YTL curriculum.
This gave us a great opportunity to start a direct evangelistic and discipleship ministry among high school students. We started to gather them in YTL clubs and work with those who received Christ. Later we had special events, clubs, weekly meetings.
Today about 130 students are coming to our weekly YTL meeting every Friday night. Also, we have twice a semester a special YTL outreach for high school students called “Winner Take All”. Hundreds are showing up. Right now 31 students are involved in our Student Leadership Team. These are students who became Christians with us through YTL ministry and are committed to share their faith weekly.
Another major outreach for our YTL student ministry is the YTL summer camp, called “Speak Out”. We invite Hungarian students to come and learn English in a summer camp setting. These are non-Christian students who are coming and we advertise it through the YTL educators. We invite American college students to come and help teach English to them using the YTL topics and curriculum.
Each year about 300 non-Christian students are spending weeks with us and they not just hear the gospel in many ways but they see it in action through the lives of the American students and our Hungarian student disciples. We see many students praying to receive Christ at these camps and remaining fruit.