Contact a FOCUS Missionary for more information.Ī Christian Disciple seeks to imitate the master, Jesus Christ, and His way of life. Bible study is an incredible opportunity to grow in authentic friendships, encounter Christ in Holy Scripture, engage in meaningful conversations, and learn more about the Faith and how to share it with others. They are led by our missionaries and other student leaders. Our missionaries and student leaders are our hands and feet on campus, inviting a wide range of students into a relationship with Christ and His Church.įOCUS offers dozens of Bible studies each semester on many different days and times to fit the schedules of our college students. Francis Newman Center, we have a team of at least four full-time FOCUS Missionaries who reach students on campus in a variety of ways -striking up conversations and forming friendships with students on campus, large-group events in collaboration with Cardinal Catholic, mission trips, annual conferences, leading small group Bible Studies, and one-on-one Discipleship. FOCUS Missionaries inspire and equip college students for a lifetime of Christ-centered evangelization, discipleship, and friendships in which they lead others to do the same.Īt St. Trained in Church teaching, prayer, sacred Scripture, evangelization and discipleship, FOCUS missionaries encounter students in friendship where they are, inviting them into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and accompanying them as they pursue lives of virtue and excellence. If we are genuinely seeking to be faithful in our Christian living, then our faith needs a clear focus: Christ who is seated in glory.FOCUS is a Catholic collegiate outreach whose mission is to share the hope and joy of the gospel with college students. 19), and the only antidote to this is to focus on heaven instead. Paul had already spoken of professing Christians whose minds were “set on earthly things” (v. Why is this important? Because it says a lot about the horizons by which we live. In Him, “our citizenship” belongs there, and it is from there that He will one day come to bring us home (v. Hence His ongoing call to us as His people is “upward” (v. What is interesting is that he unpacked this truth not just in terms of who Christ is but where He is: in heaven. This was certainly true in the church in Philippi-hence Paul’s need to spell it out for them. It is easy for us to forget this double aspect of what it means to believe in Christ. That is, we are to look to Jesus not only as the provider of our salvation but also as the pattern of how it transforms what we are and how we live. He made it clear that faith needs a clear focus, and that is Christ. He told us exactly what it was: “. . . forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (vv. Out of the many things that mattered, he gave one thing priority. Once again, he was testifying to the struggles of faith he faced and again made it clear he was not yet perfect. The Apostle gave us the long version of this in Romans 8 but provided a pithy summary elsewhere in Philippians. But we have to look elsewhere to see what this looks like in practice. 25)-his deliverance from sin in all its dimensions came through Jesus. He immediately went on to answer his own question, declaring, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (v. In making this confession, Paul was being honest about his struggle but not defeatist. This inner conflict in the life of faith is both real and common to us all. But he went on to declare, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (v. He told them, “I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out” (Rom. He acknowledged it candidly, out of pastoral concern for the believers in Rome who faced the same inner conflict. Even the Apostle Paul knew the painful intensity of this inconsistency. We are called to faithfulness as Christians, but we struggle to maintain it. Prone to leave the God I love.” How often we sing these words from Robert Robinson’s “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” and they resonate because they are all too true.
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