College Outreach

The Eszterházy Károly College in Eger is not a major university, but it is certainly up and coming, growing and getting more popular each year. The school now has around 10,000 students, and the campus is spread out throughout the city.

When we first started the church in Eger, we had quite a few college students attending, but as they graduated, many moved away. We have wanted for some time to do outreach to the college students here, and this year God opened a door for us to do that.
A guy in our church named Sanyi goes to college in Budapest, and is involved with Campus Crusade there. Campus Crusade in Hungary is an organization that I really love, and they have been very effective in leading students to faith in Jesus. One of their main outreaches every year is to go into dormitories and hand out "Survival Packs" (Túlélő Csomagok), which are binders with stuff in them for the students, such as calendars, schedules, note paper, and articles about Christianity, as well as a Gospel tract.

Part of passing out these binders, is that there is a questionnaire in them about issues of interest to youth, including relationships and of course faith. On the basis of the answers to the questionnaires, we can easily see who it is who is interested in knowing more about the Gospel, and we can later contact them and invite them to meet with us personally. This has proven very effective in the past for Campus Crusade, and I know many people personally in Hungary who came to know the Lord through this.

Since Campus Crusade is not active in Eger, they allowed our church to distribute the Survival Packs here. We included our church flier/tract, and went into the dormitories this past week to hand them out.
Out of the 400 binders we got from Campus Crusade, we have already passed out 320. We will still go into some more dormitories here in Eger, but we were able to do the biggest part on Monday and Tuesday. It was a lot of work, but a good number of people from the church came to help out, and we were able to take 3 teams through the dormitories on both days, and get the Survival Packs into each room. We were also able to have some good conversations and share with the students about Jesus and about our church as they filled out the questionnaire.

The next step is to contact those who are interested in knowing more about a personal relationship with God. Please pray for us, that God would lead us in this, give us wisdom, and that many would come to know Jesus as their Lord and Savior through this.
Here are some pictures of us in the dormitories: