Jayson & Carrie Whelpley

A little bit of free publicity today!

Last week I was contacted to do an interview for an article in the George Washington Hatchet, the student newspaper at GW University, on Friday I was interviewed by a student about an article about the student government on the whole giving out free condoms on campus. Recently we’ve been displaying an ad on Facebook (displayed on our website) about real safe sex.

The link leads to an article on one of our sites: EveryGWColonial.com which is a site based on EveryStudent.com, the site that we talked about in our last prayer letter… which I just realized I never mailed out. Expect it within the next day (oops!!!).

Anyhow, the article – located here is pretty well written and paints us in a very good light I think.

As a note, where I say that “we’re not coming on campus trying to convert students,” that is Scripturally accurate. We are called to preach the Gospel to everyone, but it is the Holy Spirit that brings conviction that leads to salvation.

Please pray that the free publicity will be effective to expose more people to the Gospel and that they would wrestle with the truth presented there. Also, pray that God would bring them to repentance and salvation!

In these past few weeks we’ve seen God moving in a lot of ways on many of our campuses, but one of the ways we’ve also seen some success is with a number of websites we’ve set up, like EveryDCStudent.com.

We’ve been doing advertising on the hugely popular social networking site, Facebook (if you don’t know what it is, visit the Wikipedia article). We’ve paid almost nothing – just over $11 to show the ads more than 35,000 times! We could have spent all day every day handing out fliers on campus and we wouldn’t have been able to get that many out… even better, all people have to do is click on something and they’re there. They don’t have to go home and remember to look up this random site that they have no vested interest in; just click.

The main site that we were able to set all of these up through also gives us statistics of how many people have been visiting. As of right now we have had over 250 visits to the site and 3 people have indicated that they have received Christ after visiting the site!

Hopefully we’ll have the chance to follow up with these people in the next few weeks, but we have to wait for them to contact us again through the site. Please be praying for the effectiveness of these sites and of the advertising.

Update: There have now been 6 people who have indicated that they have made the decision to follow Christ while viewing our websites!

Last Friday was a brand new experience for me. I traveled to Harrisonburg, VA to get some training to step into a financial administration role with the team here in DC.

A few weeks ago, I discovered the desire to help the team become more organized on the whole. I’ve been working on the team’s website and I’ve been working on the online advertising and correspondence with students as well. Well, I was also asked to consider taking on some of the financial administrative role as well.

To be quite honest, I’ve never been good at handling my own finances well, and (whether it’s the optimal arrangement or not) Carrie takes on a lot of that role for the two of us – she’s far more personally organized and conscientious. Needless to say, the financial stuff is a little bit away from my gifting and not even close to what excites me about our job; on the other hand it’s something that needs taken care of on our team and I may be the most likely to do it and do it well (for some reason, it’s easier for me to do it for the team than it is for me to do it for my personal finances).

Well, I learned terms like Quick Journal Upload Form, Business Unit, Operating Unit, GL Account, Contract Routing Slip and Blanket Purchase Order. I know what they mean now and I know how to account for the money that goes in and comes out of our team’s operating account (the account that goes to pay for a lot of the materials, conference set up expenses and advertising), I’ve also learned how it needs to be taken care of to keep the IRS happy with Crusade on the whole.

Pray for me as I step a little into this new role so I can serve and help Jake lead our team from his strength of casting vision for reaching every student on every campus of the Washington DC Metro area.