Karl & Liesl Kranich

How have you gotten connected with opportunities to serve in your local church or another ministry?  Many of you filled out a form and dropped it into an offering plate or a collection box.  Over the years, thousands of students have done the same thing, expressing interest in a summer mission trip, or serving on the worship team, or joining a small group Bible study.

Here’s a different way:  Imagine that you’re a college student at a winter conference, and you’re told that you can be connected to ministry opportunities by sending a short text message.  You send the text, and get a reply that sends you to a form that lets you indicate the kinds of opportunities that you’re interested in.

Because the system is connected to facebook (and you and your friends are avid facebook users), you soon find out that several of your friends are interested in the same overseas trip as you.  You’re even more interested in the trip now that you know that you could be serving with some of your friends.

In another context, the local leadership sees that a student, Alice, has expressed interest in an investigative Bible study.  The system shows them that Alice’s friend Beth is a student ministry leader and Beth gets to introduce Alice to the Bible study and eventually the Savior.

This is just part of the vision that we have for a project that we’re currently calling the “Mission Accelerator”.  It’s already under development, and we’re praying that the first phase will be ready for use on campus in the fall.  Down the road we hope that it could be used by churches and other missions organizations.

Please pray with us for:

• wisdom for all of the decisions that will need to be made by leaders, the project manager, and the coders
• a spirit of teamwork and cooperation
• quick progress

Thank you for your partnership with us!  We’ll keep you informed as progress is made.

I can’t believe this is the last day of January! I personally lost the first half of the month to being sick (Karl and Anja got bugs, too), but we’re all well again (just in time for my 40th birthday . Keynote has been hopping, with all kinds of good things going on. Here are just a few of them:

Serving the Campus Ministry

For many years, Keynote has been sending representatives to various college Campus Ministry Christmas Conferences in order to recruit students for our own Summer Project or for internships or full-time positions.

In recent years, God has opened doors for Keynote to be a resource to some of these conferences through worship leading, program planning and emcee training.

In December of 2010, Keynote sent teams of musicians to San Diego, Minneapolis and Boston to lead worship bands of students from the respective regions. We love being able to work alongside the Campus staff and help shepherd these students in becoming “lead worshipers.”

Along with helping conferences musically, Keynote has served in other roles. Keynote was able to serve the conference in Denver again in the area of program planning. Several of the student emcees at conferences across the country were trained at Keynote!

You all could pray for the students around the country that God wants to be a part of the 2011 Summer Project to begin the application process! (And if you know any students who would like to take part, send them our way or to www.keynotesummerproject.org)

International Opportunities Abound

• January – Slovenia – our team recently returned this weekend from worship leading at the Eastern European Campus Crusade Staff Conference
• January – Spain – worship leading at a mid-year conference for Short-term International Staff serving in North Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. This team is coming back now
• March – Egypt – ad hoc band, The Replicas outreach tour (Please Pray for Egypt. The country is having great unrest presently. Pray for our team to know how to prepare in light of the uncertainty of being able to go or not.)
• March – El Salvador – ad hoc band, Stop on Green outreach tour
• April – Guatemala – Communication training
• May – Australia – blackSoil project outreach tour

New Media Labs

Please pray for the team to be creative as they field multiple requests for tech tools, apps and language translations for existing tools. They have a lot of great new ideas, so pray that God would help their time and energies to be used well.

Each year Open Doors releases the World Watch List, a detailed analysis of Christian persecution worldwide. In this free resource, countries are evaluated and ranked according to the severity of persecution that occurred in the past year.

Check out the list at http://members.opendoorsusa.org/worldwatchlist/ and pray for Christians in these countries!

Happy belated Thanksgiving! We hope you all had a wonderful time celebrating and that you had a chance to really be thankful (the preparations and shopping can make for a crazy time). We had our first Thanksgiving at our own home and loved it.

It was especially nice to slow down after a full month. Keynote’s Vision Event went sooo well. If you weren’t able to watch Karl’s live broadcast you can see it now at www.keynoteconnection.org.

The weeks before and after that event also saw us hosting Tom and Harro, two CCC Australia Interns! They just released an iPhone app to help others share the gospel. They took the most widely used booklet for understanding who Jesus is, Would You Like to Know God Personally?, and made it available through the iTunes store (since it’s the Australian version, it has slight differences from the American booklet).

Similar to Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws, Knowing God Personally is the perfect tool for helping people understand how to have an intimate relationship with God. People can download the application free of charge. Harro grins, “It’s a God thing because we didn’t advertise it. We placed just one wallpost on Facebook and it took off from there. The first week the Lord allowed us to have 350 downloads from 31 countries.”

We had them come in to brainstorm ways we can use modern media to communicate the Gospel in more creative ways (and do programming). Keynote’s New Media Labs has been working on God Tools, another app for iPhones (and soon for Android phones). God Tools offers several Campus Crusade for Christ gospel booklets and the great articles from EveryStudent.com. If you have an iPhone or iPad, you can download Knowing God Personally and God Tools for free from the app store.

This month we’ve also had a number of conversations that reminded us just how challenging it can be for most of us to know how to clearly communicate how to begin a relationship with God. Even long-time believers find it hard to know what out of the whole Bible and their lives to focus on when talking to someone who doesn’t know God.

Simple outlines of the Gospel can be a big help.  Whether you get an app for your phone, carry a paper copy with you, or use some other method, the important thing is to be ready to share, in a simple way, what God says. I find that just getting the 4 points in my head (and keeping them there) can make it so much easier to know I’ve clearly shared what’s important when I have limited time. When in doubt, just read through the booklet with someone!

Most important is praying and trusting God to work in people’s lives. He’s the life changer and he can use all of us as we step out in faith to share our own stories of God in our lives. You don’t have to “do it perfectly” for God to use you to share His love with someone. We’ll be praying for all of us to trust God and reach out this Christmas season.