Spring Recap and Summer Plans!

 "Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen." -Galatians 1: 4-5

    Hello again! I hope all of you who are reading this are having a great Summer so far. Thank you all for your continued generosity towards me and our ministry here in Wylie. I could never express how much I appreciate each one of you, and I literally could not do the work that I get to do without your prayers and financial support. God has been working amongst our teens, and I'm excited to share some of the things He's been doing with you guys! I hope this encourages you all!

CTF Nights

    One of the things that I've noticed over my last five years doing youth ministry is that the Spring semester is usually really hard. Kids get excited for the start of school in the fall, and with that the opportunity to get involved in new things. Fall is usually really fun and exciting! But by February or March, the end of the school year is in sight. With sports coming to an end, standardized tests, and the thought of summer coming soon, you usually start to see a dip in attendance and participation during the Spring. To be honest, that usually means Spring can feel a little discouraging. There are times where you're really just praying "God help us get these teens to camp this summer". This Spring was not that way at all. 

    In my opinion, this was our best Spring semester since I've been on staff with CTF! We switched our meeting time from Wednesday to Monday nights, and we switched locations too. The Biker Church in Wylie generously allows us to meet in their church every week, and we are so thankful. Immediately as we started meeting on Monday nights, we felt a renewed sense of excitement and momentum amongst our teens. It has been really refreshing! Our sermon series this semester was called Renewing Your Mind. We got the idea from Romans 12:2 "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is; His good, pleasing, and perfect will." The world does a great job of infiltrating our minds and informing how we should approach, view, or think about something. We spent the semester taking different topics and talking about how we can "renew our minds" on those topics. We got to talk about stress, conflict, comparison, guilt, shame, mental health, and purpose. For each of those topics we got to discuss how the world tells us to think about it, what the Word of God tells us, and how we can renew our minds to believe what is true. It really was an impactful sermon series and a great Spring semester! 

CTF Night!

School Ministry

    Our ministry in the schools continued to go really well this semester! We met every week with the 7th and 8th grade groups at McMillan JH, and I continued to meet with the Wylie East Varsity baseball team. We've started to see some of the students from our FCS groups at McMillan come more consistently to CTF on Monday nights! I counted it up and we got to have 34 FCS meetings over the course of the year at McMillan. That means over the course of the year we got to gather, read different passages from the Bible, pray with students, and build community on a public school campus 34 times! How incredible is that? We feel so blessed to be able to do what we do in these schools. 

8th grade FCS group at McMillan!

7th grade FCS group at McMillan!

A few of the guys from our Wylie East group!

Summer Plans

    It's absolutely crazy to think that another school year has come and gone, but it has! Now that Summer is here, our schedule is absolutely packed with exciting things. With the teens not having school, we try to offer as much as possible for them. We continue to meet over the summer on Monday nights, but we vary what we do. Over the course of the summer we'll alternate between big group events, small group bible studies, and worship/teaching nights. All of our one on one discipleship meetings continue throughout the summer. Starting this week we're bringing back Deep Dive, where we get together once a week to take a deeper look at Scripture. This Summer we're going through the book of Ephesians during Deep Dive. We also have three college interns working with CTF this Summer! Leading the internship is one of my favorite things that I get to do. The fact that these college students would choose to spend their Summer break serving our teens is such a big deal, and I'm so thankful for them. Of course, we also have CTF Camp coming up soon! I'm so excited for camp. It's always the best week of the year, and I can't wait to see what God does this year. 

Our Summer Interns! From left to right: Kole, Oscar, and Laiya.

Our first Deep Dive through Ephesians!

Our Wylie East seniors at graduation.

Prayer Requests

    As you can see, we have a lot going on. Please be in prayer for our ministry and our students over the Summer! Please pray for:

-God to protect our students over the Summer. It can be really easy for kids to fall into temptation or get involved with wrong crowd over the Summer.

-That CTF camp would be the best one yet, and that God would get every student there that needs to be there.

-Pray for my students that I disciple one on one: Trent, Huntyr, Carter, Austin, Liam, and Corbin. 

-For our Summer interns! Pray that God would use them to have a lasting impact on our students, and that they would have a great experience this Summer.

-For me as I try to fundraise, lead the interns, plan for camp, disciple students, meet with alumni who are in town, and everything else I get to do this Summer! 

    Thank you for reading and catching up on everything that CTF has going on right now. I hope you're encouraged by all that God is doing in our ministry! 

    As I continue to fundraise over the summer please let me know if you have anyone in your network that might be interested in supporting the work that we do. 

Thank you all so much. Love and appreciate you all!

-William Royal