Monday, June 14th

8:45am. I walked to St. Aldates to meet with Peter Tepper who is over college ministry at St. Aldates. We grabbed coffee. It turns out that Peter is an ordained minister in the EPC (Evangelical Presbyterian Church). He and his wife have been ministering in Oxford for about 7 years. We walked around the grounds of Christ Church (where Whitefield and Wesley would have 2 hour prayer walks).

I asked Peter about three aspects of St. Aldate's ministry. Here are some the things we discussed:

1. Prayer Ministry.
A. They have been working on building a culture of prayer for the last six years. It has been slow going, but people are beginning to catch the bug.
B. They have a room set aside (in another building) for prayer. It is called the Catacombs. They had an artist design the room. One wall used postcard sized images, put together on the wall they presented a view of the Oxford Skyline (this was for prayer for the city); another walll had an image/map of the world (prayer for world); another wall had scriptural quotes. This was the door you entered through to come into the catacombs.
C. To learn more about the details of their prayer ministry check out their web sight.

2. Ministry Internships
A. In England, they have a thing called the "gap year". During this year many students do internships.
B. They have 16 interns right now.
C. Each staff has 3/4 interns that they oversee.
D. The interns are required to serve in one worship service, and worship in another.
E. On Monday and Tuesday, the interns attend classes and seminars (many of these are put on by other organizations, Razi Zacharias ministries, etc) on evangelism, theology, apologetics, etc.
F. They work for the staff on Wed and Thursday, and have Friday off
G. The interns raise $, and pay for their own internship (something like 3,000 or 7,000 pounds). Most of this goes for room and board and a mission trip they go on. The church doesn't make any money, actually loses a little bit, on this program.
H. They have released a lot of people into marketplace and church ministry through it.

3. Regarding College Ministry
A. There are advantages to being church based vs. parachurch.
B. Get your college ministers when they are young, before they have kids :)
C. Either get a husband/wife team or hire both a guy and girl to lead the college ministry. A female leader is important in discipling college girls.
D. Use food. Once a week they serve a meal and fellowship.
E. Find creative ways to do evangelism, build bridges; 2X a year they have an evangelistic, black tie formal dinner. Afterwords they have a brief evangelistic message with next steps (like Alpha) for people who want to investigate Christianity more.