Spring in Seattle, vol. 2 - The Sound of Music

As I mentioned on Monday, this is a series of recaps from the last few months on my work with RUF at UW. 

A huge and exciting part of spring quarter was that RUF at UW decided to record a CD of hymns along with two local churches - Grace Seattle (where I attend) and Greenlake Presbyterian Church. Because of my involvement in RUF leadership as well as my own musical interests, I was heavily involved with this hymn project throughout the spring. We have over 50 people involved with this project, and so there was a lot of coordination that took place in order to make this move forward. 

We had a vision for this project that it would be a way that we could celebrate the musical gifts among our students, connect our students to local churches, and that the album could be a gift to the community and to the campus. Many of the songs on the album have some element of originality to them - either original tunes or original lyrics or both! We are very excited for the project to get through the post-production process and be able to share it with you all soon (fingers are crossed for September 2012).

In order to make it available and be able to hand the album out on campus and give it away in churches, we ran a Kickstarter in order to raise money to cover recording and production costs so that now the album can be given away for free! The Kickstarter was successfully funded, and you can read more/view our video if you click that link. 

Here are a few pictures from the recording process, and here is a link to the project's Facebook page where we will post additional updates as we have them, including release date and possible CD release party! Exciting stuff.

Spring in Seattle, vol. 1 - Ch, ch, changes!

I am embarrassed at how belated this update is, but am excited to share with you about the spring quarter adventures that this blog has been waiting to hear about. 

I'm going to spend a few posts talking about different things that have happened over the last few months, so bear with me as this update is not a complete one. One of the large news items of the spring quarter was that the UW RUF campus minister, Ryan Hughs, and his wife, Amy, announced that they would be moving at the end of the quarter to Fort Collins, Colorado. They love RUF and love the UW but accepted a call to restart an RUF ministry at Colorado State University and felt that this was where they needed to be this next year. This was big news for us to adjust to, but we were excited for them and glad to be able to celebrate them as we spent good time with them together in April and May. 

This also left a pretty obvious job opening on our RUF staff team (the only RUF staff members at UW are me and the campus  minister :) )! While there were a few options for me in terms of possibly transferring my internship to another campus, I made the decision early on that I was going to stay and finish my second year at the UW. There are a lot of reasons for this, which I would be happy to talk to you about more, but what it boils down to is that I really felt that I could be most helpful and most valuable to RUF at the UW this next year as we walk together through this time of transition and change. I'm excited to be able to help the new campus minister and the students adjust to one another and continue the ministry of RUF on the campus here. 

At the end of May, after interviewing a number of wonderful candidates, the RUF committee offered the campus minister job to Drew Burdette, a recent graduate of Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, MO. Drew and his wife, Jessica, will be moving to Seattle in August and we are very, very excited to have them here and to get to know them better. Here's a cute picture of them:

Please be in prayer for Drew and Jessica as they work to get their support together this summer and prepare to move across the country!