“Once the students can drive it’s kinda cool because we have this really neat opportunity that students kind of show up at our doorstep. At… all… hours of the day. But at the same time it can be a challenge because sometimes you don’t want high schoolers pounding down your door, but it keeps you accountable to be like, ‘Well, why not… You gotta let them in.’

So it’s really fun that they feel comfortable doing that and to see they get that church life doesn’t have to be just at the church, that they can have it any place and what a blessing that it gets to be at our house.

So it’s really fun when they show up and sometimes they just want to play games, and sometimes they bring their guitar and have worship in our living room.

We have a big courtyard at our apartment complex and one day we were planning to play kickball and told the girls, ‘Ok guys, some of our neighbors aren’t believers and we’ve been trying to build relationships with them, and we just wanted to let you know before you go out there.’ So they were like, ‘Ok, great.’ So they go around and knock on everybody’s door yelling, ‘We’re going to play kickball!’ Before we knew it, we didn’t even know what was happening, they all just started evangelizing at our apartment complex! And so all these kids are out playing kickball and the parents are standing and talking to us and are like, ‘Why are all these kids here?’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, well, they’re from church… Do you go to church?’ And that’s like Rock the Block, right? But there’s no programming for let’s just go knock on people’s doors, invite them to kick a ball around, hangout, and talk about Jesus.

So we were just saying, ‘Hey, sometimes the kids that play out here aren’t Christians.’ And they took that to mean, ‘go find the kids and tell them about God.’

I was thinking about our trip to East Asia this past summer. I went with the graduating seniors and we decided that we wanted to make a music video. So, you know, international trips change all the time so you have to be flexible. So every time we waited for the subway or there was a lull or we just had some downtime, we would shoot the music video. At one point, we were in this restaurant and there were probably eight tables and we took up six of them. So we started talking to the people at the other two tables, and it turns out they were film students at the nearby university. Well, we were there to connect with university students. So somebody in our group said, ‘Oh my gosh! We’re actually making a film right now. We’re making a music video.’ And then they thought we were all film students. So somehow, through this whole conversation, we asked them if they wanted to be in our movie, and they said, ‘yes.’ So in the middle of a restaurant in East Asia, we’re teaching choreography to all these East Asian college students, and we’re just dancing and singing. We ended up inviting them to a party that we were having at the end of the week where we were connecting them with our local partners, and they came!

So through this goofy, silly interaction, they ended up being exposed to the gospel. And I think this is really a bigger story for what the Lord is doing through us… using even really silly, ridiculous people to move forward with the gospel.”

Jenn Debrecht has been a member of Brook Hills since her freshman year of college in 2008 and started serving as a student Small Group leader in 2009. She is originally from Boca Raton, FL. If Jenn could host a dinner party and invite anyone, it would be The Pioneer Woman and Chip & Joanna Gaines. The Masons could be invited, too.