Matt and Bethany, Vance and Elise Mahla
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
[email protected]
Duke RUF, 1206 Watts Street, Durham, NC 27701
www.ruf.org/duke
Duties, responsibilities, work emphases:
As the RUF campus minister at Duke, Matt’s main responsibility is to be a pastor for Duke students. Like his RUF colleagues across the nation, Matt’s ministry functions on Duke’s campus have been significantly challenged over the past 12 months. He has gone from his three main face-to-face avenues – one-to-one meetings, small groups, and large group gatherings – to virtual and physical opportunities as they can be scheduled or become available. In 2020, freshmen and sophomores could live on campus, juniors and seniors (and others) lived off campus, and some students lived at home. With this set-up, the RUF ministry took on different strategies and approaches, all requiring coherence with community and campus safety guidelines. During 2020, Matt conducted a virtual seminar on the overall narrative of the Bible and hosted over 15 virtual large groups plus a few small in-person watch groups. Other study topics were Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the core beliefs of RUF, getting connected to a Christian community in college, and the reliability of the New Testament gospels. Even over the elongated, 7-week COVID Christmas break, Matt is leading a 4-week virtual book study on “The Common Rule” by Justin Earley (which Matt highly recommends for anyone interested in developing “habits of purpose for an age of distraction”, as the subtitle says).
A Little Bit Personal:
Favorite pastime: Playing with their kids
Playing and watching sports – cheering for Vanderbilt and now Duke, Cooking
Exploring new places – Matt and Bethany went to China together
Finding deals in yard sales (Bethany, that is)
Favorite food:
Pretty wide variety, but love authentic Chinese food, Mexican pizza, burgers, sushi, Indian food
Bethany especially likes finding ethnic hole-in-the-wall places (Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese)
Even though, Matt and Bethany love to have people in their home, they have shifted some of these hosting hours into local family hikes, a beach trip to the NC coast, and supporting their kid’s soccer playing.
Elise is turning 3 soon and growing fast. Vance will be 6 years old later this year. Last year Vance was getting into drums; no mention was made of the drums in recent notes from Matt this year (not sure what that means). Vance and Elise have been good COVID buddies for each other the past year.
Prayer needs (or points of focus):
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
[email protected]
Duke RUF, 1206 Watts Street, Durham, NC 27701
www.ruf.org/duke
Duties, responsibilities, work emphases:
As the RUF campus minister at Duke, Matt’s main responsibility is to be a pastor for Duke students. Like his RUF colleagues across the nation, Matt’s ministry functions on Duke’s campus have been significantly challenged over the past 12 months. He has gone from his three main face-to-face avenues – one-to-one meetings, small groups, and large group gatherings – to virtual and physical opportunities as they can be scheduled or become available. In 2020, freshmen and sophomores could live on campus, juniors and seniors (and others) lived off campus, and some students lived at home. With this set-up, the RUF ministry took on different strategies and approaches, all requiring coherence with community and campus safety guidelines. During 2020, Matt conducted a virtual seminar on the overall narrative of the Bible and hosted over 15 virtual large groups plus a few small in-person watch groups. Other study topics were Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the core beliefs of RUF, getting connected to a Christian community in college, and the reliability of the New Testament gospels. Even over the elongated, 7-week COVID Christmas break, Matt is leading a 4-week virtual book study on “The Common Rule” by Justin Earley (which Matt highly recommends for anyone interested in developing “habits of purpose for an age of distraction”, as the subtitle says).
A Little Bit Personal:
Favorite pastime: Playing with their kids
Playing and watching sports – cheering for Vanderbilt and now Duke, Cooking
Exploring new places – Matt and Bethany went to China together
Finding deals in yard sales (Bethany, that is)
Favorite food:
Pretty wide variety, but love authentic Chinese food, Mexican pizza, burgers, sushi, Indian food
Bethany especially likes finding ethnic hole-in-the-wall places (Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese)
Even though, Matt and Bethany love to have people in their home, they have shifted some of these hosting hours into local family hikes, a beach trip to the NC coast, and supporting their kid’s soccer playing.
Elise is turning 3 soon and growing fast. Vance will be 6 years old later this year. Last year Vance was getting into drums; no mention was made of the drums in recent notes from Matt this year (not sure what that means). Vance and Elise have been good COVID buddies for each other the past year.
Prayer needs (or points of focus):
- The really big need for prayer this January is for the Mahlas to find a new home. They moved out of their rental home in Dec. 10, 2020, because of widespread mold and very bad in-house air quality. They moved into a house belonging to gracious friends in Durham, NC, and near the Duke campus, but who were out of town at the time. They are looking for a longer-term place to live, to have the things that remain in the house cleaned, moved, and stored elsewhere, and come to an agreement with their landlord and insurance company on possible compensation and relief from their lease. The way it looks now, it will take several months to address the cause of the mold and then clean everything in the house. They also ask that we pray for their landlord and his agent who manages the house that they would be compassionate and more accommodating to their situation and possible alternatives.
- Pray for patience for Matt and Bethany as they parent Vance and Elise and for Vance and Elise as they would be loving, obedient, and patient children all while they are out of their home and trying to re-establish a new and safe one.
- Please pray that God would make Duke RUF become a community that loves and serves Him and one another and that Duke RUF would be a place to find rest and the peace of Christ for believing and nonbelieving students. Duke can be an extremely busy and anxious place for these students. One Duke student wrote during the fall semester “I have been really encouraged by a lot of the scripture I have heard at RUF and by the messages that Matt gives each week, and they have helped me to remember to rely on God throughout the craziness of the semester. I also think that RUF’s strong community has remained even virtually.”
- Please pray for conversions: “We long to see students who don't yet know the love of Jesus in the gospel to embrace him by faith. Our students and staff have a number of relationships with unbelievers. Would you pray that we see students come to faith?”
- For effective fundraising: Please pray that God will bring in the needed funds that we hope to raise this year to continue the ministry at Duke for 2021 and the ensuing years.
