October 2023

Dear CU Martus Cornerstone Partners and friends of the ministry,

Greetings from CU Martus! I pray this finds you well.

We are well into the fall semester, and there are two main updates: 1) we now have a Women’s Ministry Fellow, and 2) current update on the Freshman Welcoming Campaign.

I am very pleased to welcome Maima Badio to our team at CU Martus. Maima was born in Liberia, West Africa. Her experience living as a refugee in Ghana, before immigrating to the United States, fuels her passion for working with students and families. She earned her BA in Economics and International Affairs at The George Washington University. She later earned her MA in School Psychology from the University of Delaware.

Despite sensing a call to serve God wholeheartedly from an early age, Maima lived a nominal Christian life until a powerful encounter with the Holy Spirit during her senior year of college. This marked the beginning of an intensifying hunger for God and a dissatisfaction with casual Christianity. She went on to work in the field of social services for over 10 years, while serving in various ministry capacities. Maima’s love for discipling women and reading the Bible compelled her to create a remote women's ministry —Women of the Word— that she facilitated for five years (2018-2022). In retrospect, this experience, with all its beauty and challenges, was God’s way of preparing her for full-time ministry at Christian Union.

Freshman Welcoming Campaign is well underway and we are meeting new students. To date we have had 33, out of our goal of 40, students commit to doing a Bible Course with us. Leading up to this Freshman Campaign we have increased our efforts and zeal to seek the Lord for Penn’s campus and we are seeing the fruit of those efforts. This is seen in the amount of students currently committed to Bible Course, but also the type of students we are seeing commit to Bible Course. The students we see joining a Bible Course are more eager to seek the Lord with us, learn the Scriptures in a greater way, and be developed into Christian leaders. We have one more week of Freshman Welcoming Campaign, and I am excited to give a good report in next month's letter of how things wrapped up.

I ask that you join me in prayer for:

• Continued success in Freshman campaign.
• I have several freshman guys interested in starting another Bible Course, but they are athletes and scheduling is a challenge for them. Please pray they make room in their life for God.
• Our last event of Freshman Welcoming Campaign is Fall Retreat. Please pray that the Lord would grant students a “Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him” (Eph 1:17), as we will be looking at the ministry of Jesus in the gospels and through the book of Acts.

We would be grateful if you are led to give a one-time or recurring donation at this secure link:  https://www.christianunion.org/cornerstone/martus

Also, feel free to share this link with anyone in your life who may be interested in helping to make Christ known at Penn.

Thank you, again, for your prayers and support, which God is greatly using to grow the ministry impact at CU Martus. We couldn’t do this without you!

Blessings,

Cory Lotspeich
Ministry Director
Christian Union Martus