UM XA Flickr Group

Hey there blog readers! Did you know that we have our very own Flickr group? What is Flickr you say? Well, it's a great photo sharing website. You can upload all those great photos you take and share them with the world! Or just your friends and family if you like.

On Flickr we created our own group for Chi Alpha, so if you take some sweet photos at SALT, on a mission trip, or even just around town with XA friends, you can add them to our group. Then, they magically show up on the website and blog! Pretty cool, eh? Yeah, I thought so too. So far we have 13 members, but more are definitely welcome. In fact, please sign up so we don't have such an unlucky number :)

There is also a national Chi Alpha Flickr group, and they would love your photos too.

So here's what you do.

1. Sign up for Flickr
2. Upload some photos
3. Join our Flickr group
4. Add some photos to our group (you go to the photo's page and above the photo there is a send to group button)

That's it! I'll be sure to comment on any new member photos I see. If you have any questions, post them in the comments here.

SALT 2008

SALT, as expected, was pretty amazing. Twelve of us from the UM Chi Alpha headed to beautiful Butte on January 8 for the four day convention. There were students and staff from 13 campuses in 5 states.


"stop, children
what's that sound
everybody look what's goin down..."

Our speaker was John Fischer, one of the leading musicians in the Jesus Movement of the early 1970s. He serenaded us with all sorts of tunes of his generation. And while we had alot of fun with that - by the last session folks had cellphones and other lights at the ready for his ballads - what we really appreciated was the wisdom this man was able to impart to us from his life experiences. One particular thing that sticks out was his call to young people to enter the marketplace as salt and light. He was adamant that we should not feel guilty if we do not go into a foreign mission field or ministry. Christians are desperately needed in business, in the arts, in schools, in medicine, etc.



The third night's session was all worship. After baptisms and communion, our own worship band - Peter, Amanda, Kelsey, Chris and John - led the music portion. Meanwhile there were also stations around the room where students could participate in other forms of worship, including journaling, artistic expressions of the names of God, and nailing pieces of paper to small wooden crosses. For many it was a time to process and give thanks for all that God had already done in them during the week.

One of my favorite parts of the week was sharing with students about the opportunities for summer trips with Big Sky Expeditions (Central Europe and Ireland) and a National Chi Alpha trip to Kyrgyzstan. It was a life changing experience for me, and I recommend such a trip for any Christian, since it gives you a bigger and better picture of God and what He is doing all around the world.

A student from Montana State took many, many pics. You can see them here. A few pics that I've collected from others who attended can be found on my flickr photostream. Finally, Rachael has promised to upload some pics to her flickr photostream in a few days.

If you didn't get to SALT this year, there will be a mini-SALT next year over President's Day weekend. I hope you can make it!

New Contributor and New Podcast

Welcome back to Missoula! I hope you all had a great Christmas. I know I did. My brand new niece came for a visit with my brother and his wife, so we had lots of fun. Ember is just 17 days older than my new son.

Good things are happening around the ol' Chi Alpha website. As you may have read, Sylvia is our newest contributor to the blog. She is our newest staff member at Chi Alpha but she's been around the XA blogging scene for a little while now. She runs her own blog too. (that ought to prompt a new post)

The other news is our newly launched podcast. I've submitted it to iTunes so it should start showing up in iTunes searches in a week or two. In the meantime, if you have iTunes you can use this special link. If you don't have iTunes, or you just want to check out the archive in your browser, head on over to our new Sermons Page. You can read overviews of all the sermons and any scripture references. There's also an RSS feed on that page so you can keep up to date if you have a Zune, or Zen, or something.

Let us know in the comments if you subscribe, and what you think about it. If you don't know how to subscribe or what all this means, ask away!

greetings, chi alphans

I just wanted to say "hi" as the newest contributor to the Chi Alpha blog. In the very near future I'm going to be doing a write up of some cool things that happened at this year's SALT and give you some links to pictures taken there. I hope you that you enjoy your last week of freedom before the new semester. See you soon.