Koinonia Christian Campus Fellowship – UC Berkeley Club

This past winter break, a group of us from our college and IGSM department went on a mission trip to Taiwan.

Here is a picture of our team:

There we outreached alongside our Hsinchu church to host a Christmas Celebration Party. Every day consisted of DT in the morning together, prayer time, prayer walks on campus, and then going out to the DCs to flyer and meet students through sharing meals.

This was also our first year trying a new thing called, “Christmas Host Teams.” Our mission team along with the Taiwanese students were split into 6 teams and the teams were:

Orange

Blue

Red

Black

Green

And Yellow!

(yes the team names were very creative). Notice how I put orange first. Orange, Orange! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

With our teams, we did fun activities like going to the night market

and a Saturday outing to Nanliao.

It was a competitive race to the finish line!

Here’s a picture of our entire group at Nanliao:

We ended the Saturday outing with a scrumptious hotpot meal.

Those moments together were memorable times and it was a blast getting to know the Taiwanese students!

The big night of the Christmas Celebration party was a really good turn out. The night started with praise, then we had our Christmas Skit,

(Angels we have heard on high…)

Followed by testimony sharing by our members, wrapped up with a passionate message about the Christmas Story by Andy

and our finale Song “Joy to the World”. The students seemed very engaged and many of them heard the True Christmas story for the first time.

The following Sunday we had our Taiwan Church’s 3^rd anniversary and it was a particularly meaningful one because Christie and Paul, who had made their decisions to accept Christ earlier in the week, read their commitment cards to the congregation.

Our last night in Taiwan, we had a farewell party where each team did a song and dance to capture their experience during the mission trip.

Here are some highlights:

(I wish they caught Steven Chee on camera when he strutted across the stage)

It was a sad farewell, but a lot of us agreed that it wouldn’t be goodbye forever. We’re looking forward to being able to go back to Taiwan one day!

There was a lot that happened, but this is all I have for now! I hope this encourages you to go on the next one!

Weary from finals studying (or perhaps still waiting to start!), our sophomores and juniors filed into BT last Thursday evening proudly carrying carefully wrapped presents.  It was our annual Christmas party gift exchange!  We started the night off with some incredible desserts, including a chocolate fondue fountain and hot apple cider!

With anticipation in the air everyone opened their randomly selected gift.  What ensued was shock and awe at both the most desirable gifts and the least.  Among the most was a LED Maglight set and among the least desirable and most absurd was a pack of beef round tip from safeway (I think it was on sale).  And, there were many gifts in between from the practical..

To the fun…

to the neither….

Then the exchanging began…but this was no ordinary gift exchange.  To prevail in this gift exchange your team had to tower build, Jenga, pig-fight, and yes even dance your way to victory!

You needed to have steady hands for some of these challenges

Koinonia’s annual pigfighting competition.  And yes, it’s merely coincidence that it was just the bros who competed..”Pig Fighting” is just an arbitrary term for this absurd game.

Impersonating John Ko, Steve & Suzanne’s TC performance

In the end, some were more victorious than others, but everybody went home with something in their hands.  We had a blast laughing together and at each other.  It was great to see everybody and spend some fun time together before the all out plunge into finals.

“Egg brain!” “Egg skull!” “Egg cranium!”…the word was actually “egghead.” As I fruitlessly tried to describe this word to the group around me during a hilarious game of Catchphrase, I couldn’t help but be thankful for being able to play this game with Berkeley students because only with Berkeley students could “egg cranium” come up and we could all laugh so hysterically. However, this was only one of a long list of things I was thankful for on Thanksgiving. During Thanksgiving break, most of us went home and a few of us stayed behind in Berkeley for various reasons. Despite not being at home with our families, we ended up having a great time!

Thanksgiving festivities spanned two days (sort of) that weekend. On Wednesday night, many of us went to Steve and Suzanne’s home to have a send-off/goodbye dinner for Isaiah and Will who were returning to Taiwan that night. After a delicious dinner of Korean rice cake soup, we prayed for Isaiah and Will that they may safely return to Taiwan and waste no time in getting back into the groove of things, revitalized and ready to continue their mission after their trip to Berkeley. Some of their peers went to send them off at the airport and the rest of us stayed to watch old G-Live videos, which is always a good way to end the night!

On Thanksgiving day, freshmen and seniors went to John and Ellen’s for lunch and sophomores and juniors went to Steve and Suzanne’s, where Jenny cooked Thai Curry for us! After that we all met up at a park to sweat off everything we ate and prepare ourselves for dinner by playing fun games of ultimate frisbee and soccer. Although I am not one particularly fond of sports, it’s a great way to get to know people you might not otherwise meet. Especially if the same tall person keeps grabbing the frisbee from over your head just as you are about to catch it. Those kinds of encounters are hard to forget.

After we were done playing and our stomachs were ready to eat Thanksgiving dinner, we all congregated at Steve and Suzanne’s. Freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, and staff alike all pitched in to finish cooking dinner and right before we ate, we all wrote on a paper leaf something that we were thankful for and taped it onto our Thanksgiving tree that Summer made. It was really exciting to see the empty branches be filled by all the things that people were thankful for and see it become a full-blown, literal Thanksgiving tree! We then sat down together to feast on turkey, beef, cornbread, stuffing, etc.

Everything tasted so good that we all ate until we could eat no more. Literally. Really. It was a little hard to get people motivated to play games after that, but everybody soon got into the competitive spirit when Josh (from Element Youth!) and Kevan split us all up into teams in order to get to know each other and play ridiculous, made-up-on-the-spot games like paper airplane making contests. But it didn’t matter, because it was all too hilarious. After being demolished by Ellen in the semi-finals of arm-wrestling (reaffirming my belief that moms are ridiculously strong), I was exhausted and everyone else was, too, after such fun. So, of course we ended the night again by watching more G-Live videos!

Although we should always realize how blessed we are, it tends to be easier to realize our blessings on holidays like Thanksgiving. Being in a smaller group than normal, we all got to meet a lot of new people and got to know the ones that we already knew even more. Thanks be to God who brings us all into community so that we can share such great times together! I hope all of you who went home for Thanksgiving had a great time and felt God’s blessings. Those of us who stayed in Berkeley sure did!

I can’t believe TC is done already. Feels like just yesterday we were practicing for our ridiculous dances. Oh well, post TC blues aren’t nearly as bad as post G-Live blues.

TC this year was pretty awesome. After 3 years of TC, it still doesn’t get old. It just gets funnier as you realized that you know more and more people on stage.

The Kairos act was a first…first time I’ve ever heard a song used word for word…turns out that “To Save as Many as Possible” is an actual song. It was also surprising because it wasn’t completely ridiculous. Of course, this was followed by the more normal ridiculous, shameless dances….like this

SF Campus was next and of course there would have to be something with Richard and the Evil Beanbag. SF Campus didn’t disappoint.

Poor Richard. That beanbag is going to end up following him for the rest of his life at Gracepoint.

After SF the order of groups going up gets all jumbled up in my head. The pictures on Flickr being out of order doesn’t help either…

So anyways, I think the next act was A2F. When I saw that the name of their song was “OT Rhapsody”…well, there’s only one song I can think of that has the word Rhapsody in it. Yeah, that song by Queen.Way too many awesome moments in this one. I think that most awesome ones (read:sick) were these two…

Wait…it gets better (or worse, depending on your point of view)

Yeah. I was kinda speechless at that point. True shamelessness.

After seeing that shocking act, I had enough awesomeness for the day. Enter the Koinonia Freshmen and Seniors. They started with a serious and meaningful time of giving thanks for different things. Best things I heard people giving thanks for were “Food” and “Dana House”. Nice.

Of course this was followed by some less-serious times of thanksgiving.

Besides learning that the frosh were thankful for BT, I also found out that Steve and Suzanne know how to dance.

Sadly, they declined to give us an encore performance later after dinner.

We (the Koinonia sophomores and juniors) were up next. Don’t really remember much from this act except that we were supposed to get a cue at the end of the second song, but it never came. Yeah, that was awkward. The cue never came. Anyways, they said that our act had “Best Use of Props”. Judge for yourself.

(I guess the powers that be like to cast Wilson as a ridiculous looking circular object. I wonder what it’ll be next year….)

That’s one nice looking pencil. Yeah, I think we had the best props.

We also had this…

Yeah, that didn’t really serve any purpose at all. Just wanted to jack David. Look at the person laughing  in the background!

The next act was the Youth.

This was supposed to be about how it’s “Too Hard to Evangelize” for today’s youth. I think they just wanted an excuse to dress up and look cool. Well they also had a dance to the Pokemon theme song renamed “Fisher of Man.” They pulled it off well! Sadly, no pictures…

IGSM and VSM was next, to give us all insight on what life is like a grad student. That professor was a jerk, but I wonder how much they’re actually exaggerating. Anyways, I think the funniest part was Professor Great drinking that lab experiment that he shouldn’t have drank.

For all of you that took o-chem, I think you got the joke about L and R enantiomers. For those of you who didn’t, go ask someone who took o-chem to explain it to you.

No TC act would be complete without a grand finale act. That was Praxis’ job this year, although I think “finale” to them meant “try to gross people out as much as possible”. Here’s proof…

I think they one-upped our waiters.  I was in shock (again), but then this happened…

And this

Wow. Just. Wow.

That wasn’t all of the act though (I can’t end the blog post like this). There were many other dances (that I forgot after being shocked by above said pictures) so hopefully you guys remember them and can fill in the blanks. They ended with an awesome finale dance

After all the performances, all Koinonia headed back to Berkeley for a Thanksgiving FEAST!

Turkey and mashed potatoes and corn and ham and chicken and pumpkin pie, oh my! And of course, that Thanksgiving staple – kimchi.

And because we didn’t get enough dancing, we had some more live encore performances:

So that’s TC for you. We all go on stage and make fools of ourselves, but somehow it ends up being awesome. One of those mysteries of life. But overall, a wonderful time of thanking God and enjoying sweet fellowship with each other. For those of you who weren’t able to be a part of it, you missed out! Don’t let that happen again next year!

Join us and join in next year for more fun, laughter, and exuberant thanksgiving!

This past Friday the Freshmen and Seniors met on their own for a Bible Study on John 4, the story of the Samaritan Woman, also known as the Woman at the Well. It was part 1 of 2, so be sure to join us next week for the conclusion!

Afterwards we went bowling. Check out this cool video for a recap:

And here are some more pictures from the night!

Join us next week for another exciting event!

P.S. – Anyone happen to know the high score for the evening?

This past Friday, the frosh and seniors went to Buffet Town after the Bible Study for a night of fun games and mucho laughter.  The night started with a game called “Best of the Best” and we witnessed both hilarious and “wow” talents, such as beatboxing, doing a split, singing with mouth closed, and taking out a tooth and putting it back instantly.

Here’s some highlights from “Koinonia’s Got Talent!” Some of these truly deserve a WOW!

One of the most memorable parts of the night was when an anonymous sister challenged an anonymous brother, who was the MC for the night, for a push up contest and won. Here’s the clip:

We ended the night by playing King Kong Shower and the freshmen had a showdown to see who were the King Kong Shower masters. The game started with more than 20 freshmen but soon came down to two brothers and two sisters competing to see who’s better. And the result was (as brothers expected) victory for brothers!