Park Cities Presbyterian Church (PCA)

Meet the new RUF ministers at A&M and Texas Tech

By Steve Percifield

Published February 1, 2009 in Witness

It is PCPC’s great privilege to support the Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) ministries on numerous college campuses in Texas and Oklahoma. In August, we welcomed two new RUF ministers to the ranks:

Ben Hailey, Texas A&M University

God brought me to Christ through RUF, and my heart has been in this ministry ever since. For the last four years, we’ve been serving RUF at Hinds Community College in Mississippi.

We are very excited to be working at A&M. For over 20 years, God has been at work on the campus of A&M through the ministry of RUF, blowing His Spirit into the lives of students through campus ministers and those who support them.

While a ministry should never be evaluated solely by numbers, we are very encouraged. RUF at A&M has been in transition for several years—the current seniors have had three different campus ministers. So we have been surprised to average 50+ students at our large-group meetings. Katy Simpkins, our intern, has been a large part of reaching out to new students.

A network of small groups also meet regularly. Relationships, roommates, abuse, neglect, sexual immorality, death, you name it, we’ve talked about it. And while we’re sometimes overwhelmed, our gracious Savior gives us the freedom to dive in and sort through the tough issues of life.

Pray for me, for Katy, and for our students. Pray for eyes to see and ears to hear. Lives are changed through these tear-filled and difficult conversations, and we see a lot of evidence of the Spirit’s work during these times. Love is being renewed, hope is being restored, and change is possible because God raised His Son from the dead.

Steve Percifield, Texas Tech University

The stars at night are big and bright… clap, clap, clap, clap… deep in the heart of West Texas. And the Percifield family is glad to be back in the Lone Star State.

Kelly and I were married in 1996, right after I finished my studies at TCU. We spent our first eight years of married life in Fort Worth, where we were active volunteers for RUF at Texas Tech. The opportunity to work alongside and learn from Dustin Salter was instrumental in the life of my family and our call to gospel ministry.

In 2004, we moved to Philadelphia so that I could attend Westminster Theological Seminary with the hope that upon graduation I could work with RUF. We returned in 2008 with great excitement to do the very thing we desired.

Marc and Amy Corbett began the work at Texas Tech seven years ago, and it has been great to begin engaging with a group of students that already has an established sense of community. Marc’s faithful work at Tech has created an environment where we have instant credibility. Students are ready and willing to allow us into their world. This semester in large group we will consider the wonderful truths in Colossians: those of us who were alienated from God are now reconciled through Christ’s death. Our record of debt has been cancelled, nailed to the cross, and all this is so that we may be presented holy and blameless to God in Jesus Christ. Our desire is that truths like these would become a comfort for our students, many of whom are unfamiliar with the richness of the doctrines of grace. Further, we pray that as they come to understand these better, they would then seek to minister to those around them out of the comfort and joy that they have experienced.

PCPC’s support of RUF across Texas is instrumental to the ministry of biblical, reformed teaching on our college campuses, and I am now experiencing the generosity of PCPC firsthand. Thank you!