Urbana 12 kicks off today.

USA (MNN) ¯ Up to 18,000 young people are in St. Louis, Missouri, for life change. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship'sUrbana 12 begins today. It's the largest student missions conference in the world.

The Mission Network News team is on location where they'll be finding the story behind the story. MNN's Greg Yoder met up with InterVarsity staff members arriving to get everything set up for this triennial event.

When asked what they expect over the next five days, Holly Lin--InterVarsity staffer at the University of Texas, Austin campus--says, "I'm just really hoping that all of our 20 students would just get a better understanding for loving Jesus and what it means to reach our campus, and then what it means when they graduate to reach our city (or whatever city they live in), and to reach the world."

Her husband, Kavon Lin, is serving alongside his wife this week. He says he's excited about "being able to see what God can do through college students, what the future holds for them and how they can affect society. "

Petek Altug, a staffer at MIT in Boston, says, "My first year on staff, I was only able to bring one student. This year, [I'm] bringing nine students. I'm really excited to see the ways that they'll be able to grow with God and actually bring it back to campus."

Altug also hopes these nine students will share their vision with fellow Intervarsity members on campus, which could have a ripple effect throughout the campus.

Samuel Opolot is from Uganda with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. In Uganda, it's called The Fellowship of Christian Unions of Uganda. Opolot desires to train students and challenge them in their quest to be more missions minded.

Everything at Urbana 12 is getting underway today. We'll have special up-to-the-minute reports on Facebook, plus our regular reports each day on Mission Network News.

Source: Mission Network News 

USA (MNN) ¯ The sound of 18,000 cheering students helped kick off InterVarsity Christian Fellowship's Urbana 12. While the cheering crowd was a culmination of years of planning, Urbana 12 faced problems. Spiritual warfare? Maybe.

The largest student missions conference in the world had a MAJOR glitch. Urbana 12's communications director Bethany Horvath says, "Our registration and check-in on site require using Urbana.org. Due to high capacity there, and due to people outside of St. Louis and outside on-site Urbana using the Web site, our servers just couldn't take it anymore."

While Urbana officials discovered the problem quickly, it took most of the overnight to fix it.

Did spiritual warfare have an impact? "Yes," says Horvath. "As frustrating and disheartening as it can be, it's been a good reminder to us as staff that God has something really great [for us], and the enemy really wants to affect that and keep it from happening."

During a staff meeting, the director of operations Rob Knight asked Intervarsity staff to pray. Horvath says, "That alone helped everyone see that this is a battleground and although we are all here for the advancement of God's glory and Kingdom, there are spiritual forces against that."

Horvath says with conversion rates, "the highest ever in our history...no wonder."

Other issues: a student bus stuck in a ditch, computer hardware crashes, and technical issues with musicians.

Pray that God will thwart the attempts of the enemy to discourage, defeat, or distract the staff and students at Urbana 12.

Source: Mission Network News