Bielsko-Biała is not a big city or a typical student city, but for some reason God has chosen this place to build a quickly-growing student group rooted in a Christian community called City on a Hill – a meaningful name as Bielsko is located at the foot of the Beskid Mountains.
UCO (University Christian Outreach) Bielsko started only four years ago when a group of students attended the Kairos Adelante conference in Spain. During the conference, God gave us a seemingly crazy idea about building a student group! It seemed like walking on a water to start a student group in a city where there are hardly any students, in a city where most university students leave Bielsko to study somewhere else, in a city where there are just six people who are up for trying something like this… So we “got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus.”
Four years later, we have now a growing UCO. We have a weekly discipleship course for 32 students, we evangelise at the small University of Bielsko, and we run conferences and meetings for up to 600 people that bring the Gospel to our city! We meet every other Thursday for prayer meetings, we have UCO Sport Mondays in the athletic stadium, we serve in our local churches, we have Fan into Flame retreats twice a year, we have Life in the Spirit Seminars, we help with Alpha courses and… the list goes on!
Now history is coming full circle: in 2016 we will host the Kairos DALEJ Conference! This is very significant for us – the Kairos Adelante conference four years ago is where God spoke to us first time and called us to build a UCO. We are grateful for what God did at Adelante, but now we are also looking forward to see what God has in store for us this time. We would also like to invite university students and young people from all around the world to come and join us for DALEJ in July 2016, and meet us personally!