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Part 3: Developing Your Ministry's Heart to Start Work on New Campuses

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This is the third and final installment.  If you missed the first two, here is Part 1 and Part 2 . The nine months leading up to our first child’s birth I slept great!  My wife on the other hand, would experience the full spectrum of emotions and changes accompanied by many sleepless nights. I never woke up from heartburn or a kick to the ribs.  Those first nine months was the easiest, most low-maintenance parenting I had ever done!  However, everything changed when Noah was born.   All of a sudden parenting was hard-work!  The pregnancy and birth were so vital, but raising Noah and his siblings has been a full-time, all-hands-on-deck experience. In the same way, it takes work to recruit and train people to send out, but caring for them after you send them is vital to developing a culture and your ministry’s heart for starting new work.  One of the best recruiting tools for new workers is a successful first example of someone who was recruited,trained, sent,and cared for. Use the Whol
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Part 2: Developing Your Ministry's Heart to Start Work on New Campuses

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This is part two.  If you missed the first post, you can read Part 1 HERE Eager to begin the sending process we cast vision for one of our graduates to go help with work in the Northwest.  This was our first one - our first fruit! We commissioned him and sent him off with high hopes.  In retrospect, we rushed the process and ignored some red flags. Within a year they were overwhelmed and depressed which led to some drastic moral failure which to this day they are still walking in. We blew it.  I blew it. I was so ready to send that I cut corners and rushed the process, the casualty rate was high. If you’ve cast vision, exposed students and staff to the need, and set the direction you will have students and staff respond.  It’s only a matter of time.  There is something about unreached people and places on the hearts of God’s people that, marinating under the influence of the Holy Spirit, pushes us to those places.  Now the question isn’t about do we send but who do we send and how do
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Part 1: Developing Your Ministry's Heart to Start Work on New Campuses

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“I have never been so honored for someone to tell me to go.  Thank you for believing in me.” I was cleaning off my bulletin board above my desk and found a note with the above statement written on it. It was from a recent graduate who we’d asked to go to another campus to help a newer ministry build momentum as opposed to coming on staff on our campus.  It brought me to tears… again. Our Story In 2015, I was trying to build a staff team.  We needed more work on our campus and we could use more hands to put to the plow in the harvest field.  I was hoping that with “enough” staff I could cut back and start working a 45 work week and avoid burnout. Then the Lord asked me one of those bone-chilling, soul-tilling questions he does so well, “Clayton, are you ok having a large staff on a ministry-saturated campus when there are campuses without a multiplying gospel presence, small teams laboring while being under-resourced and under-supported, or without Gospel work at all? Are you b
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Why Sabbatical?

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After ten years of working at the Tarleton BSM I'm taking a two month sabbatical this summer.  It has been on the calendar since November and I have to admit COVID is really jacking with some of my plans, but the summer is the best time to take it in campus ministry.  The more I've talked to people and planned out the summer I've gotten several questions as to what am I going to do for sabbatical.  The truth is, I don't know the specifics, but I have some general plans. Perhaps I need to define "sabbatical" before we go any further.  If you're not in higher education or ministry sabbatical can be a weird concept.  In the Bible, God's people would take a Sabbath (day of rest) every seven days.  Every seven years there was a Sabbatical year where the entire nation would take the year off (slaves set free, debts forgiven, let the land rest, etc).  It was a nation-wide reset button and a tremendous act of faith! Sabbatical comes from this concept of r
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Leading Off The Map

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Unprecedented. Unheard of. Never before. These are the words that people use to describe this COVID-19 situation. The church has gone online and families adjust to the “new normal” of social distancing and quarantine. What we’ve done before will not work wherever we are now or where we are headed.  We can crumple up the road map, because there are no maps where we are headed as a church, because no one has ever been there before! What an honor that God would allow us to steward his church during this season. We are the generation that will lead the church off the map.  The questions are endless and the answers are fluid and untested. When there are fewer knowns than unknowns there are a few things to remember: THE MISSION IS NOT CANCELLED. First, we have to realize that God knows it all and has seen it all, so when he issued his promises and commands he did it with the FULL VIEW of time.  This means that when God made promises to us and commands for us,  he did it knowing fu
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Virtual 1on1s

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Make Disciples: Virtual 1on1s. Sunday morning I, like most Christians, sat on the couch with my family and watched our church service online. I gotta admit, it was kind of a cool experience! Later that afternoon, I caught a couple more services from churches around town.  I watched as the CHURCH broke Facebook Live!  Never before has the Church been so digital and so available!  On the campus ministry front: our students have gone and our campuses have gone online. Therefore, we go virtual!  Never before has this been an option in the history of the church! But, let’s not buy into the lie.  In the same way that in-person worship services never produced the same quality disciples as the intentional one-on-one investment, the well done, live-stream worship service will fall short just the same.  If nothing else, it will take consumeristic, church-hopping Christianity to the next level!  Before we take our large groups online, what’s our plan for the intentional investment in a f
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The Comparison Game

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The Comparison Game The past week my social media feed has been overwhelmed by the number of live-streamed ministries. I’m guessing yours has been too! Some of them have been simple recordings off a phone or tablet and others have been high-tech productions.  And if I’m honest, REALLY honest, as our team was prepping for our own virtual launch I was feeling a TON of pressure to produce something studio worthy and have it stream on a hundred different platforms we weren’t even on.  I was tempted to spend tons of money that we didn’t have, so we could have a nice polished ministry broadcast so people would think we were something we aren’t!  My friends, I have been living in sin.  The sin of comparison! Comparison is the thief of joy and the fuel that feeds our insecurities’ flame. In an age where everything we do is online for all to see, the comparison virus is in full swing! It’s more contagious than corona and spiritually more dangerous! What a cruddy way to live! It’s lik
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