CAMPUS LAUNCH PAD

“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 wor...

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...

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...

“What you’ve heard from me in the presence of many witnesses pass on to faithful men who in turn can train others.” Paul of Tarsus “The gospel came to you on its way to someone else.” Rob Gallaty “Your church is the fruit of other people and churches whose names may have been long forgotten.  Has your church started other churches, or did history stop with you?” Steve Addison The gospel is meant to be passed on.  It was meant to saturate every pour of our being and every nook and cranny of society.  It’s what Jesus preached: “Repent the kingdom of heaven is at hand!”  What a picture!  In order to see the kingdom come near and the gospel passed on Jesus had a big vision, a focused plan, and an open hand.  EVERY AND ALL: The Big Vision Jesus had a big vision and started with the end in mind. Here are a few of God’s “vision statements”: Go and make disciples of ALL nations... - Matthew 28:19-20 EVERYONE who calls on the name of t...

2 Timothy 2:2 - What you heard from me [Paul] in the presence of others pass on to faithful men who in turn can teach others. I love this verse! If someone was to ask me what is my favorite verse I don't know if this is it, but it is close.  I love the idea of 4 generations of believers!  4G discipleship!  Paul who trained Timothy who was charged with training faithful men who would train others.  Paul >Timothy>Faithful>Others. Can I be honest though? Sometimes I find myself pushing for 2 generation discipleship.  2 Clayton 2:2 goes something like this: "Now that you've heard from me in the presence of others go and invite your friends and family and anyone you can to come back next week to hear more."  2G discipleship.  Come, hear me teach, and be fed.  I tend to make discipleship more and more about attendance to something where I can teach them, rather than radical obedience to Jesus' call to make disciples.  I mean, if I ...

Having a staff can be one of the most rewarding and challenging things for a campus minister to deal with.  A good staff can multiply kingdom work in amazing ways, but a dysfunctional staff can kill a ministry quickly.  Often times as ministers we are quick to develop students but once we have staff we forget about developing our staffs. Here are ten things that can help develop your interns and staff. Don’t treat them like Ministry Assistants. Spend their time and energy on campus. Make your own coffee, hire someone else to answer the phone.  Spend their energies on evangelism and discipleship.  Let them be Chief.   Give them something they are in charge of and you answer to them about.  Sure, they may ask you questions in private about how to do it, but in public, in that area, you are the Indian and they are the Chief. Remember as responsibility goes up, personal rights go down.   You may be top dog, but remember the kingdom principles....

You could spend every waking hour on your campus and not get done everything you need to get done. Am I right? One friend on a huge campus said to me one time, “I haven’t finished a to-do list since I started this job!” We all have limited time. Between family, work, ministry, friends, social life, and sleep we have planned out 30 hours worth of day before we even get out of bed! With limited time on campus how do we get the best bang for our buck? Who do we engage? We’ve been planting satellite campus ministries on surrounding campuses the past three years and we’ve had to look at what engagement is when you’ve got only a day or two on a campus a week. How do you engage a campus with limited time? It’s caused us to develop a tool that has helped me think through how I’m engaging my campuses. Whether I’m on a campus one day a week or everyday there are four quadrants I need to engage consistently and intentionally. The LOST. The majority of your campus is not involv...

Fish. Thirteenth –graders. Newbies. Freshmen have many names.  Our campus sometimes calls them baby ducks (don’t ask, you don’t want to know). Freshmen ministry is one of the most time consuming and rewarding things in college ministry.  For many, it’s the first time they begin to own their faith. For some, it’s the first time they are exposed to discipleship and evangelism.  For those of us in collegiate ministry we see the pros of freshmen getting plugged into a ministry and growing in their faith, but we also see the dark side of freshman year  as vast numbers of church attending freshmen disappear from the faith after they hit campus.  Within the first 4-8 weeks incoming freshmen have set their pattern and their peer group, and many times Jesus and discipleship aren’t in the picture.  We have a saying here, “Catch them in four or chase them for four.”  It’s the rally cry the first month of school.  We have four weeks to help them discover a...

I remember the moment my paradigm shifted. I had turned over the leadership to one of our lunch outreaches to our interns.  I told them, “find a way to make this better.”  They did. I sat and watched how students responded to them and how within a semester more students were coming than ever before.  Then it hit me: I’d been training them to do their role in my ministry and not training them to be effective ministers. The bottle neck wasn’t them and their ability; it was me and my lack of vision. If we are going to reach the world for Christ and have an impact on not just our campus, but every campus, we have to raise up men and women and give them the opportunity to be better than us.  It reminds me of the life of Barnabas in the New Testament. Barnabas was a man who never wrote a single page of the New Testament, but his fingerprints are all over it.  He was a man who humbly knelt at the cross so others could stand on his shoulders to see Jesus better. ...

I remember the first time I tried to share the gospel like it was yesterday.  I had recently become a follower of Jesus and I knew, almost instantly, who I was supposed to share with - someone I’ve known most of my life.  With a lump in my throat, I stuttered and stammered my way through my testimony, the gospel, and asked for a response.  That person looked at me and calmly said, “Get the [explicitive] out of here.  I don’t want your Jesus drug!”  I was a little shaken to say the least! Have you had that kind of response before? We’ve all seen people hear and respond to the gospel, but we’ve also seen many who hear and for whatever reason, choose to reject it.  Are there things we can do to create an environment in order for people to hear and receive the gospel? We’ve noticed on our campus that there are three things that we can do in order to help people come to Christ. SHARE THE RIGHT MESSAGE This is going to sound over-simplistic, but we have go...

A few weeks ago I stood in front of our students at our weekly evangelism training meeting and told them I was the worst evangelist in the room.  They laughed, but I was being serious.  I turn green with jealousy when I meet people with the gift of evangelism.  You know the people I’m talking about.  You go to the grocery store with them to pick up one thing and they are like, “let’s get hot sauce and a soul!” You can’t take them anywhere without someone hearing the gospel!  That just isn’t me.  But just because I don’t have the “gift of evangelism” doesn’t mean I’m exempt from sharing the gospel.  If I’m gut-wrenchingly honest, though, when I came to my campus five years ago I was worried about my lack of experience and ability in sharing the gospel.  I wanted to lead a ministry that was unapologetically evangelistic, but we weren’t. I didn’t know how to create a culture of evangelism and I wasn’t sure on where to start. However, looking bac...