CAMPUS LAUNCH PAD

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 ...

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...

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...