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...

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,  h...

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 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 wa...

GOD IS STILL ON HIS THRONE Chances are you’ve felt like the whole world is falling apart.  God is still good and God is still on his throne.  Perhaps he is giving his people a platform to serve and love the world instead of cower in fear, without hope, like our non-believing neighbors.  God has given us a spirit of power, not a spirit of fear and timidity.  The gospel runs in when everyone else runs out.  Don’t buy into the hysteria and fear-mongering! THE GOSPEL CALL HASN’T CHANGED It is times like these where the gospel has spread the quickest.  World-wide panic and fear?  The peace of the gospel is the cure.  Isolation and broken relationships?  The family of God leans in.  Corona Virus may have forced us into social distancing, but social distancing DOES NOT mean relational distancing.  Pick up the phone and call.  FaceTime, Google Hangout, Zoom call.  Find ways to stay connected and feed each others souls....

Do you spend much time at the doctor’s office? If you haven’t, just wait till you have kids! And, if you are blessed with boys, expect to spend some time at the ER as well. Just saying… I have four kids so I’ve seen a lot of waiting rooms. Waiting rooms are all pretty much the same. They usually have two sections to divide the well from the sick and a variety of things to keep both parties entertained and isolated until their time comes to move onto the next room. Next time you’re there look around the room. There isn’t much emotion. Each person is biding his/her time until his/her time comes to move on. Now compare that with a launch pad for the space shuttle. The cockpit is swarming with activity. Ground zero is alive with clicking and talking. All parties are frantic to make sure every detail is secure. The ground crew is scurrying about making sure everything is filled up, topped off, and packed. There is excitement and anticipation!  Every man and woman is doing...

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....

We met as a staff to prep for the year. We've been developing some Staff Lessons to Live By. Here is what I shared with them: HONESTY WINS THE DAY It's better you are honest than a good campus minister. If you're not sure what to do in a situation, ask. If you do something dumb, tell us. If you are stuck in what the next level of your ministry is suppose to be, ask someone. Is someone on staff or a student rubbing you the wrong way and there is conflict? Address it. THE MISSION DRIVES THE TRAIN. Your personal preference is important, but it takes a back seat to the mission. Sometimes your idea or plan isn’t chosen. Sometimes you don’t lead the mission trip, ministry team you want. Use that disappointing energy to build a bridge and get over it. This is a rhapsody of compromises. EVERYONE HAS A VOICE We sit as equals here. different roles but as equals - from the Ministry Assistant to the Director. Interns - you are staff. Directors - you are staff.  To st...

John Worcester said, “Fill the field instead of fill the room.”  This is such a powerful statement! It’s so simple but packed with so much insight!  Instead of gathering students to hear you preach how can you send students out.  Instead of packing out the room how can you saturate the harvest field with workers.  Isn’t that what Jesus said to pray for in Luke 10:2?  Ask the Lord of the harvest for workers because the harvest field is plentiful but the workers are few.  Jesus didn’t ask us to beg God for sitters and listeners, but for goers and workers!  How many of college ministries make it their goal to gather Christians? If they can just gather enough Christians and provide a safe place for them to hang out until they pass through the dark ages of college then they’ve done their job. O friends, may it not be!  May we become so captured by God’s vision to see our campus saturated with the gospel that we begin to see the harvest field in n...

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...

If I’ve got to be honest, I think my love language is numbers. Seriously. When more people show up at our events - I feel loved. I mean, numbers have to be important, right? God named a book of the Bible Numbers! But nothing can suck our souls dry or set our souls afire like numbers. When we run out of chairs and people are standing in the back we go home and have trouble sleeping we’re so excited! When we only have half the people show up who we thought would come we go home and have trouble sleeping we’re so depressed. The numbers game. Ever been asked: “How big is your ministry?” This question has a way of exposing the sin in our hearts quicker than any other. When we walk into a room and we think we’re one of the larger ministries we fight pride. When we walk into a room and we think we’re one of the smaller ministries we fight insecurity and self-doubt. Have you been there? Always looking at how many are there. Feeling like you’ve arrived because you can gather ...