CAMPUS LAUNCH PAD

College students are rich. No, not money rich, but they are overflowing with one precious resource: Time. It’s their most significant commodity. They say they’re busy but that is because they have no idea what busy actually is. Students are sendable and trainable. Once this is leveraged, collegiate ministries can be the greatest launching pads for global missions in the world. In order to reach this potential our ministries have to look at the process and the person. We have to consider the big picture of how our ministry does missions and the individual picture of how we engage particular students for missions. Borrowing some language from Matt Chandler’s Explicit Gospel , we will call this Missions from the Air and Missions on the Ground. Let me break those categories down for you and give you some key principles to consider for each. MISSIONS FROM THE AIR We need to start with the big picture first before we engage students to go. This is how we approach missions. W...

“Jesus had a big enough vision to think small.” Robert Coleman in Master Plan of Evangelism What a crazy statement! Jesus came to earth with the vision of rescuing all of humanity from their mutinous rebellion against the High King of Heaven and what does he do? What is his plan? He takes twelve guys on a three year camping trip!  What a plot twist, right?  In order to go big, he goes small.  His vision is the whole of humanity so he starts with making sure the few have the DNA to carry on the kingdom charge after he is gone.  This is nothing short of brilliant.  You know why it was brilliant? It worked.  How did you hear the gospel?  Chances are, someone told you. And chances are, someone told them and so on and so forth back up through the ages until someone heard it from Peter or John or someone.  You’re living proof his plan worked.  Jesus went small. BIG ISN’T BAD, IT’S JUST INCOMPLETE Does that means that Jesus didn’t do l...

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...

Do you remember the first time you came home after being at college for a semester? I do. I was headed out to see some friends and it was 11pm. My mom asked what I was doing and where I thought I was going at that “time of night.” You already know where this is headed, right? I casually told her that I was headed out, 11pm was a normal time to leave the house for a college student, and I would be back later. Within seconds, two things were clear: 1) both my mom and I were convinced the other had lost their mind and 2) I was not leaving the house! I had been home for a total of six hours and I had already blown my witness with my parents and been handcuffed with a curfew! I’m not sure who was more ready for the semester to start back up in January, me or my parents! The transition back home for our students, especially our freshmen, can be hard for several reasons. They are moving back under the direct authority of their parents. They may be moving home to some sin patterns that they ...

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 ...

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. ...