Exploring College Ministry blog (daily notes about our field)

Monday, I discussed something obvious but powerful: Our students’ spiritual “success” in five years is a major evaluation of our ministry today.

Tuesday, I connected the dots a bit: What we aim for this year should be directly connected to our five-year goals for our students.

Today, I jump off of the last few lines of yesterday’s post:

“When you have that target to shoot at, it tells you what you need to be instilling in people’s lives now,” Brad explained.

That’s the kicker, right? We have to make those long-term targets explicit, and then we have to translate them into aims we carry out each year.

The practice of making our aims “explicit,” of getting a concrete list of what we want students knowing, feeling, and doing, is NOT a priority for many college ministers. How do I know? Because I’ve asked them. Nationwide. Lots and lots of times. And very rarely did someone have a ready answer to what they wanted their “finished students” to look like.

(These amazing men and women had lots of awesome ideas and great hopes, and many were seeing great fruit! But they just didn’t seem to be ready for that question.)

And yet isn’t the definition of our aims, prayed through and thought through and repeated over and over, vital to our calling? Doesn’t it give us clarity in what we’ll teach next, conviction as we ask for funds or prayer or volunteers, a better assessment when things seem a bit rocky, focus when success or drama or “options” distract us?

How do we “fulfill the ministry you have received in the Lord,” if we haven’t discerned exactly what that ministry entails – and what it doesn’t?

For many of us, an inquiry about our goals leads to a mumbled list of hopes. We should be ready to proclaim concrete goals, because we’ve already reminded ourselves of them dozens of times.

As promised, the first of some college ministry thought-connections from Catalyst Dallas…

Andy Stanley spoke Friday morning about what he called Northpoint’s “secret sauce” to building great teams. But it’s something he said to introduce that topic that hit me the hardest for our field. The quote (or a close approximation thereof):

If you don’t know why something’s working when it’s working, you won’t be able to fix it when it breaks.

I get the feeling that lots of very successful collegiate ministers haven’t taken the time to examine why they’ve seen success. Of course, ultimately, it’s God who has built the house. But it’s still likely that He has used principles, systems, methods, and patterns to bring forth fruit. (And not to belabor the point, but He does the same thing – use principles, systems, methods, and observable patterns – to bring out actual fruit in nature, too, right? Let’s not demand that God work in inscrutible ways; He often acts according to wise principles that we can discern and continue to use.)

Maybe you would put one thing or everything in the list of “What’s Working” within your ministry. Whatever the case, have you sought to discern why it’s working? Have you looked for reasons your recruiting went so well this year, or why your small groups seem to be humming along? Have you prayed / thought / talked through WHY your students grew in evangelistic fervor this year, or WHY that service project was so effective?

There will be occasions in our ministry when we simply shrug and say, “God did it, and we don’t know how.” But generally, we need to be learning alongside our victories (and not only within our defeats). We need to ask the God of All Fruit to reveal anything He wants us to learn about doing ministry in the future… lest we find ourselves at a loss when suddenly it’s not going quite as well.