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Arrived. Basically.
As I’m writing this before going to sleep Monday night (really, Tuesday morning), I’m not far from Saddleback Church, where tomorrow morning’s thing will be. That will be a good way to kick off the Los Angeles portion of this trip! It should be a neat chance to hang out with some church-based college ministers from around the Los Angeles area (or maybe further – I dunno).
Monday was quite a day. My time at UNM in the morning was phenomenal (I met with 3 ministers total!), and I’ll hopefully get to share some of that soon.
Then an incredibly long drive to California. I almost never drive that far in a day, and that includes during the yearlong trip. But it was good. It’s good to be stretched through craziness.
I’m exhausted, and normal sleep won’t happen until Tuesday night.
The opportunities to connect with some cool people this week and next are shaping up well. I’m excited to be here.
I need to go to sleep.
Written from Ontario, California
For many college ministries, the time after Spring Break can be a bit anticlimactic. For those in the home stretch, this next month can feel somewhat… wasted? inconsequential? boring? Maybe I’ll just stick with “anticlimactic,” and you can fill in the most appropriate adjective for your situation.
But April isn’t that way for our Quarter System friends at all.
Remember, there are a huge number of college ministries – especially on the West Coast, but dotted elsewhere around the U.S. – that may be just beginning their Spring Quarter. April is full-tilt for them.
For example, UCLA’s Spring Quarter is March 30th (today) through June 12th!
Now it’s time for the break-down:
First, we should pray for our Quarter System brethren while we’re at it. Even if our semesters are winding down, their quarters are just getting started!
Second, if you’re a semester-based college ministry leader, here are some big questions:
- What if you were in the situation those Quarter System guys are in? What could you do this month if you had to?
- Better yet, what if your campus awkwardly decided to split the school year into nine segments, each five weeks long? What if all you had each “semester” was 5 weeks? What would you do during April if you had to do college ministry that way?
Weird situations have a funny way of making us really creative. Go ahead – brainstorm. What if the next month was all you had? What ministry could you do? What steps toward your purposes could you take? What small pieces of your strategy could you accomplish? What students could you serve?
When you’re done brainstorming, one last thing:
- So of those ideas, why can’t you do (at least) some of them this month?
Written from Albuquerque, NM, near the University of New Mexico
My dad recently pointed me to a fact I didn’t realize:
What Color is Your Parachute?, an incredibly influential book over the past FOUR decades, started as a result of underfunded college ministry…
Here’s part of an article from Fast Company:
But as it turned out, [Richard] Bolles himself was one of the bailers. As an ordained Episcopal priest, he was canon pastor of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. But he lost his job in a budget crunch. He then landed an administrative position with the Episcopal Church, meeting with campus ministers at colleges across the country. He discovered that many of these ministers shared his predicament: Their jobs were in peril, and they had no idea what to do.
So Bolles did some research and wrote a 168-page guide to help the campus ministers he was supervising find jobs and change careers. Stuck for a title, he remembered his wacky question from two years earlier. He self-published the book in 1970.
That question was, “What color is your parachute?” and the rest is history! (Read the article here.)
So one upside of underfunded college ministry… you might write a bestseller!
(I watched God use defunded college ministry in my own life to get me to take a yearlong road trip… you can read a bit about that in the upcoming ebook.)
When people ask about my best experiences on the big road trip, my time in Southern California is definitely near the top of that list.
Why?
It was the beginning of my second semester of the trip, and I was finally getting in the “groove” of visiting ministries and interviewing ministers.
Also, California is such an innovative place… but it’s laid back at the same time. And those descriptions apply to Christian ministries like everything else.
Plus, I met some amazing college ministers there who really encouraged me as I continued on my big trip.
And finally, I got to stay with my awesome buddies Jake and Lesley (I’ve known Jake since Jr. High). And baby Sam, but he was in Lesley’s belly at the time.
So anyway, I like L.A.
On Sunday, I’ll leave for Road Trip #10. I’ll be spending about 6 days in the Los Angeles area, plus about a week total on the road. I’m still working out details, but here’s what I’m thinking at the moment:
- Albuquerque on the way. I’m excited to see UNM during the school year! (I’ve seen it multiple times during breaks, but never during school.) And I’ll hopefully get to hang out with a minister or two.
- Los Angeles Tuesday through Monday. Something like that, at least. I’ll be attending the College Leader Regional Training on Tuesday morning at Saddleback. Otherwise, I plan to meet with some college ministers, visit some campuses, and…? I’m sad I won’t have more time out there, but I’ll be headed back in October, so anybody I don’t get to catch up with this week, let’s plan on it then!
- Lubbock on the way back. Surprisingly, I’ve never gotten to see Texas Tech University. So I would like to remedy that and, again, see some friends and meet some college ministers.
Meanwhile, as usual, I’d love for you to join me in exploring college ministry here at the blog. I’ll blog about what I learn and experience along the way, and I’m hoping for some great encounters, some great campuses, some great rest, and some good Jesus time.
It should be a great chance to pray about what’s next for my life, too. With the ebook almost finished, it’s a good time to re-ask what God would have me do next.
Since late January (after giving a Ten Big Ideas talk at a conference), I’ve been hashing out ideas. Ten of ‘em. Ten BIG ideas.
The original idea for the conference talk was that any of these Ten Ideas could transform a college ministry, and I still believe it! Not all these ideas will fit into every ministry right now. But if any of these ten strike your fancy… God might just use it in a transformative way.
They’re basic ideas, but from what I’ve seen around the U.S., every one of them can be POWERFUL.
To wrap up the series, I figured it might be helpful to post a quick synopsis of each post. That way you don’t have to wade through ‘em to find what you need.
- The Intro: What are these Big Ideas?
Big Idea #1: College ministry is missions.
- post one: Intro’ing the topic, with talk of tribes and contextualization.
- two: Missions means strategy.
- three: What makes a successful college ministry? (It’s not as complex as you think.)
- four: Missions means difficulty.
Big Idea #2: It’s great to be a college minister.
- one: It’s great to be a college minister.
- two: How we can join the growing national desire to reach college students.
Big Idea #3: Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate.
- one: Intro’ing collaboration, with some types of collaboration.
- two: Means of collaboration (a brainstorm).
- three: Some major college ministry resources!
Big Idea #4: Figure out churchmanship.
- one: Why working through the church-involvement issue is so important.
- two: Doing the hard work of ecclesiology for the sake of our students!
Big Idea #5: Help students connect with the biblical whys.
- one: Temptations (or how I don’t always motivate students with the biblical whys).
- two: How students are harmed when our “whys” aren’t biblical.
Big Idea #6: Beware unhealthy ministry.
- one: The serious and prevalent situation of unhealthy campus ministries (including cults!).
- two: It’s more than cults, though… (other examples of unhealthy college ministry).
- three: Why our situation as college ministers is particularly precarious.
Big Idea #7: Help students transition to college.
- one post with links to others (I’ve already talked about this Big Idea plenty before!).
Big Idea #8: Help students transition from college.
- one: One of our enormous responsibilities as college ministers.
- two: What will best prepare these students to keep growing for a lifetime?
- three: Specific ways to disciple college students for the Latter Transition (a brainstorm).
- four: Some teaching topics to prepare college students for the transition out (even early in their college career).
- five: The effect of making this a key point in the evaluation of a college ministry.
Big Idea #9: Think about niches.
- one: What’s a niche college ministry?
- two: Going niche!
- three: One way to determine a great niche for your college ministry.
Big Idea #10: Build your best campus mission.
- one: Build your best campus mission!
- two: Building your best campus mission requires building for longevity… eight reasons to aim for longevity.
- three: How to build a college ministry to crumble – enemies of longevity.
- four: Building your best campus mission also requires serious, regular evaluation.
- five: Keys to forming a good evaluation plan.
- six: Potential ways to evaluate your college ministry (a brainstorm).
- seven: Building your best campus mission also requires making aggressive progress!
- eight: How a college ministry might progress (and it’s not just by getting bigger).
The last couple of days, Chuck Bomar has been writing some “University as Mission Field” posts – and he’s gotten some pretty interesting reactions in the comments. Not everybody is a fan of slow-but-steady campus mission planning, so that part is interesting.
But I’m especially excited that people are even having a discussion about something collegiate!
I would encourage you to check out those posts. I’ll add to the list of posts below if he writes any more in this series. (And again, be sure to read the comments.)
And you can join the conversation if you want!
Continuing from yesterday…
Building our best campus mission requires that we be serious about making aggressive progress.
By “progress,” I don’t simply mean numerical growth – although that can certainly result from becoming an even better college ministry (while some ministries will lose attendance as they grow better!).
There are many other ways a college ministry might make progress:
- impacting students more deeply
- becoming a healthier ministry
- more creatively impacting the campus
- better reaching the entire mission field (including under-reached student groups, faculty, administration members, and even the surrounding community)
- better preparing students for life after college
- better complementing and cooperating with other campus ministries
- and so on
Because we do face a rapidly changing audience (with nearly complete turnover every four to five years), college ministries may need regular major adjustments – not only to progress as a ministry, but even simply to keep from declining in our impact.
That’s why I believe that from the beginning of a college ministry, its leaders and supporters should plan on a lifetime of strategic modifications in response to changing students, a changing campus, a growing understanding of the tribe, and God’s work within the ministry and its leaders.
A lifetime. Of strategic. Modifications.
That’s part of how we build our best campus mission. We keep at the building.
We’re close to finishing up the Ten Big Ideas series, and since we’ve been looking at evaluation, I want to remind us of an important principle I mentioned early on.
Someone asked me recently what I think makes “a successful college ministry.”
While plenty of people who can answer that better than I can, I do have one thought. I told him that even though it’s simplistic, my best definition of college ministry success is doing the best we can with what we’ve got.
The best evaluation for each college ministry is to determine whether we are doing the best we can do with the situation we have. As we seek God’s wisdom, He may very well lead us to small niches within a campus or incredibly large numbers of students. Whether “large,” “small,” or somewhere in between, we must simply make sure that we are actively progressing toward having the best ministry we possibly can.
BUT…
It is this area – progressing as a campus mission – in which even the largest college ministries seem to struggle. I think it’s easy for developed college ministries to lose their “passion for progress” and no longer place a high priority on regularly improving and gaining “momentum” from year to year.
As in missions around the world, it is absolutely necessary that college ministries make aggressive progress to build our best campus missions.
More soon (probably tomorrow, unless I get distracted). [Here's that post.]
Could you pray for me this week?
While the public release of the ebook is still a few weeks away, I’ll be finalizing quite a bit of it this week.
If you’re unfamiliar with the ebook I’m writing (or want a refresher), here you go!
I’m designing an ebook to share the major conclusions drawn from my yearlong research trip. This book isn’t the end of what I have to share – far from it; it’s the beginning, but it’s a pretty important beginning.
If the ebook spreads – beyond college ministers to pastors, parents, and others who need to value our field more – this could pave the way for lots of changes and lots more priority given to college ministry.
(If you’d like to see a preview of the very unique format, keep reading…)
I want as many people as possible to have access to this thing, so it will be very, very FREE.
So please, if you have the opportunity, pray:
- That the book would turn out exactly how it’s supposed to.
- That I would have wisdom, time, and stamina to finish.
A couple more things:
basketball article (and ebook prebook): Some of you may have missed it because of Spring Break, but I posted a short, picture-filled article connecting March Madness and college ministry. (Download it here.)
You may find it encouraging – and you may be able to pass it on. Not only does the article remind people of the wonders of college ministry, but it also serves as a little preview for the upcoming ebook, which, like the article, is chock full o’ campus pictures.
cali trip: As you may have noticed on the Schedule, I’ve been hoping to take a trip to Southern California pretty soon. It’s now looking like that probably will happen! I’ll update you later this week on Road Trip #10.
Some updates!
Losing a campus.
I was sitting around the other day, and the thought crossed my mind – “Did I leave Grand Canyon University out of my campus count on the yearlong trip?” I think I was recollecting the oranges (or some bright fruit) growing on campus and the cool Antelope mascot they have (and the lack of cool Antelope T-shirts in the bookstore). In any case, I don’t know how I realized I had left them off the count…
…but when I checked my list, they were missing.
Sorry Grand Canyon U. If it’s any consolation, I saw you toward the very end of my trip (#172) when my brain was definitely fried. Plus, I had visited you a few years earlier, so it wasn’t as surprising a visit. I still need to come get a real ‘Lopes T-shirt if they’re ever available.
That means I actually visited 181 campuses on last year’s road trip, and I’m glad to find out now before the ebook comes out. If you’d like to see the full list (with random one-line recollections from each school), click here.
Losing at brackets.
You might recall I was planning on filling out quite a few brackets for the NCAA Tournament. Ultimately, I filled out 31 (honestly). And most are fairly mediocre at the moment. One of my 10 ESPN brackets is hovering around the 95th percentile, but it’s early. We’ll see how it goes.
But here are some other bracket numbers from the world of Exploring College Ministry:
- Of the 65 teams in the tournament, I have seen 37 of their campuses.
- From the round of 32, I have seen 25!
Pretty fun…
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