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Today’s post starts an occasional series on “Topics Worth the Tussle” for college ministers to consider. They’ll be some passages and biblical topics that seem, at times, to be overlooked or undertaught – but that have a particular importance for college students. And yes, it’s likely you, your students, or both will have to struggle a little bit with these tricky topics.
Whether you teach on these, use ‘em in small groups, or just wrestle with how well your students practice these principles, hopefully they are indeed worth the tussle… for you and your students!
My brothers and sisters, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring that person back, remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from death and cover over a multitude of sins. (James 5:19-20 NIV 2010)
Rescue those being led away to death;
hold back those staggering toward slaughter.
If you say, “But we knew nothing about this,”
does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?
Does not he who guards your life know it?
Will he not repay everyone according to what they have done? (Prov. 24:11-12 NIV 2010)If anyone does not obey what we say in this letter, take note of that person, and have nothing to do with him, that he may be ashamed. Do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother. (II Thess. 3:14-15 ESV)
I recently heard a college minister deliver a message on the use and abuse of the tongue, springboarding from James 3 to discuss several ways college students need to think about what they say.
I so appreciated that he included in his message the clear biblical call to confront their friends as needed. Throughout Scripture, confrontation – including even varying “degrees” of confrontation and separation – is revealed as a required part of true community. Wow.
So if we want to assess the “community” angle of our campus ministries, one question we should ask is, “How ready, willing, and able are our students to confront sin in others’ lives?”
It’s definitely a touchy subject. But I think it’s worth the tussle – and a community that does this well is bound to be a pretty strong college ministry indeed.
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As mentioned yesterday, this Fridea is a day late. But it’s actually worth the wait, since I spent all day Friday working on this very project.
In some sense, it’s a little early to bring up this idea – and I’ll probably “unveil it” in a bigger way in a month or so. But now is the time for Quarter System schools to take a look. And I’d love to hear from anybody else who’s interested in possibly giving this a try. I’ll probably have an application process for getting involved, but the fact that you’re willing to jump on this early will definitely mean points in your favor.
I have – a couple of times now – mentioned a rather secret idea I’ve been working on to help college ministries raise funds. The funds can be used for anything you want – ministry budget, staffing, service, mission trip, whatever. It’s a no-strings-attached way to raise funds.
It involves Textbooks. Getting them at the end of the semester or quarter. Letting me sell them for you. Pocketing a whole bunch of cash.
How much cash? Using the data from my trial run, I’m guessing there will be campus ministries that make one or two thousand bucks a year, and there will be some that make five or ten thousand dollars a year. And a few college ministries might even make a whole lot more, depending on how much effort they’re able to put into this.
The truth is, it’s likely there’s somebody – a club, another ministry, an outside organization, a guy with a pickup truck – who’s already raising funds via Textbooks. (And you know the campus bookstore is making a killing…)
But not only is this method tried-and-true, it’s also something I’ve been involved with since 2004. So my chance to help has been tried-and-tweaked, you might say – over FOURTEEN semesters. I can help you figure this out, because I’ve been doing it myself.
So here’s the deal: If you’re interested, let me know. If you know others who might be interested, tell them to let me know as soon as they can. And if you have buddies at Quarter System schools, please let them know about this – or let me know and I’ll contact them personally.
This could be huge. I wanna help. And I’m so excited to have one more way to do it.
Somehow this didn’t get posted for Thursday, so enjoy – and I’ll post the Fridea on Saturday!
If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. (I Pet. 4:11 NIV2010)
It’s not enough that we raise up college students to witness on campus… lead a small group… pastor a church… teach a Sunday school class. It’s not enough that we catalyze collegians to build houses… pay for clean water… run a non-profit… spend a life overseas.
If we haven’t raised them up to speak… if we haven’t raised them up to serve… from God’s very own supply, in His way, how He Himself would have done it, in ways only explainable as God’s work…
then we haven’t let them fully glorify… fully become “faithful stewards of God’s grace” (v. 10)…
then we haven’t been faithful stewards of God’s ministry…
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Obviously, I’ve written on the Bethel College a bit – if you want to catch up, see the first post and the updates post (which I’ve updated since I originally wrote it, too). But there have been enough new developments that I want to post one more time.
Campus-wide revivals are a real part of the history of college ministry, and they’re rare enough that it’s worth examining and enjoying them when they happen! So there are a few new ways to do that:
If you have 9 minutes, I encourage you to watch this video recollection from the Senior VP of Bethel, Dennis Engbrecht. I encourage you to read some of the really cool comments from Erin Kinzel of the Bethel College staff, below that. And I definitely encourage you to click over to college minister Sarah Koutz’s blog, where she’s already reported quite a few observations and testimonies!
Here are Erin’s comments from yesterday, including ways to pray for the Bethel students:
Thanks so much for spreading the word about this. We pray it will spread to the other colleges in our area (including Notre Dame, Goshen College, Holy Cross, Saint Mary’s, IUSB, and many more I’m forgetting) and beyond. …
Our spring break is next week – we pray that students will carry the message (and fire!) of what happened last week as they leave campus. Please pray for the fire of revival to continue to burn in their hearts while they are away.
Also, 32 faculty and staff members volunteered to lead follow-up discipleship groups, so please be in prayer for those. I really appreciate how Shawn Holtgren, our VP for student development, presented the groups to the students in chapel yesterday. He said that his goal was not to create a program or a system or some type of cookie-cutter follow-up, because discipleship has to come from the heart. (That’s my paraphrase – I remember him being much more eloquent.) :) I admire Bethel’s leadership for wrestling with the tension between providing structured guidance and follow up, and yet giving enough freedom for the Holy Spirit to work.
Thanks again for posting about this. May it spread to many more college campuses!!
Erin Kinzel
Assistant Director of Marketing
Bethel College
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A monthly gathering for Young Adult Ministers has recently started up here in Dallas! And since I had helped with a little input on the front end, I had the chance to sit in with them last week.
To avoid any confusion right off the bat: While there are people who serve both college students and young adults (in some churches, at least), those groups are significantly different. I’ll likely blog more about that in the future, but I just didn’t want anybody to be confused by my contrasting of Young Adult Ministers and College Ministers here.
Last semester, I got to attend a Youth Specialties lunch and blogged about the interesting differences I noticed between Youth Pastors and us College Ministers. So I figured I would do the same for the Young Adult Ministers – not just as a thinking exercise, but to help us examine what we do a little more closely!
It’s churches. Unlike our field, which encompasses four distinct branches (campus-based, church-based, institutional, and collegiate churches), Young Adult Ministries are generally housed in churches… at least for now. The only common exception isn’t really an exception; the “citywide” worship service might draw young adults from across church lines, but even that is often run directly by a single church.
Young Adult Ministry’s “target” varies more widely than ours. In College Ministry, our lines aren’t perfectly clear – some people who aren’t attending classes are still quite “collegiate,” while some who are students will feel most at home in Young Adult or other Adult ministries.
But I think Young Adult Ministries have even much more varied definitions of their audiences. Even in that room of 15-20 Young Adult Ministers, the definition of “Young Adult” varied – in age and in marital status. As I’ve seen around the country, “Young Adult” can mean 18-25, 23-30, 20s and 30s, or similar combos. And it doesn’t always mean just singles. In fact, I think the trend (and it’s a trend that makes a lot of sense) is for churches’ Young Adult Ministries to reach “post-college, pre-family, married or single” – as one young adult minister put it the other day.
But in some sense, we can be thankful that the lines are (usually) a little clearer, and they don’t change much with generational shifts (like the average marriage age).
Clearly, college students are part of the equation. Of course, not all Young Adult Ministries have “post-college” as part of their definition. Many churches try to reach both collegians and young adults as part of an overall “Young Adults” or “Singles” ministry, with varied success. This is an important aspect to note, of course, because it affects all of us who reach college students – including college ministries that aren’t in churches.
As I’ve seen at an awful lot of churches around the U.S., it can be really hard to reach both groups simultaneously. While I certainly think one achievable College Student Plan for churches involves activity overlap between the two groups, it needs to be done strategically and with a recognition that collegians and young adults are simply different. Hopefully our field can help churches think through their plans, including helping them see that sometimes a cooperative approach with already-established collegiate ministries may make a lot of sense!
more observations to come! (Read the second post here.)
Additional updates since this was first posted are in red! Big thanks to Sarah Koutz for much of the new info.
If you didn’t see the news over the weekend, an Evangelical Christian college near Notre Dame reported experiencing a campus-wide revival last week! This news from Bethel College is obviously something exciting for the whole college ministry community, and I hope you’ll take a second to read my original report. We should be praying for the students, faculty, and administration of the Pilot tribe – as well as those who minister to them on campus and off!
Here are some updates I’ve gathered, and I’ll try to post more here this week if anything new comes up.
Reports
Local college minister Sarah Koutz has started sharing her impressions and her students’ experiences at her blog! Be sure to check it out.
“Bethel College Revival Breaks Out“: Geoff Hensley, a staff member of Granger Community Church (a well-known Northern Indiana megachurch)
“‘Revival’ on the Bethel College Campus“: Bill & Debbie Jones, Missionary Church denomination missionaries-in-residence at Bethel
An interesting recollection of a revival at Bethel College in 1991, posted by Gary Wright, president of World Renewal International
College Ministries
Impact Campus Ministries (South Bend)
Churches a number of Bethel students attend
River Valley Community Church
Calvary Baptist Church
Nappanee Missionary Church
Granger Community Church
Other Links
Bethel College home page (including their official updates)
Bethel College chapel page (if you want to view some of last week’s stuff)
Mentions on Twitter: “official” mentions, mentions of “Bethel” and “Revival” together (these are pretty neat to scroll through!)
After reading below, be sure to catch the updates at this post.
There’s a pretty rich history of rather spontaneous revival activity breaking out at Christian colleges. Asbury College has a history of several revivals, and I actually took a road trip to see the aftermath of one during the spring of 2006. Sixteen years ago, one particularly influential revival broke out at Howard Payne University in West Texas, spreading to places like Wheaton College, Southwestern Seminary, and Gordon College.
This past week, an exciting similar revival has been reported at Bethel College, a 2000-student Evangelical college in the Missionary Church denomination. The school is located in Mishawaka, IN, not far from South Bend (the home of Notre Dame) and some 100 miles from Chicago.
The Senior VP of Bethel, Dennis Engbrecht, sent the following email out to Missionary Churches on Wednesday (with links added where applicable):
You have probably already caught wind of what is taking place on Bethel’s campus via Twitter [official Twitter feed, mentions of Bethel on Twitter], Facebook, and the internet. Today the Lord showed up at chapel and it lasted 7.5 hours. Forgive me for not going into all of the details but we resume meeting at 9 PM tonight so I have but a few minutes to share what is transpiring.
Jeff Kling, a former Bethel student in the 1980′s, a young man who never came to Christ during his two years at Bethel, shared how God miraculously healed him of stage 4 cancer. His story has been widely covered by the media and has made the front page of at least three local newspapers in the past 12 months. Over the past year Jeff has been sharing openly his own conversion as a result of this miraculous healing. His testimony is powerful. Catch it on our website via the chapel archives.
However, how the Lord used Jeff’s testimony today is even more powerful.
I received a call three weeks ago from a former Bethel professor indicating that God was going to use Jeff Kling to bring revival to Bethel. Last night a small group of us met for prayer in the trustees board room. Today God did above and beyond what any of us could have expected…even though it was what we had and others have prayed for.
Bethel is in the midst of a revival.
Today for 7.5 hours we worshipped God in a way I have not witnessed at Bethel for 20 years. Students shared Scripture, confessed sin, repented, were filled with the Holy Spirit, testified to incredible transformations of lives, and texted friends, families, and home churches what God was doing. Unknown to us, the chapel was being viewed all across the United States…live. One person reported his father was listening to the service in Puerto Rico for hours. People from the community started coming into chapel in the afternoon. Faculty and staff listening from their offices joined in and some became a part of the confession, repentance, and admonitions from the Lord. A former student from 1980 who had walked in darkness for 20 years after she graduated saw from her insurance agency office on Face book that “Revival is at Bethel!” and drove over to share her testimony. A young man came to the stage about the 4th hour and said he had been at Bethel for 4 years and knew all about Jesus but still did not know Jesus. He prayed right there in front of the student body to receive Jesus into his life. The place erupted in euphoria. John Brummel, my intercessory prayer friend, came down to campus last night from north of Grand Rapids and prayed through the night for this service. I just had supper with him and we rejoiced at being able to witness the fruit of prayer and intercession.
There is so much more to share, so much more to come. This is just the beginning. God is raising up a generation of world changers for His Kingdom.
Please be in prayer. The enemy is not happy. Pray for wisdom, discernment, and follow through on the part of those who have been transformed. Pray that the revival would spread from the campus into the community, to the church, across the nation, overseas, and to the lost.
An update was sent out on Thursday:
Today we learned some interesting details. Normally there are 25-35 “hits” on our chapel services web site. Yesterday there were nearly 3000 hits. These came from nearly every state and 17 nations. Here are a few more interesting developments
- Last night a student who made a public confession in the 7 ½ hour chapel service shared with his youth group later that evening. As a result a number of young people came to a saving relationship with Christ.
- A Bethel coach indicated that his student athletes began meeting with him at 1:30 yesterday and this continued until 7:30 last evening, cancelling practice. When he got home there was a group of more student-athletes waiting for him wanting to talk about what had transpired yesterday in chapel.
- The repentance and confession that started in chapel yesterday continued late last night in residence halls across campus into the early hours of the morning.
- A pastor from Peoria, IL called Dr. Weakland to let her know that his church had been praying for revival at Bethel…at the exact time that chapel was going on.
- Another athletic team spontaneously met this morning at 7:30 AM for prayer and individual reconciliation.
- There is a student movement to pray through the week-end for the Lord to continue what began yesterday in chapel.
- There are preliminary plans developing to share individually as well as collectively in various locations over Spring Break in just over a week.
God is good.
One last note: I found one other note on the Bethel site that I really appreciated seeing. In the midst of all this, they seem to be recognizing the deep need to follow this exciting event with a process. They posted, “[W]e will be forming discipleship groups across campus as a way to follow up with students. Please pray for the faculty and staff who will step forward to lead these groups, and that the groups would help facilitate the healing work God wants to do on our campus.”
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Each year, my church encourages its members to walk through a basic spiritual inventory. Through a series of questions, we self-report on our own maturity and growth in our connection to community, our spiritual understanding, our faithfulness to what we’re learning from the Lord, and our service to others. It’s a cool chance for each of us to see “where we’re at,” and the church gets to see how effective it’s being in “equipping the saints for the work of ministry.”
Obviously, this sort of thing is kinda rare, and any standard “spiritual inventory” is likewise quite rare among campus ministries.
But what if you tried it? (And if you have tried something like this, I’d love to hear about it!)
We obviously don’t usually have “members” like a church does. But that doesn’t mean we can’t introduce our students to some semi-regular, semi-objective means for measuring their own growth and maturity. What if…
- each year, all your students in service or leadership positions worked through an inventory?
- each semester, you took 15 minutes in a large group meeting for an anonymous spiritual survey of everybody present?
- this was offered as an optional way for students to see their own progress?
- this took place with every student who’s plugged in to a small group?
Those are just a few variations. But how you do it will depend on why you do it. Some of those possible purposes include helping leadership recognize the strong spots / weak spots of the ministry, reminding students of the importance of continued growth in the Lord, helping students evaluate themselves rather objectively (which college students seem to need… desperately), and helping both leaders and students recognize the progress that’s been made over the semesters!
Once you identify the purposes, you can develop the what and who of the survey to match.
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It’s always good for us to review even the “basics” of our college ministry’s setup. For many of us, for instance, what night our Large Group Meeting meets isn’t something we’ve pondered in a long, long time. Or maybe the fact that our small groups are all 8-12 members is so “standard” we’ve forgotten why that made sense.
Today I wanted to throw out two options specifically for the teaching in your college ministry’s Large Group Meeting. It’s interesting to note that many college ministries seem to fall toward two extremes here. But whichever side you presently land on, I encourage you to give the other some thought. Is your present method best accomplishing your purposes? Or might your ministry be better served by mixing in some of the “other” style?
(This is reminiscent of the “College Ministry Poles” series, where I look at how various ministries differ! Or, if you want to see 49 choices you’ve made for your Large Group Meeting – possibly without knowing it – check out this list.)
series vs. one-off
Some college ministries almost always teach in series. Others will nearly always be talking about something different week-to-week. But there are true positives for each option.
A series might help reinforce past teaching, encourage students to attend regularly, better cover a topic than simply one message would, and draw new / marginal students more than a single message topic would. Continuity is a great thing, too, and can even help develop a sense of “identity” and “community” in a campus ministry.
On the other hand, doing a series “just to do a series” is highly unpurposeful; sometimes what your students need most can’t be crammed into a series, and it’s tempting to design talks around a series rather than around needs. Going the non-series route might also allow for more flexibility, keep new / marginal students from feeling left out, increase the interest level in these change-loving Millennials, and free you to tackle “teachable moments” in your ministry, on campus, or in the world.
one teacher vs. rotation
In the same way, certain ministries seem to gravitate toward having only one main speaker, while others nearly always have a different speaker week-to-week. As with the above options, I’d argue that whichever side you’re on, it’s worth considering if the present setup is still the best setup.
Having one teacher does allow for greater familiarity – for both teacher and students! It’s also likely that you’re going to put the person up there because he or she is highly skilled. Sometimes a single teacher (particularly the lead college minister) needs to “steer the ship” or “cast the vision” over a series of weeks or months. Having a standard teacher allows them to hone their craft over time, and students also know what to expect. A standard speaker will also be consistent (obviously) in theology, approach, focus, etc.
On the other hand, allowing speakers to rotate keeps the change rate high. It also means a variety of students will be catered to through the various styles. Different wisdom / approaches on topics can be shared. The burden of preparation is spread among various speakers, as is the opportunity to be known by the group. This method might also allow speakers to be trained / “raised up” more easily.
This particular teaching pic is from the Chi Alpha crew at Texas A&M Corpus Christi!
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Pursuing the kind of purposefulness I often describe here at the blog feels – especially to some personality types – like a laborious chore. But one thing we don’t always realize, one fact that can push us through the hours discerning purposes before deciding methods, is that
we will never find ourselves so sharp
so creative
and, when all is said and done, so satisfied
as when we work backwards from purposes to methods.
When we determine the purposes we believe God wants us to aim for, they become our necessities. We must accomplish them, so our methods must bend around them – and no longer vice versa.
And because necessity is truly the mother of invention, we suddenly begin to discover ways and means. Even rapidly. And even along lines we’ve never considered.
It will make the time spent upfront, in the (boring?) planning and purpose-defining stage, completely worth it. You might even find time saved in the end because of how fast Necessity begins birthing all those Inventions.
There are few college ministers who aren’t interested in learning more creative methods. It’s the basis of many of the questions I get, whether I’m speaking at a conference or meeting one-on-one with a campus minister over pancakes. And the only sure-fire way I know to both increase your ministry’s inventiveness and effectiveness is to discern your necessities at the outset.
I wrote on “Backwards College Ministry” in a series. Read it here. (Just start at the bottom. Naturally.)
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