You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September 2011.
I’m moving to a new house here in Dallas this week, so a Fridea springs to mind:
Serve students by helping them move (in or out) at times other than the start of school… and even in places other than the dorms!
I recognize “Move-in” is a widely used, classic method for service and recruitment each Fall. But students can be served at other times, too – like when they’re moving out of their dorms at Christmas or Summer Break. They need help moving back in after Christmas, too, and sometimes summer students could use some help, too!
Further, it’s not just dorm-living students who have to move stuff. While it may look a little different, it’s probably not too hard to get a crew of students to look for moving trucks (and then offer to help) at student-oriented apartment complexes.
Like a lot of our methods, we can often accomplish new purposes (or old purposes better) simply by thinking creatively about the classic methods that we’re already using (like start-of-school Move-in)!
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There are some college ministries out there – campus-based, church-based, and otherwise – that have asked themselves today’s question, answered it well, and used the answer to create a better ministry.
But for many of us, its answer is less clarified than we’d like.
The question: Within the campus community, how is your campus ministry identified?
In other words, how is your college ministry known… or what’s the one-sentence reputation of your ministry… among both the secular and Christian members of your campus community? (This includes administration members, faculty, other college ministries, student organizations, and anybody else.)
Have you discerned a concrete – and accurate – answer to that question?
I could follow up with plenty of other questions: Are you happy with that reputation? Are you even “identified” at all? Is there good reason for any disdain? Is there actually good reason for any appreciation? What could change your reputation for the better? Do you care? …and so on.
But you can ask all those questions and plenty more yourself. So I’ll stick with the one question: What’s your college ministry’s identity, externally?
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I wanted to revisit one of my favorite recent posts today, encouraging us to consider – strongly – spending time this school year building a stronger college ministry. My encouragement back in August, as it is now, is to pick at least one of the following “hills”… and climb it this semester.
Now that we’re past those invaluable first weeks of school (at least if your school is on the Semester system), I urge you to ponder these ideas.
How much better will your ministry be in November or March than it is in August?
Ministry improvement should be a year-round endeavor, not just something we tackle in the summer or at an occasional conference. In fact, many avenues for growth are only or primarily available when school’s in session. So hopefully you’re considering how you can move your ministry from a “7″ to a “8″ (or even from a “2″ to a “4″) well before next June.
As we stand at the base of a new semester, we have the choice to keep our ministries here for nine months… or to carry them toward new heights! So as you look at the possibilities for improving your college ministry, consider tackling at least one or two of these hills.
Strong small group leader training. Most small group leaders (students, adults, or even staff) aren’t naturally great small group leaders.
There are small-group-leadership skills (practical and spiritual) that can be taught, trained, tried, tested. While plenty of your leaders might be useful and impactful, if they’re untrained… they’re still untrained. Yet small groups are, for most college ministries, the “front lines” of discipling students – why leave this area underdeveloped?
Want to see your college ministry improve quickly? Significantly training your small group leaders might make the biggest difference of all.
Evaluating effectiveness (instead of impressions). If your big evaluation questions are “What went over well? What fell flat?,” then your effectiveness is suffering. (Even worse, of course, is not evaluating at all.)
The impressions we campus ministers take away from a big event, a message we deliver, or an entire semester aren’t of primary importance. Even less important are the impressions our students walk away with. OF COURSE impressions matter… but they simply don’t matter as much as overall effectiveness matters. Our biggest question for every activity has to be, “How well did we accomplish the purposes we planned around?” …which of course implies some things about how we planned in the first place!
Make this your primary assessment after every activity, and every aspect of your ministry will benefit.
Tailoring your ministry. If your decisions and activities aren’t particularly campus-specific, you’re not succeeding (or loving!) like you could be.
Another hill to consider climbing this Fall? More consciously tailoring your work to your specific campus. I’ve seen how different campuses are from each other, but college ministries don’t share nearly that level of variation. But just like with loving individuals, adapting our work to the campus will provide the best impact. You might even invent brand-new forms of ministry, after you notice the necessities and opportunities around you.
You have a unique mission field. Is yours a unique mission?
Learning your calling. If you’re not a learner, you’re not the college minister you should be.
Please notice that I didn’t say, “If you’re not a natural learner…” Not nearly all campus ministers have a personality bent toward regular learning. But if God has called us to college ministry, he’s called us to get better at college ministry – a field full of skills, aptitudes, areas of inquiry, and better methods to be explored.
So if you’re hoping to “up your ministry’s game,” it might have to start with… upping your game as a college minister. There are resources to learn from, and there are people to learn from. If you make it a priority, you can be a better college minister long before next summer.
Building barns. If your semesters aren’t building on each other, why expect a better ministry in the future?
The principle of Barn-building (taken from Tim Elmore’s Habitudes) teaches us that given two choices, we should choose to build our barn before we build our house… because the barn helps pay for the house! In our college ministries, we should be investing in a better future; though “Barn-building” may exist behind-the-scenes, it’s paving the way for greater impact.
This may mean training future leaders, choosing to teach on foundation-building topics, exploring support-raising avenues, spending months exploring a new ministry avenue, or building “quality” into your ministry before aiming for “quantity.” Even the four other ideas in this post have an aspect of Barn-building within them, too.
Barn-building isn’t as flashy or fun as our more obvious programs, but it makes all the difference for future semesters. So while Barn-building may not fit perfectly under “Ways to Improve Your Ministry for Fall 2011,” your College Ministry of Fall 2012 will thank you for attending to it now!
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Happy Monday!
Following up on last week’s Fridea, three easy aspects many college ministries probably need to make more explicit:
1. Your student leaders. How many members of your campus ministry could point out who the “official” student leaders are? We might like the idea of those guys and gals serving without (much) recognition, but the positives of making their positions explicit outweigh the negatives.
2. Opportunities for student leadership (and other involvement). If you have “ministry teams” of some sort, are those opportunities clearly laid out… often? Do all your students – new ones, irregular attenders, regular attenders – know how to plug in? Your opportunities for future student leaders AND for other volunteers should be quite explicit indeed.
3. The mission of student teams (both ministry teams and small groups). Can each of your student leaders…
- …give an “elevator pitch” for their ministry area? Are their activities and emphases clear and organized in their own minds?
- …clearly articulate (from memory) the specific outcomes their team or small group is aiming for this semester? If they don’t know what they’re aiming for…
Explicit. It matters.
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Another great aspect of the student leader retreat I was involved in last weekend involved student leaders making their work explicit. The college minister directed each team to share their purposes and plans with all the other teams. In fact, he had them write their goals and plans on wall-hanging Post-it sheets hung around the meeting room. Everyone was told to read those sheets during the course of the weekend, and time was also spent sharing plans out-loud.
Sometimes we forget how important it is to make our leadership roles and activities explicit for not only the other leaders, but for the entire college ministry. It’s easy for a campus ministry’s Leadership Team to run in the background, dutifully but quietly getting things done.
But there’s a lot of value in highlighting both student leaders’ work and the leaders themselves:
- Your college ministry will cultivate what it honors; as leaders are honored, more students will step up in the future.
- Your leaders could likely use some additional help from other student volunteers. As Teams and other opportunities are made known, it allows students to consider joining in the fun… and you’re likely to raise up quite a few future leaders through that process, too.
- Publicity can be a crucible. By highlighting what leaders are doing, it forces them to have their plans “public-ready.” There’s a sort of accountability here – not only to having a well-formed idea of their mission, but also to persisting in their commitment well as the year continues.
- Sharing what’s being done will give other students the chance to think about what’s not being done, too. A college ministry that appears to be running smoothly might lead many students to assume “everything’s being handled.” You and I know the truth. We need students to think about how they could help strengthen our movement!
So that’s this week’s Fridea: Make sure your leaders and leadership teams / positions are explicit for the entire college ministry. Highlight and “honor” them regularly.
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As I spoke to the team of student leaders last weekend, one theme I visited was the concept of “Better Brainstorming.” It’s something I’ve discussed before here on the blog; you can listen to a longer version at the links below. (There’s a shorter, somewhat different explanation at this post, too.)
The purpose of this method is to help anyone creatively “tweak” their present ideas to better accomplish their purposes – even those ministers or students who don’t feel they’re very naturally “creative.”
But I added something to my explanation this weekend: Not only did I encourage students to consider how they might adjust the “Who,” “What,” “When,” and “Where” of their projects, I also urged them to add a With Whom axis. I told them that for each of their plans and events, they needed to purposely consider what other teams might be good to consult or cooperate with.
If the Activities Team plans a Game Night, they probably don’t have to take care of everything themselves. They can get some advertising fliers designed by the Advertising Team. The Freshman Team can make sure to tell first-year students specifically. The Team devoted to reaching out to another, underserved local campus can help Activities figure out an appropriate date/time if they want those students to attend. And so on.
There are always possibilities to bring more people into the discussion, and I love the model of cross-planning among campus ministry ministry teams. Each team can focus on building expertise in their area, then making it available for any project where it’s useful.
I realize not every college ministry has this sort of developed “Ministry Team” structure. But many ministries have individual students, volunteers, or staff members devoted – formally or informally – to individual areas of the ministry. The more these leaders see each other as resources and teammates rather than simply “other leaders in charge of something different,” all the better.
For audio of my “Better Brainstorming” talks, Campus Ministry United has made them available. Just use the links below; either right-click to save the file to your computer (by clicking “Save Target As,” “Save Link As,” or something similar), or just click to play them directly.
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One of the most awesome moments of helping lead the student leader retreat last weekend involved one soon-to-graduate gal. At various points throughout the weekend, her college minister and I were able to help find her place in the ministry.
She’d been on leadership team for this college ministry for a few years now. And as she approached graduation, she wondered about connecting her major – Exercise Science – with the ministry. Fortunately, her college minister gave her wide latitude – and during the course of the weekend, she was able to take some real steps toward understanding just what this might look like.
I bring up that aspect of the weekend to ask an important assessment question for your campus ministry: How many of your student leaders are serving in positions that match not only the needs of the ministry, but ALSO their life callings or very unique gifts and talents?
It’s the “also” that’s tricky, right? Because certainly, we need to ask many of our students to step into positions that wouldn’t exactly be described as their “Dream Jobs.” Sure, they hopefully have aptitude and passion there, but that’s different than tailor-making a position to fit them. That’s part of learning service, in fact; we don’t want our collegians to ever learn that service is more about “the experience” than the actual results. (It’s loving in “deed and truth” rather than just “word or tongue.”)
However, we’re also trying to disciple our students to find the callings (including the so-called “secular” callings) that God has placed on their lives… and to connect all those callings to Faith. One key way to accomplish that might be letting students explore ministry roles that fit those specific callings. So while your well-laid plans on the College Ministry Dry-erase Board this summer might not have included a “Graphic Design” student leader position, the presence of a Senior who’ll be chasing that calling for the next forty years might be all the impetus you need to, indeed, tailor-make that position.
And while you may never have an “Exercise Science” team, an Outdoors team might allow those students to “exercise” their calling in a ministry setting.
And so on.
The unique individuals God brings to our ministries make up part of how He directs our ministries, yeah? If He’s brought faithful servants with specific gifts and unique callings, then He might just have something specific and unique in mind for them, at least at some point during their collegiate career.
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While sharing leadership principles at the student leaders retreat this past weekend, I hearkened back to my own first year of campus ministry, as a student leader myself. Several of the things I learned that year stick with me even today, and over time I’ve realized just how foundational they really were.
I wrote about several of those principles two years ago, in a series called “Leadership Nuggets.” I encourage you to read through (or scan through) those posts. If any of the principles (or the posts themselves) seem like they’d be helpful, I encourage you to use them with your own student leaders!
Here’s that series. (To read them in order, start at the bottom.)
I had the wonderful chance to help lead the student leaders’ retreat for Abilene’s Pioneer Drive Baptist Church college ministry this past weekend. I talked about a lot of things with the few dozen on the leadership team – many of those will show up here this week – but I wanted to kick off the week with ONE big theme from the weekend.
I want to start this week by encouraging you to make sure you’ve worked hard…
…to terrify your student leaders.
As Pioneer’s college minister and I worked through our plans for the weekend, we realized the value of raising the stakes for these student leaders as they face the year ahead. We needed to help them recognize they’re not only “student leaders”; their roles mean they’re actually college ministers themselves. And because that’s true, they’re also missionaries to their own campuses.
College ministers. Missionaries. Those are two roles your student leaders might not realize they’re actually called to. But when they do – and especially when we hash out what those roles mean, it (rightly) gets a little scary for these students: The weight God places on ministers. The expectations of the roles. The dangers inherent – both of the “temptation” form and the “trial” form. The work involved. The potential impact. The potential disaster if God doesn’t work through them to accomplish what they’ve set out to do.
And so on.
But of course, we want our student leaders to feel a little freaked – the kind of “terrified” that drives them to their knees, drives them to seek wise counsel, drives them to build their skills. We want them to be humbled to the point that their hope is placed in the Lord – not primarily in their skills, their opportunities, or the people around them.
Have you terrified your student leaders enough this year?
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If your campus is on the Semester system, it’s likely that your usual “recruiting season” is winding down. But I was wondering if that schedule aligns well with actual student patterns. (Students and their habits are far messier than we would like them to be!)
There are plenty of students who – for better or worse – have been weighing options without jumping right into commitment. (They’re Millennials, remember!) They’re still looking for organizations to get involved in, a church home, whatever. And the freshmen are just now figuring out what “college life” kind of looks like.
So what if you spent a little more time and effort rolling out the red carpet to that kind of student?
And the second idea is like it: While you could recruit in the same ways you’ve been recruiting, you could also consider coming from a different direction:
- using some different tactics,
- approaching some different kinds of students, or
- even showing different sides of your ministry
…different tactics, students, or sides from your first “round” of recruiting.
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