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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).
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.]
Continuing with the Ten Big Ideas series and discussing building our best campus mission, I want to brainstorm some ways you might evaluate a college ministry.
Like I wrote a couple of days ago, evaluation is / should be highly contextual. These are just ideas for you (or anyone overseeing a college ministry) to use as springboards to the evaluation your college ministry needs!
Seven evaluation scenarios:
- Get in touch with ten students on Facebook who were a solid part of your ministry a year ago. Ask if they’ll fill out an anonymous survey you’ve created on surveymonkey.com. The survey can ask how well they were prepared for the young adult world, how their spiritual condition compares with where they were at graduation, if they’re plugged in to Christian community, and what they would change about the college ministry.
- Sit down the week following each semester / quarter and determine how well your ministry pursued its detailed, desired outcomes for the semester. Bring student leaders and volunteers in on the evaluation. (NOTE: Requires that you have decided detailed outcomes you’re aiming for before the semester!)
- Talk to a peer college minister in town about “trading” a few students for a week. Have students from that ministry visit your ministry to observe its accessibility, friendliness, atmosphere, potential tweaks, overall enjoyment, unique components, etc. After your students visit the other ministry, debrief – with both groups of students.
- Give a survey to your present students covering a wide spectrum of spiritual needs and beliefs. Give the same (or a similar) survey each year, so you can track the general progress of the ministry. Make sure each student gets a copy of their survey to help them grow, too.
- Sit down for lunch with the last ten students who joined your group. Ask how they heard about it, why they first came, why they joined, what gave them second thoughts, what they would change, how they’ve liked it so far, and so on.
- Ask twenty students on campus today what they think about your ministry. Ask for honesty… ask if they’ve ever even heard of you guys… ask for advice! Follow those conversations wherever they lead, and pray that God might lead the conversation to spiritual impact (for them OR for you).
- Have five students who don’t come to your ministry (maybe the same students I mentioned in #3) surf your ministry’s web site. Have them find out simple things like directions, times, etc. Ask them if the web site makes a good impression or a bad one. Ask them if your ministry is doing a good job of serving students through your web site.
If we want to build our best campus mission, our “best” – whatever that means – will probably never be achieved without evaluating our ministry regularly. (Read the earlier post on evaluation here.)
Before I get to practical possibilities for how you and I might evaluate our college ministries, I think the keys to forming a good evaluation plan probably include:
- Decide it’s important
- Be honest about real questions to ask
- Be specific to your group
- Take the time to get it done
- Pray like crazy
If those five things are in place, my guess is that we’ll each come up with some solid evaluation techniques that fit our college ministry situations.
First, we’ve got to decide that evaluation is truly important. Without that motivation, this won’t happen.
We’ve got to be willing to ask questions that could bring annoying answers. (It’s easy to ask only questions that will bring favorable or benign answers, even as a subconscious choice.)
But your evaluation questions won’t be my questions. And your questions this year won’t be your questions next year, either. While it’s not a bad idea to have some standard, “timeless” questions, measuring your purposes and progress and campus impact will all relate to specifics about your present college ministry. (Which begs the question, Can we really know what questions to ask if we’re not all that familiar with our college ministry or its context?)
We’ve got to take the time to evaluate, too. I know time isn’t one of our abundant resources. But if evaluation is important, then we’ll take the time.
And finally, through the whole process, we had better pray like crazy; God is more interested in improving our ministries than we are, and He’ll give us the tools to do it… if we’re willing to be honest and take the time (as mentioned above). He wants to walk with us (as always), not just send us to take measurements and then come back and tell Him about it. He’s got all sorts of creative ways to determine if our very best campus mission is being built.
Building our best campus mission doesn’t just mean focusing on longevity. Another ingredient is evaluation.
Admittedly, the usual college ministry doesn’t undergo too much relevant evaluation. Certainly, our overseers may have ways to assess our work, but sometimes those range from, “What did you do today?” to “How many students did you talk to on campus this month?” Campus-based ministers are probably the most likely to be evaluated on things that actually connect with their mission, because they’re judged by other college ministers. But even those overseers rarely know the specifics of the campus tribe you happen to be working with, right?
So unless we make self-evaluation a priority, it probably won’t happen well.
There are two sides to this coin, of course:
- First, this will mean facing some pretty harsh realities. We’re not going to like everything we find. We will be forced to improve (which is a good thing). But it’s gonna hurt.
However…
- Our assessment won’t demand perfection or even being comparable with other college ministries. Instead, we aim for what I wrote about at the beginning of this series: Doing the best we can with what we’ve got. (Read that post here.)
Some thoughts on evaluation methods will be posted soon.
Enjoy one of college ministers’ biggest Holidays, Selection Sunday!
I promised two days ago to discuss some of the reasons college ministries don’t always last long. This is part of the discussion on longevity, which is part of the discussion of building your best campus mission, which is the last topic of the Ten Big Ideas series. Yikes. Lots of levels there.
So I’m noting a few of the things that seem to stymie longevity in college ministries. This is not the same as writing about what causes strong college ministries simply to fail – there are lots of reasons that can happen, and we could all brainstorm a pretty big list, I’m sure.
Instead, I wanna mention some of the inherent, systemic issues that could keep a college ministry from being “built to last” in the first place. In other words, here’s how I would “build to crumble” in college ministry.
- Keep the vision with the leader, not the “sending organization.” Obviously, a college minister or other leader will often be the initiator of the college ministry vision. But if it remains with him or her or their “inner circle,” then the vision leaves when the minister does. And ministers leave sometimes.
- Aim for speedy results. We can build a college ministry for quick numbers and quick reputation, or we can build to last. These are divergent paths. Sometimes God decides to provide the former while we aim for the latter, but aiming for the former could keep us from ever achieving the latter.
- In your list of things to do this semester, put strategy at the bottom. In the hustle-and-bustle of college ministry, we may never work on strategy if we wait for “free time.” And yet strategizing our mission to the campus is key to helping it last. We’ll work on strategy if we carve out time to work on strategy. (I recommend strategizing before building the college ministry at all, but that’s discussed in another post and another post.)
- Place no value on sharing your successes. I’ve written about college ministry and public relations before. It’s often a necessity for keeping college ministries supported and staffed. Read about that idea here.
- Have no core value of making aggressive progress. I’ll talk about this one soon, because it’s yet another key to building your best campus mission. [Read more on that here.]
For those who desire to build their best campus mission, one key ingredient is building for longevity. If we’re going to build a ministry, we might as well build to last, right?
That’s nice to say, but there are certainly reasons a lot of college ministries don’t last long. I’ll discuss some of those soon [right here, to be exact]. But today, thoughts on why longevity is so worth aiming for.
I do strongly believe longevity can majorly increase the quality AND quantity of college ministry impact. Here are eight big reasons:
- A campus ministry or church-based group that is widely known as effective and established will receive positive word-of-mouth: from students, campus staff, the community, alumni, and others who hear about its impact (even from far away).
- Relationships with campus and community members grow deeper over time.
- Relationships (and even continued impact) with alumni are harder if the ministry doesn’t exist anymore…
- Strategy becomes more and more fine-tuned over time.
- Spiritual health (including wisdom, spiritual balance, and love) within the ministry can grow over time.
- Even when the college ministry isn’t the largest ministry on its campus each and every year, it may have an easier time staying “in the mix,” since it’s a staple in that campus tribe.
- While other short-term ministries may at times steal the spotlight, a consistent, long-term college ministry can ultimately influence a much larger number of students as the years go by.
- A long-range mission effort has the opportunity to impact not only students, but eventually to see its impact extend to faculty, administration, and other “locals” as the ministry becomes an integral part of the campus and even the city.
Here we are. Number 10, of the Ten Big Ideas that could genuinely help transform a present (or new) college ministry. While not all of these ideas fit every ministry, those that do fit are truly things that could create major positive change.
Number 10: Build your best campus mission.
This one brings us back full circle to #1, where we broached the idea that college ministry is missions in the first place. Yet there’s a difference between applying that first idea – that college ministry is more “missions” than “Christian Education” – and actually treating an entire ministry like a mission to the campus(es). In the former, we apply missiological elements (I wrote most recently about contextualization, strategy, and difficulty). But in the latter, building a campus mission, we keep working to build a lasting, effective outpost for the Kingdom.
I’ll hash out what this means to me over the next few days, based on what seems to be needed in the ministries I’ve visited. But there’s no way I can prescribe for your situation as well as you can. So it may be best to begin simply by asking (and sitting with) the key question:
Are we building a campus mission or just running a college ministry?
(I’m not trying to replace the term “college ministry,” I promise. But it’s still helpful to use different words when they make us look anew at what we’re doing.)
————-
Below is the full list of eight posts about building our best campus mission, or click here for the entire list of all posts from the Ten Big Ideas series.
- one: Build your best campus mission! (That’s this post.)
- 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).
Since I’ve been writing about niche ministry as part of the “Big Idea” series, I want to include one tip that comes at this issue from a slightly different angle. It’s a helpful tool for brainstorming what possible niches your ministry might serve in. It’s one simple question:
What’s something that only our ministry can do?
Your brainstorming based on this question can take one of two different paths.
The first path is brainstorming what only your type of ministry can do. In other words, use the advantages you’ve got from simply being a ______________________ ministry. Are you a denominational ministry? Parachurch? Church-based? Chaplain at a Christian college? Student-run ministry? There are certain “peculiarities” to any of those ministry types. And I think it’s kind of sad that so many of our ministries still look kinda the same, when they could really make use of some things only their type of ministry can accomplish.
This will take creativity, but that’s why I’m providing a springboard: What can only your type of ministry do? Is there some new form of ministry – or niche – that corresponds with that ability?
The second path is brainstorming what only your specific ministry can do. In other words, use the uniqueness your particular ministry has: in people, financing, facilities, reputation, creativity, numbers, lack of numbers… WHATEVER sets you apart in any little (or big) way. Use it! Milk it!
As you think about your people, think about their skills, know-how, reputation, campus involvement, church involvement, personality, age, and anything else that could possibly set your group apart. If you’ve got a bunch of gamers… cheerleaders… freshmen… guitar players… techies… Trekkies… why not brainstorm connecting that provision – yep, it’s a provision – with how you do ministry?
I have a friend ministering at a church that locals semi-jokingly call, “Six Flags Over Jesus” (because the church has a lot of money and holds lots of special events). But my buddy’s response is pretty measured: “Alright,” he says, “If that’s who we are, then that’s who we’re going to be.” What he means is that since God happens to have given them some budget money, they’re going to use it to the best of their ability – and not be ashamed of that fact.
The truth is most college ministries have something that is / can be / should be an advantage. Why not brainstorm how you could use that in a special sort of way… to reach people in a special sort of way? I don’t mean your ministry has to be super-strange or “go niche.” But it’s at least worth thinking through, right?
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