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Yesterday, I outlined (at length) the Unplanned Mission Trip, an original idea that’s one of my favorites – and one I got to try with a group a few years ago. We called our version the “Mad Libs eBay Road Trip,” and it was a blast. (As linked yesterday, you can read the story from that trip here.)
But that episode will also remind me forever of a vital truth for what we do as campus ministers: Methods only matter when they match particular purposes.
You see, this was one method I dreamed up at some point earlier in my ministry career. Then that school year (2006-2007), as Spring Break drew nearer and I was hoping to take our fledgling college ministry on a mission trip, it became really tempting just to take that fun idea and plug it in. It would be fun. It would probably seem “successful.” Why not just “go with it” and see what happened?
But I have to take my shepherding role more seriously than that.
Even if the Unplanned Mission Trip was a great idea “in a vacuum” or “on paper,” did it match the actual purposes God had in mind… for our group… at that time?
I faced a crisis: Would I “go with my gut,” taking a chance on a truly good idea and praying for God to bless it? Or would I instead labor in prayer and thought, discerning first God’s purposes and then – and only then – deciding my method?
I’m so glad I took the time to ponder, pray, and strategize – and it definitely wasn’t easy to do that as apparent deadlines approached. In the end, it became clear that the Mad Libs eBay Road Trip fit several purposes for our ministry at that point – even more than a traditional mission trip would have. That certainly doesn’t mean our trip was perfect or that my decision was somehow “infallible” or anything. But the whole thing sure did seem to be purposeful, and I could get excited about that.
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What impact can an ad really have? Can it actually make a city feel better about itself? The answer this morning seems to be yes…
That’s how Monday’s FastCompany article on Chrysler’s Super Bowl ad begins. Did you see that commercial? It was well into the game, but it ran for a full two minutes, separating itself from the entire mass of well produced commercials that evening. (Even watching it again, though, it sure doesn’t seem that long.)
I spoke earlier this week about extrapolation, about the First Lady’s minor Charlotte flub and the way we too can assume that what applies to one campus or one region will apply to another.
But that’s the negative side of an amazing, beautiful reality. These places have a richness in their “localness,” in how they stand out from all the other campuses in the country. When we extrapolate, we’re actually denying the individuality of each campus, refusing to know it well enough to know the ways in which it is, simply, itself.
If you have a second, I encourage you to read the FastCompany article about the Chrysler ad before viewing it again (below). It helps point out the ways this commercial tied itself to its subject – not its apparent subject, a car, but its real subject.
A city.
And then ask yourself, “Could I produce something like this for my mission field? Have I let God bring me to love this campus enough, have I entered into its rhythms and life enough, that I could speak of it with tears in my eyes and fire in my belly?” Even though we place ourselves within these “campus tribes,” are we still relating to them as outsiders? Or have we immersed ourselves, made our home here, prayed not only to see but also to hear,
touch,
smell,
and taste these glorious places?
I urge you to “lose yourself / in the music, the moment” of your campus, that we might stand in a long line of missionaries indeed.
P.S. On a side note, the ad company behind this also created the Old Spice Man ads, which actually had a lot to teach us about college ministry, too. You can read about that right here.
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I spent a little time this week looking at areas we might want to consider this semester, including areas that perhaps don’t usually receive our focus. Another such area came from the always-profound Tim Elmore at the Intersect college ministers’ conference yesterday.
Sometimes, he said, we get so busy working in our ministry that we don’t get time to work on our ministry.
Some of you – maybe many of you, since you are, after all, reading a college ministry blog – love working on your ministry. You really enjoy strategizing beyond simply one semester, intentionally becoming better teachers and disciplers, auditing your systems for greater effectiveness, consistently seeking out wisdom on how to do this stuff better, and working on your ministry however else you can.
But there seem to be many college ministers out there who focus entirely on working in their ministry. Teaching, leading, planning events, doing events, meeting, discipling, going, going, going. It’s great. It’s impactful. But it’s not all that’s needed to fulfill our ministry.
To me, it’s clear that one of the simple lines that separates good college ministers from “okay” ones is right here: Time and effort spent working on our campus ministries, not simply in them.
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Earlier this week, I reflected on the need for us to avoid the easy road of just “doing service” with our students, even though we’re in a climate when volunteerism, social justice, and compassionate concern are all the rage. Let’s tie into that cultural fad, to be sure, but let’s make sure we couple doing service with shepherding.
What does this look like? I can think of two biggie principles I’d at least want to make sure to focus on.
Shepherding means pointing students to the biblical motivations for service.
Why?
That’s the question we’ve got to answer before it’s asked, because it’ll be rare for today’s students to even ask it! But doing service without a biblical motivation is, at best, simply secular – and pretty easily tiptoes into the low-grade legalism our students are extremely susceptible to.
If we’ve ordained that Service, Social Justice, or some similar theme will be part of the “DNA” of our ministry and yet we haven’t made this a ministry-wide teaching point, I honestly believe we’re doing a grave disservice to our students. Without the biblical whys, they’re either “doing good just ’cause,” they’ll quit doing good after awhile, or both.
Shepherding means training students in serving well.
If you’ve got to pick one, choose the above thing. Biblical motivations will likely lead to pretty impactful service all by themselves.
But in our role as shepherds, we have the chance to raise up servants who are actually really good at serving. It’s that whole “loving in deed and truth” thing. It’s serving “with the strength God supplies.” It’s serving in ways not like somebody “running aimlessly” or “beating the air.” Instead, we shepherd servants who more and more land their punches, actually impacting the people and groups and world they’re aiming to impact.
I think this sort of shepherding – shepherding the how of service – will take two courses, and they’re both important. We’ll give our students all sorts of biblical principles for creating a giant impact in the world. And we’ll also offer them all the wisdom we – and plenty of others – have on the practical skills of service.
Of course, love covers over a multitude of sins, and really loving the people we serve has a way of working out the kinks in our service. But still we’re commanded to love in deed and truth and not just word or tongue. If we really examined the servanthood of our college students, what percentage of their service really exemplifies the “deed and truth” variety?
More thoughts to come. [Find the next post in this thought-train, on things we need to shepherd students away from, right here.]
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As we know, many members of the collegiate ranks are excited – theoretically – about service, compassion ministry, social justice, and the like. But I agree with some other college ministers that college students might like the idea of service a bit more than they like actually serving. So yes, they will serve when service opportunities come along. But they’re not naturally going to invest much in making sure that the service they undertake is all that it could be.
The same can be true with any area of their Christian lives. They need help in growing up into Christ. So that’s why we shepherd them, right? We train them in Jesus-following and all its glorious, tough, blessingful facets.
So why would we be unwilling to shepherd our students when it comes to service?
Like prayer, kindness, evangelism, Bible study, or any other facet of our students’ spiritual lives, it’s not enough just to give them space and opportunity to do service. It’s never enough just to put a service project on a calendar… at least not if we want to produce lifelong servants.
I mentioned yesterday that I worked an aid station once again at the local White Rock Marathon this past weekend. And after four years of that effort, I’ve certainly learned that there are better and worse ways of serving in that capacity.
There are better ways to give cups of water to runners, better ways to cheer, better ways to mix the Gatorade, and so on. If I’m in it just to have a good time, I won’t care about those things. But if I’m in it to serve the runners, I have to attend to the necessary skills, as simple as they may be.
Of course, we can’t know all the skills our students will need for all the ways they’ll serve the world. But we can produce true servants, people biblically motivated to serve at all times “with the strength God supplies.”
On the other hand, if we don’t shepherd our students, we risk producing only “people who serve on occasion” – and people whose selfishness or lack of skill greatly diminishes their impact on a hurting (and watching) world. That’s no good at all.
Service, like the other things we urge, is an area that needs our shepherding – not just our encouragement.
Are we raising up servants who are really good at helping in ways that meet actual needs really well? Are we raising up students who will work hard to serve best?
[Here's the next post, on how we shepherd students' service.]
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Something I touched on yesterday (because it came up at the Cohort) is something that has been near and dear to my heart since the yearlong road trip, after observing all kinds of college ministry activity around the country.
It’s the concept that without connecting our ministry’s emphases to spiritual truth, we create legalists.
On Saturday, we talked for awhile about social justice / compassion ministry, which is obviously something that many college ministries are now incorporating in a major way.
My comment was that if we avoid truth-teaching at this juncture, if we just treat this activity as “obviously right” or “something we do because it’s clearly good” and never point to the biblical whys and underlying spiritual ideas here, then we’re simply teaching students the same non-theistic morality they’d learn in their fraternities or the Kiwanis Club.
The same goes with anything we promote – and especially those things we hope to make “pillars” or the “DNA” of our college ministries. If we want a theme to spread throughout the ministry and its students, then we surely have to teach its biblical foundations in a ministry-wide, comprehensive way. This probably means from the stage of the Large Group Meeting, or throughout your small groups. And it probably means more than once. And it probably means somewhat repeatedly.
If we don’t, then we’re not teaching godly grounds for good works. And that produces a form of legalism, right?
I’ve hinted at this principle on occasion, but the last time I really expounded on the thought was a year and a half ago. So if you really want to wrestle with this concept, I’d encourage you to read those two posts – the first, about connecting students with the biblical whys, and the second about the dangers when we don’t.
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The theme of this year’s Catalyst Conference was “The Tension is Good.” And while certainly not every speaker aimed directly for the heart of the theme (because that would have been annoying), it was woven throughout – and capped off by some excellent practical instruction by Andy Stanley.
The crux of that Catalyst finale was the idea that not all tensions should be ultimately resolved. Some tensions are meant only to be managed, left purposely “tensioned” because they represent not good vs. evil or even good vs. best, but good vs. good. Successful ministry will mean doing what wisely needs to be done this time… while leaving “unresolved” the tensions that will continue to instruct our future plans. (I’d encourage you to get the recording if you can.)
In the final gathering of our College Ministers Cohort (an update on how that went is here), a few dozen of us looked at several Catalyst-introduced ideas through the lens of our calling as college ministers. So we often found ourselves recognizing “tensions to manage” in college ministry.
Today, I simply wanted to list the tensions I heard during our time. But what’s important not to miss – indeed, the radical idea hiding within this simple list – is that these particular tensions are not to be resolved (at least in my view). In some way or another, we are each likely to face a give-and-take, back-and-forth, on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand tug for as long as we minister to college students.
Of course, if you disagree – if you feel that there is a definite way to lean for any of these – I’d love to hear about it. And if you have other tensions to add, please do that, too. I’m just listing the ones we talked about that morning, but there are plenty more in the messy practice of campus ministry.
(An extra thanks to Steve Lutz, who explicitly articulated several of these during our time on Saturday.)
1. College ministry involvement AND “significant involvement” in a local church. Applies for both campus-based and church-based ministries. As I noted Saturday, we haven’t done a good job of recognizing what everybody else believes “significant involvement” means… or done much of the hard work of ecclesiology to figure out what we each think it means, either.
2. Being “on mission” AND impacting those already present.
3. Discipling students for their “now” AND discipling for their “later.” Right now, we seem to skew heavily toward the former.
4. Discipling the immature or unchurched AND discipling the churched / mature. Besides evangelistic outreaches, it’s rare to see either group addressed individually. Not that there’s a clear line, either.
5. Students’ “spiritual” / ministry life AND their classroom life. Clearly, college ministry is famous for skewing toward the former.
6. At Christian colleges: Discipling students via college ministry principles AND appreciating how Christian faculty impact them. You think there’s ministry diversity on your campus? There’s probably no setting with more “styles” or different attempts at discipleship than the Christian college campus… And yet some office often is charged with being the “point people” for this impact.
7. Cooperating with other college ministries AND getting our own ministry goals accomplished. While I hear more complaints about ministries skewing toward the latter, it’s very possible to lean too heavily the other way, too…
8. Autonomy of students AND adult / staff direction.
9. Practicing social justice / compassion ministry AND helping students understand these things biblically. If we don’t do the latter, we’re happily creating legalists.
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This is one of two articles I’m including in our program at this week’s College Ministers Cohort during the Catalyst Conference. It’s a revamp of a blog post from about a year ago, and it’s something great for all of us to think about!
To stay connected with the joys of Catalyst (and the Cohort) this week, tune in to the blog or – for even more – keep an eye on my Twitter feed.
The widely-recognized lack of college ministry training resources doesn’t let us off the hook when it comes to advancing our understanding of our calling. We can still learn from plenty of sources, if we choose to.
For as long as I’m a college minister, I hope I’ll always work to apply great ideas and great training to my work as a college minister. It’s not enough simply to learn great “general ministry” thoughts that are cool to blog about but don’t affect my day-to-day work.
I want to challenge all of us… to a little more one-track-mindedness. When you attend a ministry conference, consider analyzing its value for your present work. When you read a book, why not read it with college-ministry-colored glasses? When you have extra time, don’t just read “cool Christian blogs,” but look for blogs and articles and other sources that might be applied—however tangentially—to college ministry. This won’t always feel natural and certainly isn’t always easy. But it keeps each of us from being “a jack of all trades, and master of none.”
Very often
we dabble in every area in which we have an interest
rather than
especially focusing on the area that already has our investment.
And more importantly, it’s the area to which we are called.
A while back, a Campus Crusade friend described how he had learned some college ministry principles… from a church-planting conference. In that same conversation, I described a major college ministry brainstorming tool I gained from Seth Godin’s secular book, Free Prize Inside. And I’ll never forget how one church-based college minister described using the ads and articles in ESPN Magazine to find design ideas.
If you follow my blog, you know I’ve found college ministry principles in Jimmy Fallon’s show, the musical Wicked, the teaching at the Catalyst Conference and other non-college ministry conferences, secular and Christian books, and on and on.
Certainly, God has other things to teach us that apply to other parts of our lives. But if our vocation—our calling—is college ministry, it’s very possible that God wants to teach us lots more about our field. Even when He ships that wisdom in odd-looking packages.
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