Nor Cal / Nev College Ministries

This is a synthesis of an interview Glen Davis conducted with Steve Shadrach, founder of Student Mobilization along with highlights from Steve's packet titled "Heart of the Campus."

Launching Transformative Campus Ministry

1. Your students will do to others what you did with them. If all you do to start up is find all the loose Christians on campus and get them in a room, don't expect an evangelistic powerhouse to result. Win them to Christ, don’t just invite Christians.
2. You will attract students like those in your core: focus on mainstream influencers (as opposed to interested or isolated students).
3. Don’t start a large group meeting until you have 15-20 mainstream students who have primarily been won to Christ who are all sharing Christ with their friends. It takes a year and a half to two years to reach that point.
4. The three key components of a campus ministry are momentum, multiplication, and management.
5. Do discipleship in the context of evangelism, and not vice-versa. Frequently we teach people to do evangelism as one component of our discipleship strategy and then get back to 'real discipleship'. What we need to do instead is help students share their faith and in the context of ministry do on-the-spot discipleship.
6. Spend all your time on campus, hold all your meetings on campus—don’t even have an office! Grab your suitcase/backpack in the morning, get on campus, and don't leave until the day is done.
7. The beginning is hard, exhausting work. You have to take the initiative in everything, meet people like crazy, and follow up on those meetings.

Reaching The Heart Of The Campus

• "All people are equally important, but not all people are equally strategic." Dr. Bill Bright
• The most strategic people on campus are the key leaders of the key groups.
• They comprise only about 5% of the campus, but their influence is huge.
• Win the chief, win the tribe--this is a basic missiological principle.
• The heart of the campus is the most unreached segment.
• Focus on influencers and you will indirectly effect more interested and isolated students.
• If you want influential staff down the road you must focus on influential students now.

Do We Want FAT Or FAITH?

We often say we're looking for FAT student-faithful, available, and teachable, but for an interested or isolated student, FAT may mean this:

Effectiveness Questions

1. What percentage of my group converted under my ministry?
2. Do I have more freshmen than upperclassmen?

Leadership Questions

1. Are more than 1/3 of your student leaders new this year? If not, you are not prepared for sustainable growth.
2. Does joining your leadership team make a student's life better or worse? If better, then why don't you have more applications? If worse, then why?
3. Do you hear frequent laughter in leadership meetings?
4. Do people reguarly disagree with one another in your leadership meetings? If not, then you have a problem. Either people don't feel safe or all your leaders are too stupid to form opinions.
   

Imagine a city with several Assemblies of God churches. There may be a four-year campus with a Chi Alpha ministry, a commuter campus with nothing on-campus, and two or three churches which have college groups of their own.

How should they relate to one another?

I bounced this question off one of the most innovative people that I know, and this is what I heard:

Noble Bowman is a veteran Chi Alpha missionary currently stationed in Springfield, MO. He and I talked on the phone, and this is a rough approximation of what they do.

1. Following Andy Stanley's breakdown of foyer, living room, and kitchen environments (http://www.northpoint.org for more info) work with other AG college ministries to offer complementary programming.

2. In the Springfield model, all the different AG college ministries will together sponsor a weekly meeting in a neutral venue designed to be a foyer (evangelistic) environment. They're planning to use a non-AG church located near campus. That’s important because a lot of our churches are nervous about one another.
3. Each participating church provides a living room (fellowship) environment on Sundays (i.e., a college group that has fun together).
4. Collectively the college ministries provide a network of kitchen environments (discipleship small groups) that meet on campuses, in students' apartments, or anywhere else they can arrange. Each small group leader is required to be an active participant in one of the local church living room environments.
5. At the weekly gathering they plug the small groups (and not the local church gatherings) and in the small groups they invite people to be a part of the sponsoring churches each Sunday. In other words, they sneak the students into church through the back door.

The take-away from this model is that we seek to find things we can do that are complementary and not competitive. We're all on the same team, and so there's got to be a way we can act like it without abandoning our individual ministries.

It is time to move from the philosophical, theological foundations for the discipling process to the implementation of that process. With us, as with Jesus, the method must be in the building up of believers into disciple-makers. What is needed is a consistent direction and process. There is no magical recipe. Remember, discipleship is a process not a program. The prindples of discipleship must be applied and tailored to your unique situation. We repeat, there is no magic formula which can be devised to work in all situations.

However, just as a farmer prepares the soil to receive the seed, then fertilizes and waters, so we can prepare the soil of our campus groups to become a discipling ministry. Just as with all other ministry, campus ministry is the Lord's work. He causes the growth. He makes people mature. He has instructed us to be part of the process. So how can we help prepare the soil? Hopefully some of the following ideas may help you on the way.