Getting Past Irrelevance

August 12, 2010 in Evangelism, Ministry with 9 Comments

The random picture will be explained below.

Helping Students find Purpose (when they’re not looking for it).
There was some great discussion/comments on yesterday’s post The Chief End of College Students so I thought I’d solicit more specific help.

Crowd-source my ministry planning.

Using your collective genius to help us better reach college students with the gospel.

Stehanie N. summarized the question well in the comments yesterday:

“I understand that they aren’t already thinking about Life Purpose…but is it possible to get them there? And then create doubt about whether their ladder is leaning against the right wall, so to speak?”



So yesterday AM, our staff team spent about an hour looking for practical application points for our ministry. Here’s what we came up with in our first pass. I’m not posting this because we figured it out – I’m posting because maybe you/your team have found some things that work.

So if you would, take a look at what we came up with as a team and let me know what you’d add/subtract/change, etc.


It’s a bit long but hopefully very practical:

The main “solution” we came up with in “Getting Past Irrelevance” is relationships. As we see it, there is no one shot solution. It will take a sustained relationship and many conversations to help students see the incredible relevance of the gospel.

Just to be clear: we’re not going the relational evangelism route because we’re scared to share the gospel up front. Us? Scared? Please! If Campus Crusade drove a truck, we’d have 30 “Aint Skeered” and “No Fear” stickers plastered on our back windshield.

It’s just that our boldness with the gospel in the past (speaking for our team) has fallen on deaf ears because it’s filtered out thru the “not relevant to my life right now” auto-reflex of college students. So we will be bold by creating tension and then presenting the gospel.

Our vision statement is relational and provides the solution: “Equipping students so that everyone knows someone who passionately follows Jesus”.
As they really know (go thru life side by side) with a passionate Christ-follower they will see what is lacking in their own life (tension).
Then we can present the message of the gospel – because they have ears to hear.

So the long term solution is a relationship where the gospel is lived out and explicitly communicated through many mini-gospel presentations (best done in a conversational, “this is how the gospel is humbling me to the ground right now and how I’m finding hope in the grace/love of Christ right now”).


To get really practical, what do we do during the initial conversation?

  • In our particular situation, we have 2,000 contact cards at the beginning of the year. And hundreds of follow up appointments in the first few weeks. And throughout the year we (staff and students) are trying to “stir the pot” with whomever we talk to on campus, trying to start spiritual conversations. How do get past irrelevance in this initial conversation?

Here’s what we’ve done in the past on follow up appts:

  • Explain who we are as Cru and what we offer.
  • If the conversation is still moving along (i.e. their eyes aren’t glazed over), ask the Kennedy Questions (If you were to die tonight, how sure are you that you would go to heaven? & If God said, why should I let you into heaven, what would you say?) and try to share the gospel
  • If the conversation has hit a wall, yell as they’re slamming the door: “OK, so Tuesday night is Cru and we’ll see you at Bible study tomorrow night right???”
  • The goal – to invite them to a meeting/Bible study and share the gospel with them

Maybe we just suck at ministry but this hasn’t yielded much fruit for us (anyway you measure it – conversions, involvement in Cru, etc)


Here’s our best shot at a new approach – The goal of the initial conversation is to get a second relational connection (going to a movie, lunch the next day, a Bible study, playing Ultimate Frisbee). The primary goal of the first appointment is to launch a long-term relationship.

And to try to create tension starting with the first appointment or encounter.  Some ideas we had:

  • Quote/paraphrase Acts 17 – From before Creation God “determined the times set for you and the exact places where you should live.”
  • So God has you here at the U of A for a determined purpose.
  • So why do you think God has you here? What do you hope to get out of college?”
  • Their probable answer: “Get a degree. Meet People. Have a good time.”
  • Our response: ?????

That’s where we’re a bit stuck. How do you increase the tension in a conversational/non-preachy way: “I’ve arrived at the solution, let me tell you how yours is wrong”?   Because I think if you do that – you lose them again.

One idea – Use CCC’s Soularium cards and ask them to pick a couple pictures that best represent:
 1. What drives you in life? What motivates you?
2. What does your spiritual life like now?
3. What would you like your spiritual life to look like by the time you graduate?


So help us out – what has worked for you in “Getting Past Irrelevance”. Additionally, how do you ratchet up tension in a bold yet conversational/non-preachy way.


photo courtesy of slambo_42 via Flickr (with the obvious Aint Skeered/CCC adaption)

  • http://ali-enos.com Ali

    Another great post! I wish I had thoughts, but these are some of the same questions I have been pondering and talking about with other staff friends. I look forward to reading others comments and hopefully gaining some insight on this….thanks for starting the dialogue.

  • http://www.destinoyearbook.com DE

    Tim,

    What if you went about answering this question a totally different way? What if instead of trying to approach the same students in a new way you started approaching new students?

    20% of your campus is non-white. ( http://oir.uark.edu/students/pdfs/Fall2009EnrlRptSummary.pdf )What if the percentage of students “with ears to hear the gospel” was much higher among the minorities than the caucasian students. If you had to do less work to get them to to the place you want wouldn’t that make up for the fact that there are fewer minorities on campus? Might you actually get more bang for your buck?

    Last fall we saw 1 in 4 Hispanic students accept Christ when we presented the gospel. Maybe God’s moving in a similar way in the African-American or Hispanic communities on your campus.

    “Find out where God is at work and go join him in it.” – Henry Blackaby

  • http://Website Matthew Moravec

    Maybe it is too much to both launch a long-term relationship and create tension. When a guy is planning a first date with a girl, would you advise him to begin introducing tension that perhaps a single life isn’t best for her?

  • timcasteel

    DE – GREAT thoughts. You’re a “reaching-ethnic-students” evangelist! Love it! Love having your input.

    As a team we’ve just recently (last 2 years) started putting a focused effort toward African American and International students.

    I’m going to have our team look at that PDF you linked to on Monday morning during planning. Embarrassingly, I didn’t realize we had so many Hispanics!

  • timcasteel

    See. That’s why I started blogging. You put your ideas/thoughts out there and get great feedback like yours Matthew. Hadn’t really thought that one through – is it too much to expect to be able to do both?

    My initial thought (re: why we would try to do both) is that we would try to start the relationship on a spiritual note (and not do a bait and switch later on after we’ve built a relationship). Not give them a ton of “harsh truth” on the front end but enough to set up conversations in the future.

    Also, if we just hang out without any spiritual content the student we’re meeting with may be like, “so. . . why are you here again?” or “why is this 34 year old dude trying to hang out with me?”. At least here at the U of A, most students grew up in a youth group and expect you to play the youth pastor role of asking spiritual questions. And hopefully they’ll be pleasantly surprised at our tact/grace and desire to invest in them relationally.

    But I can see what you’re saying that there may not be enough relational currency to introduce tension at the very beginning. Anyone else have insights on this one?

  • http://www.destinoyearbook.com DE

    Tim,

    Everyone’s reaching ethic students…most are just going for Ethnically “white” students. Just trying to broaden horizons.

    It’s great your team has already started putting effort towards the minority students on campus. In my experience, the more effort you put in the more you see happen. Hope that holds true for y’all!

  • http://Website David Taylor

    All these are great comments… I’m a little late to the party but a great read. I like what DE mentioned. I would say in Houston and @ UH specifically this has energized me in min. working w/ethnic students that seem more interested in the gospel.

    Also one thought I had (and I’m just spit balling here) as a student shares their plans/what they want they want to get out of college, you challenge them to want MORE. Paint a picture of living a life of the ‘ho-hum’ or mundane graduating, getting a job, marriage, house w/white picket fence, 2.3 kids and a dog, or living a more adventurous life, a life that seeks to get outside of itself. Or just say… “Don’t you want more out of life?!”

    Maybe the challenge of activities that engage them in something along the lines of social justice, like serving somewhere in the community along side your Cru students would help start those relationships that could allow gospel conversations to pop up later. You could schedule/plan a ‘service project’ that you can invite these new contacts to as a follow up to your initial contacts. This would still put out who you are, but also create a bit of tension & challenge them to engage in something outside themselves, hopefully leading to gospel conversations down the road?

    Just a couple random thoughts…
    DT

  • http://Website Mike Beckham

    Tim,

    This is good stuff and it is really in the same train of thought we are taking at ou. E one thought I would add is that this is where us guiding and providing vision to a student led movement is so critical. In reality we are likely to seem like we are doing a bait and switch with students because we don’t have the time to develop a relationship of significant depth with very many students. Even when we do we are not the most natural people for them to connect with. In contrast our students do have time to develop long term relationships where the gospel can be talked about over natural relational connection. As a result our staff team sees our role as introducing new students to our gospel community. The relationship side of the ministry is primarily owned by the students.

  • timcasteel

    Thanks for the input David – better late than never!

    Great addition Mike – we’ve actually been talking about similar things as a team. Staff’s #1 job is to empower students. But when it comes to following up and meeting new students, we talk about staff being free agents – our job is initiate with new students (maybe grab lunch with them) and then seek to quickly pass them on to student leaders (for them to pour into).