Top Takeaways from Large Cru Movements – Part 2

You can read Takeaways Part 1 here (click here for the Intro of the series)

If you want to go back and read about each campus here are the 8 Large Cru Movements I profiled:

• University of Florida
• Montana State
• Michigan State
• Cal Poly- San Luis Obispo
• Miami of Ohio
• NC State
• Ole Miss
• Penn State

 

Here are my Top 10 Takeaways

1. The Critical Event– Montana State
   • A trained person taking a non-trained person to share their faith
   • How to share your faith can’t be learned in a classroom. The campus whose staff do more evangelism than any campus I’ve ever heard of — Montana State – hardly does any classroom training in evangelism. They just go out and do it (modeling it).
2. It’s a longer process to take a carnal, nominal, youth group kid to Christ centered than it is to take a lost student to Christ-centered laborer – Miami
   • We want to reach the unbelievers, but we have a ton of students who come as self-centered Christians and we trust God to scrub them down and start following God passionately
3. Start the way you want to finish– Michigan State
   • If you want students who are engaged with the Lord, sharing their faith as seniors, you need to start doing that with them as freshmen
4. Emotionally unhealthy staff like to do everything themselves because they feel better about themselves — they feel productive – Miami
   • If you’re movement is led by students, there’s not much you need to cover in a staff meeting
   • Do staff say “Man, Mark runs ragged. He’s exhausted”?
   • I look at staff who are running crazy and I think; “I don’t think a student would want to be like you”
5. We work really hard to make sure we have a meeting that people want to bring their friends to (feel comfortable with/not embarrassing) – Penn State
6. We had created an [unhealthy] culture of discipleship = “deep conversations at coffee houses”– Cal Poly- SLO
   • I heard some of our students saying “I guess I better start liking coffee because I’m going to start discipling guys”
7. If we were a factory, what is the widget we would produce? – Penn State
   • If we were a tree, what would be our fruit?
   • We produce Laborers!
8. Everything we do is designed to move students toward becoming: “independent, capable, Christ-centered laborers equipped and motivated to continue their own development and influence the world for Christ” – Penn State
9. Parents Weekend – Florida
   • Parents come to weekly meeting on Friday night
   • Do a Giving Brunch next morning
10. Florida’s streamlined ministry structure. Everything is built around Community Groups.
    • How do they do evangelism? Thru Community Groups.
    • How do staff spend their time? Pouring into Community Group Leaders.
    • I’m especially intrigued by how their studies are multi-generational (freshmen thru senior in the same group)

 

What are your main takeaways or favorite thoughts?