Tim Casteel

Thoughts on Leadership and College Ministry

Sending

The 1 Common Element of Radical, World-changing College Movements

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For decades, Cru’s mission has been “Turning lost students into Christ centered laborers.”

Our mantra has been “Win/Build/Send”. The reason I have remained on campus for 20 years is because I want to send laborers to the harvest.

But over the last few years I have been convicted that on our campus, our Cru movement could more accurately be described as “Gather/Build/Keep”

Our campus is solidly in the Bible Belt. It’s easy to find kids who grew up in solid churches. We can have a good size movement ministry by “Gather/Build/Keep”.

 

But that is not why I am on the college campus. I am on campus to send laborers.

 

And here’s the issue:
“People reproduce what they have experienced.” Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch – The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church
Students who are pursued and brought to Christ with much persistence, will turn into laborers who pursue with much persistence. Students who get involved because they were looking just to “plug in” somewhere will find it difficult to be persistent pursuers.

 

In other words, many of the most effective Christ-centered laborers start out as really lost freshmen.

 

Steve Shadrach remarked to me that he’s found THE one common element of radical world-changing college movements:
the movement is made up of students who were led to Christ in college. 

 

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Cru on my campus – the University of Arkansas. In those five decades God has worked in some incredible ways. There have been seasons of true revival and thousands of laborers have been sent out. No exaggeration – hundreds of churches have been planted as a result of Arkansas Cru alumni. How did those revivals happen?
In the late 60’s and early 70’s when Cru began at the U of A, revival swept the campus.
In 1968, 2 Cru staff, Don and Sally Meredith, launched the ministry. Sally recounts: “It was in the turbulent sixties and the days of ‘God is dead’ philosophy. He proved soooooo alive.” That year they saw 4 students get involved and go with them on a summer mission with Cru.

 

One year later, they brought 200 students with them to the summer mission – the vast majority of those 200 had just trusted Christ.
Yesterday I spoke to a lady who was involved with Cru at Arkansas in the early 70’s – her comment: “It was really amazing – none of us came from Christian homes. Everyone involved with Campus Crusade became Christians in college.”

 

In the early 80’s, revival swept the Arkansas campus again.
This time through University Baptist Church (and what was to become StuMo). I encourage you to read Steve Shadrach’s recounting of that incredible movement of the Spirit. The common thread? They aggressively shared the gospel on campus and the movement was almost completely made up of new converts.
Do you want revival like that on your campus? I believe it begins with aggressively pursuing the lost.

Mark Brown, who was the long time Cru director at Miami (OH), once told me:

“It’s a longer process to turn a self-righteous, youth group all-star into a Christ-centered laborer than it is to turn a totally lost student into a Christ centered laborer.”
So do we not want already-strong Christians involved? Of course we want them involved. But we quickly want to engage them in the mission to show them that they are not involved in a Christian social club but a missional force that is engaged in the great adventure of proclaiming Christ to the nations.

 

What you win them with is what they will win others with. If you’re preaching (by words OR by deeds) “come get involved with us – you will really get poured into and have sweet praise and worship” then you will attract spiritual leeches. If you’re preaching (by words and deeds) “let’s boldly proclaim the gospel to lost students” then you are going to be a movement of world changers.

 

The primary way you preach “come help change the world” is to make your primary activity seeking the lost. Now, I’ve found that even the best of already-solid Christians usually require patient, persistent vision to catch the vision of seeking and saving the lost. It’s worth sticking with them and casting vision to them and continuing to push them to be a bold pursuer. I was one of those “already-solid” incoming freshmen. And I eventually turned into a laborer with a heart for the lost. But I spent many years in college actively trying to avoid sharing my faith! I mostly wanted to gather believers into my Bible study.

 

I have a friend who has labored in Western Europe for over a decade and he shared with me the issue he sees with much of our sending:
We have seen well over 250 students come through our country [on STINT and Summer Missions] but after all these resources, I could hardly get anyone to stay and work longterm. We would get students from these highly successful ministries that can’t cope with ministry…where you have to share your faith all the time.
Here in Europe it is purely a WIN-BUILD-SEND ministry. In America they were successful because you could find-build-send.
For example, we have had multiple students come here and tell me they want to run my weekly meeting. Others who say I want to have a worship ministry. Some say, “my goal is pour my life into 5 men who can multiply themselves”. Our city has 100,000 students and maybe 20 known Christ followers!! Not going to happen.

 

Effective Sending starts with Winning. The most effective Christ-centered laborers will likely start out as really lost freshmen.

 

So the question is: How would our staff and student leaders spend our time if we really believed that Sending starts with Winning?

 

What Do These Maps Tell You?

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As we as Christians think about where to invest our time and resources, I think these maps are really helpful:

Faithland from VividMaps

NYTimes’s Ross Douthat’s reaction (and Rod Dreher’s response) to that map:

As you might guess, I am with Douthat on this one. Granted, I haven’t read Dreher’s book. But it just doesn’t seem like the early church waited around for the tides of history to turn more favorable.

This second map from VividMaps is less, well, vivid but more helpful as it is just evangelicals (the above map has any religion – Muslim, Mormon, etc.)

I have written before (in 2015) about my organization, Cru, and our allocation of staff vs the need.

As far as solutions to this need, I still agree with my 2015 self –

  • I’m a big fan of empowering leaders by showing them a problem or a need and asking them to be a part of the solution.
  • I would love to see a grassroots movement of college ministries sending to where there is a need. A local-level driven movement where teams sacrificially send to the world and to more needy areas of the country. A mentality of “send first” and trusting God that He’ll provide the staff we need to reach our own campus

 

But I think there may be another component of the solution that my 2015 self couldn’t see: Dr. Soong-Chan Rah, in his book The Next Evangelicalism, makes a compelling case that the future of Christianity in America rests on the shoulders of immigrants and ethnic minority leaders:

White churches [in America] are in decline while the immigrant, ethnic and multiethnic churches are flourishing. Very few have recognized that American Christianity may actually be growing, but in unexpected and surprising ways. Contrary to popular opinion, the church is not dying in America; it is alive and well, but it is alive and well among the immigrant and ethnic minority communities and not among the majority white churches in the United States.

Unless [churches/parachurches] see growth among the ethnic minority population within their [congregation] they will experience steady decline.

Even while we consider the needs of the U.S., we HAVE to keep the bigger picture in mind. God is not America First.

 

The needs of the world dwarf the needs of the U.S. Virtually the whole world is < 5% evangelical (which is < than any part of America).(click to see a larger pdf)

from the IMB

And what of the new reality that the Global South (Africa/S America/Asia) is the New Face of Christianity?

In the year 1900, Europe and North America comprised 82 percent of the world’s Christian population. In 2005, Europe and North America comprised 39 percent of the world’s Christian population with African, Asian and Latin American Christians making up 60 percent of the world’s Christian population. By 2050, African, Asian and Latin American Christians will constitute 71 percent of the world’s Christian population.

The Next Evangelicalism – Dr. Soong-Chan Rah

As we think about where to invest our time and resources, a good bet is on the growth markets:

What do these maps tell you?

 

Govember

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“November is Summer Missions month” – Jim Sautner, Destino National Development Director

Govember is a month-long focus on God’s heart for the nations and our role in that (specifically focused on Summer Mission and STINT – one year international internship). We focus on Govember all across our movement: weekly meeting, community group, staff meeting, and discipleship content.

I got the idea from talking to University of Wisconsin Cru (and I know many others do it) and we’ve adapted it for our campus.

“If you create the momentum for Summer Project early it will snowball throughout the spring months. Plus students can drop the bomb on their parents over Thanksgiving break. Take advantage of this month, it will pay off in March.”  – Adam Penning – Cru staff at U of Wisconsin

If you want to use the Govember branding we use, here’s the logo.

Here’s what we do during Govember with lots of linked resources:

A monthlong focus at the Cru meeting on going – some ideas:
– Heart for the lost
– Heart for world (get the Traveling Team to come in November if you can!)
– Lordship
– Eternal perspective (my talk and slides)
– STINT night – this was by far the best Cru we did all year. Essentially, we spotlight Arkansas Cru grads who are serving God all over the world, mostly via video. Here’s the flow of what we do)

A Summer Missions recruiting dinner
– Here’s an overview of what we do
– Here’s the talk that I give at the dinner (and another talk I’ve used)
– A sample response card to follow up after the dinner (the pdf file is editable in photoshop)

All of our Community Groups do world-focused material during November:
– A 3 week study we adapted from The Traveling Team: Govember Study – Leader  — Govember Study – Student
– A great idea from Ball State Cru: assign a country to each student in the Bible study — give them an Operation World and they research it and present it back to their study and they pray for it

At least one week of focus on the world in all our student discipleship
– The Compass lesson on World Vision

– An article to read in discipleship: A Brief History Of Campus Missions

Staff Focus
– A couple great articles to read with your team during this month: A Missionary Call by Robert Speer and Mobilization of College Students by Claude Hickman

– Kick off the month by doing the “how to do a summer project challenge” document as a devo with your staff team. Don’t tell them what it is for until the very end.

Some other ideas (that we haven’t tried) from Wisconsin:

8 by 12/08: Each staff person personally challenges 8 students to Summer Missions by Dec. 8th. Give your team 6-7 min in staff meeting to actually write their list. Remind your team about the 8 by 12/8 challenge each week at staff meeting during Govember. Follow up with your team half way through the month to see how it is going by writing the names of everyone who has been challenged down on the white board. Then take 10 min an pray for those names and people left to be challenged.

Man-sized challenge: Two staff men do “Man-sized breakfast for a man-sized challenge” together with four students at a time, using the “How to do a Summer Missions challenge” document.

Share the wealth! What has helped your campus send students on Summer Missions or overseas as missionaries?

#MovementGoals – Send 10% to the World

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Fresh off the virtual press, Shane Sebastian (Cru’s Global Missions Executive Director) has released an article with a powerful vision and challenge: trusting God to send 10% of our involved students each year to bless the nations.

10% of our students each year would go to the world on vision trips, Summer Missions or STINT. If you have 100 students involved with you, 10 would go on Global Summer Missions or Vision Trips. If you have 400, 40 would be sent.

God's Heart for the World

National Current Reality= 3%

What is the current reality on your campus? What % are you sending to the world each year?

We have a tremendous stewardship to send. Laborers come from the college campus. And the U.S. campus ministry is exponentially larger than any other country.

By far, the vast majority of laborers within Cru come from within the U.S. Campus Ministry. May God use the U.S. campus ministry to send generously. To send at least 10% of our movements every year to reach the world for Christ.

Shane asked me to partner with him in writing this article and to share how sending to the world has benefited our local ministry. I echo this from Dan Higgins: “If you just go after a campus, you’ll get nothing. But If you go after the world you’ll reach the world and get the campus thrown in.” This has definitely been true for us. The campus is too small a vision for students. As we send more and more to the world, our local movement expands.

world map

I’d encourage you to read and discuss this article with your staff team and student leaders. The number one determiner of whether a school sends a lot of students to the world? Whether the staff really buys into sending. You won’t send if your staff team doesn’t bleed for the world.

Download it here:

God’s Heart for the World or here on Google Drive.

If it’d be helpful, I’d be happy to skype into your staff meeting to share some of the best practices of the best sending schools in the nation or what has worked on our campus to send more. You can email me at tim dot casteel @cru.org.

 

What We’re Implementing on Our Campus from the Top Sending Campuses

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The Top Sending Campuses

This is the part 5 in a series of posts summarizing key findings from researching 17 of Cru’s Top Sending Campuses in the nation.

See the Intro for a full list of all the campuses profiled (and links to each).

It’s one thing to take all of this in. To hear what these Top Sending Schools are doing and think, “Well, that’s great. Good for them.”

The next step is to consider: “What does our campus need to implement from these Top Sending Schools?”

I thought it might be helpful to share with you what we have implemented on our campus at the University of Arkansas, since I’ve talked to these schools over the last couple years.

We’re taking baby steps toward sending. We’re learning it takes years, not months, to correct our course. I would guess it will take about 5 years – to see a freshmen class raised up under a culture of sending.

“You are changing the culture of your movement not just getting people to sign up. This will take time, intentionality and prayer.”

What we’ve implemented from the Top Sending Campuses (in order of impact):

  • If you’re not sending it’s probably because you as the director don’t really believe in sending
    • This was my biggest realization.
    • I have had very few game-changing epiphanies in my time as a director. I can only think of three:
      1. Discovering Movement Building – reading this little article gave me incredible clarity on what it looks like for me to succeed in my job in college ministry.
      2. Discovering the Secret of Success for Fund Raising Dinners
      3. And this: If you’re not sending it’s probably because you as the director don’t really believe in sending
    • If you would have asked me a few years ago why we don’t send more, I would have listed out 10 things students need to be doing: we need to get more students on Summer Mission, students need to care more about the world, etc, etc
    • I can distinctly remember sitting down last fall with Brian White, Cru MTL (Missional Team Leader) at Texas A&M. I asked Brian: “How are y’all so good at recruiting?” He immediately and politely corrected me: “We don’t recruit. Sending is who we are.”
    • It’s not a matter of semantics. For Texas A&M it’s not recruiting. It’s in their DNA. It’s the air they breathe as a staff team and movement.
    • More specifically, it’s Brian’s DNA. Brian eats/drinks/sleeps sending to the World.
    • I just sat there and got schooled for the next hour in what it looks like for an MTL to bleed for the world. Brian lives to send to the world.
    • Realizing that sending starts with the MTL was a game changer.
    • “As the leader, as the mouthpiece, you need to be telling the stories and leading from experience.” – Brian White
    • It’s why I’m sitting in a hotel in East Asia as I write this. Because if I don’t go, I won’t bleed for the world. I can’t bleed for a country I’ve never been to. So I’m here seeing what God is doing. Asking God to break my heart for this country. Meeting with the national staff to hear what their vision for their country is. Going on campus to do ministry.
    • That is by far the most impactful takeaway for me personally, and hopefully for our movement: I as the MTL need to go and personally own sending
    • “Our movements always reflect our leaders’ passions. If I’m asking how do I change the movement, I need to ask, what do I need to change? I need to ask — how passionate am I about it? What am I teaching? What am I talking about? Am I living this out? Are we highlighting it?” – Bacho, MTL at Ohio State
    • A corollary: My co-MTL and I need to be the ones challenging students to join with us:
      • “I had to learn as an MTL: My words carry a lot of weight — I’m looking people in the eye and I’m saying: ‘I’d really like you to be on our team’”
  • Our family is committing to going overseas on Summer Mission every three years
    • It’s an extension of the previous point, but our family is planning on going on Summer Mission next summer to East Asia.
    • It costs a small fortune for my family to go anywhere. We have 5 kids.
    • family.001But in talking to Brian White and his wife Erin (Cru leaders at A&M), they would say that one of THE keys to them sending so many students into full time ministry has been their family going overseas every three years (and they have 4 kids – pictured (a long time ago!) to the right).
    • My oldest kid is 13 and we have NEVER taken them overseas on a Cru Summer Mission. I honestly didn’t feel like it was a good investment of God’s money to spend close to $30,000 for 1 of us to work full time on campus (my wife is working full time with Cru but would spend 95% of her time keeping up with 5 kids!). So we’ve never done it. I’ve taken a couple vision trips on my own, but our family has never gone.
    • But as I sat down with Brian and Erin White, I was convinced. They showed me a picture of a Summer team they took to East Asia 5 years ago. Something like 13 of the 15 students are interning or on staff with Cru now. That’s not a bad batting average. And both Erin and Brian pointed to the students really connecting with their family and coming back to College Station and continuing to be close to their family.
    • Why every three years? Not exactly sure! We’re just following the White’s wisdom here! I would guess because: It IS expensive and because there are other needs some summers (MPD, seminary, sabbatical)
  • Staff owning it
    • Again, this is an extension of the first point.
    • We’re not sending because our staff 1) Aren’t going and 2) Aren’t passionate about sending
    • “The main mouthpieces of the movement need to be speaking of the partnership from first hand experience. Vision trips or summer projects every few years are great ways to keep things fresh for those who are casting vision.” – Texas A&M
    • So a few things we’re implementing as a team:
      • We want every staff/intern to go to one of our partnerships in their first 2 years on the team (either on a Vision Trip or Summer Mission)
      • Our staff are actively seeking to lead our Summer Missions partnerships (both internationally and stateside)
        • Previously, we were pretty hands off with our staff’s summers. We were like the book of Judges: “everyone did what was right in their own eyes”.
        • But we want to set a norm on our team that most staff will go on one of our three partnerships EVERY summer:
          • East Asia
          • Ethiopia
          • San Diego
        • “Come with me” is far more powerful than “you should go”
        • We’ve noticed a HUGE difference in the number of students who will go if we have our staff or key students leading a project (vs when they are being led by other campuses’ staff). HUGE.
      • We are asking our staff to decide by August where they will be going for the Summer and Spring Break. So the minute they step on campus in the fall they are planting seeds with students- “Hey, what are you doing this summer? You should totally come with me to Ethiopia this summer!”
        • Part of this has been lobbying our region to move up their Summer placement to August
        • Previously, our staff would find out in November where they are going
  • Being proactive to select summer and STINT leaders for the coming year
    • They are the most important people to get on board (again, preferably by August)
    • Because they will assemble their team
  • GovemberGovember –we have done this for two years now and I think it has really helped create a sending culture. – via Wisconsin
  • We continue to really push Summer Missions and have started to really push Vision Trips
    • “Summer Missions are the lead measure for full time staff” — Wisconsin
    • “There’s a good chance if students go on Spring Break overseas, then STINT will be on their radar”
  • Junior Recruiting Dinner – via Virginia Tech
    • “We used to do most of our recruiting during student’s senior years. But we kept finding that we were too late. Students had already accepted jobs. For most of our students, the summer after the junior year internship is the job interview.
    • So we started doing a Junior Recruiting Dinner — the spring of their junior year.”
    • This spring we did two small dinners (about 6-8 students at each). We’ll likely do another in the fall to catch the students who were not able to make it to one of those spring dinners
  • We’re actively pursuing a Foundational Sending Class.
    • We made a little progress this year – we have 8 STINT’ers going and 2 interns staying. But next year we hope to have at least 6 on both of our STINT teams, and 6 interns.
  • We try to help students connect relationally with our staff team
    • We invite our Student Staff (8 juniors/seniors) to our weekly staff meeting as well as any staff socials
    • Because: “Healthy teams are attractive to students” and “It snowballs when your team is an attractive team to be on and students get to be around that enough and think ‘I want to be a part of that’”
  • Send first and send your best
    • “Be generous. The needs of the world are greater than on our US campuses. Challenge and send your best and brightest to the world…God will provide and give back.” “I would rather send a solid team than have a big team here.” – Texas A&M
    • This is really hard. But we’re trying. And I feel like our attitudes on our staff team are changing to “we need more laborers on our campus!” to “let’s just send as many as possible to the world!”
  • city_on_a_hill_higher_wordsVision for the world
    • We’ve shifted from just “let’s reach all 26,000” students on this campus to:
      • Let’s reach The Hill so we can be a City on a Hill to be a light to the nations (the U of A is affectionately called “the Hill”)
  • We’re pushing the Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course.
    • We had 21 students take this intensive World Vision course this spring. It will be interesting to see how many of those students go to the world after graduating.
  • We’ve started tracking who we’re sending/have sent over the years – via Wisconsin

What are you implementing on your campus to become a Sending Campus?