Tim Casteel

Thoughts on Leadership and College Ministry

Evangelism

Follow Ups – How to Actually get Face to Face with Freshmen

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After you get thousands of contact cards, what do you do with them?

Alan Mitchell tweeted to me on Friday:

freshmen in dorm room

Question 1: How soon do you start following up?

  • We start immediately. We do the majority of our surveys on Tuesday and Wednesday the first week of class – timed to coincided with our first Cru meeting of the year (on Tuesday) and our freshmen Bible studies in every dorm (on Wednesday). So as they are filling out the survey on Tuesday, we are inviting them to the Cru meeting that night.
  • On Wednesday we get as many student leaders together as possible for a Follow Up Party at 6pm. We feed them dinner and split into groups to pray for the freshmen. Then we hand each dorm (students leading freshmen studies in each dorm) a printout of everyone who checked “I want more info about a Bible study”. The students then call and text everyone on that list and invite them to the freshmen Bible study in their dorm that night at 8pm. At 7pm the students go (with a freshmen escort they’ve met during move-in week) into the dorms and knock on doors of everyone that checked “yes – Bible study” (as well as inviting anyone with their door open).
  • After that initial Tuesday/Wednesday push we spend every afternoon as a staff team in the dorms calling and getting appointments.

Question 2: How do you follow up with them?

Last week, Chris McKinney – Cru MTL (Missional Team Leader) at Mizzou – emailed along the lines of Alan’s second question:

We have had a really hard time getting appointments from cards. Even from the “Yes, Yes, Yes” ones. We text them, email, then text again and try and stop by their dorms. I’m hoping maybe MissionHub will help and it’s been a card organization thing
but I’m kinda stumped. We do about 2000 freshmen surveys at tables so we have a lot. 

I feel like it could be the evidence of a changing culture but also want to see what you’ve experienced and what works well for you. It’s to the point where we celebrate just getting an appointment.

Our team has had similar troubles and have experimented a lot. Let’s pool our wisdom - I’d love to hear what’s working for your teams (in the comments).

Here’s what we’ve come up with on our campus (with pretty good success).

Overall Goals in Follow up

  • Train leaders to do future follow-up (multiplication)
    • Staff do what we are good at – initiate and boldly share the gospel. So our first priority (more important than getting to the freshmen) is actually modeling to our student leaders how to do a follow up (AND how to set up an appointment by boldly making phone calls) so they can then do follow ups on their own and train other students.
    • We then pass off key contacts to students who are good pursuers. As we pair up with student leaders to follow up, the student leaders take the relational baton and are the ones relationally pursuing after the first follow up.
  • Share the Gospel with everyone we meet with (Either they don’t know Jesus or they’re a legit Christian and they want to know about Cru and here is the essence of what we are about)
  • Relationally connect new students to the movement and ultimate goal= get them in a Bible study
    • Getting them in a Bible study usually happens after several more relational touchpoint

Making the Call

  • Be bold, assume they want to meet with us (in how we talk to them)
  • Missed call, then send text and tell them you’ll call later (don’t leave a voicemail).
  • Sample:
    • “Hey is this John? Alright cool well this is Erik with Cru. I’m calling because you filled out one of our survey cards at the Chick-fil-A table. Do you remember doing that? Cool well on that card you said that you wanted more info about a Bible study. Are you around right now – I’m in the lobby and would love to grab 15 minutes with you.”
    • If no (insert lame excuse- “nah, I have a class in 40 minutes. I have to take a nap…”) – “OK- I will be on campus tomorrow afternoon and Wednesday. Which one works better for you? Sounds good I will see you then.”

General Tips

  • Go in pairs – always take a student with you
  • After modeling it with a student leader, challenge them to take another student tomorrow to do follow up
  • Smile- remember their name
  • Be confident- it’s only as awkward as you make it (you’re setting the norm for their college experience. Everyone in college talks about God!)
  • Have the student leader set up a second “appointment” – basketball tomorrow, “I’ll pick you up for Cru on Tuesday”, “we’re going caving this weekend – want to go?”

You can download our Follow Up Cheat Sheet. It has everything listed above, as well as what we actually say on the appointment (too much content to share here!). Feel free to edit that Word document and make it your own.

I’d love to hear what’s working for your teams – how do you get face to face with freshmen?

image courtesy of Zach Dunn

What you Should be Doing the First Week on Campus

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Some great wisdom from Brian McCollister here.

3 Keys for the First Week on Campus

    1. students on denver campusStaff must lead in evangelism. All else must suffer for the sake of getting face to face with freshmen. I tell our staff that your first six discipleship times of the year must be primarily spent in evangelism. If your upper classmen balk at this then that is evidence that you may not be working with the right upper classmen. There ought to be time to develop and teach but evangelism has to happen those 6 times.
    2. If you pay the price in the first six weeks of the year you will reap the rewards for the next four years. If you blow the first six weeks you will pay the price for the next four years. I can tell how well we did in the first six weeks of the last four years by looking at the size of our classes.
    3. Directors must mobilize their best people assets into evangelizing/gathering freshmen into freshmen groups (staff/ student leaders).

We teach that discipleship is doing the right things (doing ministry together, time in the Word, relationally connecting) with the right people (faithful, available, teachable).

Here’s the key: those three things – Ministry/Word/Relationship – don’t have to happen evenly over the year. In other words, the first 6 weeks of the year will be HEAVILY weighted toward doing Ministry together. Talking about life and their summer and the new year as you walk on the way to share your faith. That’s one reason a Leadership Retreat before move-in week is so crucial. It gives your staff time to connect relationally with student leaders before you jump in the trenches together.

I always try to grab one-on-one lunch (Relationship) with each of my staff guys in the calm before the storm of the first 6 weeks because I know that August and September will be heavy on doing ministry together and lighter on Word/Relationship.

What are your thoughts on Brian’s 3 Keys?

 

Tim Keller on How to Get into Gospel Conversations

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Some great thoughts from Tim Keller on Evangelism in this video.

Some highlights:

  • If you strictly do Evangelism, the outside world sees it as recruitment, increasing your tribe, a power grab
  • You need to combine Word and Deed.
  • The best way to combine Evangelism and Good Deeds is on a personal level (more difficult to do on a organizational level)
    • You’re not going to love a friend without sharing the Gospel with them. And as a friend you will serve them as there is a need
  • Keller’s two steps for setting up Evangelism:
    1. Let the other person know you go to church
    2. Let the other person know that your Christian faith means something to you, even in passing: “my Christian faith has really helped me here…”
      • There are a lot of simple behaviors that you should be doing, that will lead in a very organic way into deeper spiritual discussion
      • You should be doing the simple behaviors first:
        • Loving and caring for people
        • Being a person of integrity
        • Letting people know that your Christian faith
      • And it will just bubble up naturally
      • I think most people think, I have to find out a way to get the whole gospel out in one conversation or get in a debate about Creation and Evolution. That’s not the way to go. Be simple.
  • He goes on to talk about how sharing the gospel in the city is more complex and requires more skill.

HT: @hanskristensen

 

50% off Gospel-Centered Life Study

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gospel centered life imageGood news! For the next few months the great folks at New Growth Press are offering Cru staff 50% off of the Gospel-Centered Life Bible Study.

The Gospel-Centered Life study is phenomenal. Incredible heart-probing, Christ-centered content. Click to see a GREAT sample chapter or here for an excerpt on how “The Gospel Propels us Outward”

GCL was written by a couple of former Cru staff — Bob Thune (now a pastor in Omaha) and Will Walker (now pastoring in Austin).

We use GCL with all of our freshmen studies every fall. We love it because we can know for certain that freshmen will come out of the fall having clearly heard the gospel EVERY week in Community Group. And it requires almost zero prep for student leaders.

And our plan is to use CGL part 2, Gospel-Centered Community, for all freshmen spring studies. Gospel Centered Community is being released in August and is a great follow up to GCL.

But CGL is not just for freshmen – it’s equally challenging material for upperclassmen studies (and staff!) as well.

We buy leaders guides for all our leaders and participants guides for everyone in our freshmen studies.

Here’s how you take advantage of this deal:

Enter the code “CRU” as the Promo Code at newgrowthpress.com or in the World Harvest bookstore [UPDATE: the New Growth site is cheaper than the World Harvest site right now]. Also, if you prefer to call you may give “CRU” as the source code to whoever answers the phone and get the same discount.

They’ve asked that only Cru staff use this code so please respect their wishes.

The Gospel for Bible Belt Christians

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Listened to a Matt Chandler sermon a few weeks ago where he gives a phenomenal gospel message to Bible Belt Christians:

For most of us, the former life that we need to proclaim is that we were busy with a thousand religious activities, but we didn’t know the gospel until Jesus saved us. “My former life” is that you were a deacon and Sunday school teacher, but you didn’t know Him. Or our former life needs to be, “I went to church four or five times a year. I went to church Christmas and Easter. I had Christian in my title of who I was, but in reality I had no idea who Jesus was. My life didn’t match up with the gospel calling on my life. I just didn’t know. So in my former life, this is what I treasured and this is what I pursued. And Jesus saved me.”

I think the most difficult group is going to be the group that has been in church a long, long time.

I’m saying that the offer stands, especially for you. For me, is it miraculous when someone in witchcraft comes to know the Lord? — Yes. But it’s just as miraculous, if not maybe more miraculous, when God saves among church folk. Some of them have been inoculated to Jesus: just enough to not need Him. They can talk the language just enough to not understand that they’re way outside of the Kingdom and under a false gospel. Oh, that He might move well in your hearts today.