Tim Casteel

Thoughts on Leadership and College Ministry

Resources

What I’m doing for Bible Study

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I started this blog because, as Russ Martin said in Tithing your Time Online: “By spending five minutes to upload the presentation from your last small group leader training you could save someone hours”.

It’s one of the primary reasons I read so many blogs – to quickly glean from others and use their thoughts for Cru talks, Bible studies, and staff coaching. I feel that it multiplies my time (requiring a lot less prep/admin time so I can spend more time with staff and students).


So hopefully this will help you save some time. Here’s a few things I’m using in my Bible study the coming weeks:

“Repentance is THE way we make progress in the Christian life. Indeed, pervasive, all-of-life-repentance is the best sign that we are growing deeply and rapidly into the character of Jesus.”

  • I’m also using this question from Tim Norman in Bible Study today: “Why do you think it’s important to read the Bible?” followed by his Devil’s Advocate questions and study of 2 Timothy 3:16—17 he lays out in his post (he just started blogging – you should definitely subscribe! And not just cause he’s my boss).
  • For the next five weeks in our Bible study, we will be reading through a chapter a week from Fight Clubs. I’ll have them read through the chapter during the week and then discuss and apply during Bible study. The “Bible” part of our Bible Study discussion will come from digging deeper into the various passages in each chapter. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like this e-book is free anymore. You can preview the intro and 1st chapter here. Or buy it here.

What we fight for: “All else that is good and beautiful flows from him, but our thoughts don’t naturally drift to Christ. This is precisely why we need to fight.”

Why accountability groups fail in this fight: “We need to remove accountability [groups] from the center and replace it with the Gospel. We need to orbit around Jesus, not rules or confession. Instead of groups gathered around accountability, we must gather around Jesus. Only then will we find something truly worth fighting for.”


What are you using right now for BIble Study and Discipleship?


Buckets and Holes Planning

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Planning is honestly one of my favorite times of the year. We do serious planning (5 days, 9-noon) three times a year: August, December, May.  Love it.

To use Stephen Covey’s metaphor, we spend the entire year climbing furiously up the ladder – planning is a time to make sure our ladder is leaning against the right wall.

We start our week long staff planning this morning. So here’s some planning-themed inspiration to help you get ready.

The most practical advice I’ve heard in the past few years came from Tim Henderson who leads the Cru ministry at Penn State (Tim and his team put out incredible resources under the name Centerfield Productions).


I call it Buckets and Holes. I’m sure Tim Henderson has a more official name for it than that.

Here’s how Tim puts it: “How do we spend what we have to solve our problems, meet our goals, and increase what we have for next year and its problems?”


Here’s the (abbreviated) idea in two parts (the second one, for me, was the new insight).  For your ministry, for this year:

  1. What are the holes/problems (this step is common for most strategic planning)?
  2. What are the buckets we have to draw from?  What do we currently have that we can use to solve those problems?

Fleshed out, here’s what that looks like for us this year:

  1. Hole: our leadership numbers at our weekly training time have plateaued over the past few years.  If we want to reach the entire campus, we need more equipped laborers.
  2. Buckets: Our weekly meeting is not a problem to be solved.  It’s a giant bucket of cash.  We’ve got great momentum and incredible student leaders attending who love Jesus.  So we plan to use our weekly meeting to address our Laborer Hole.  A few other buckets we plan to use: we have a lot of great students leading Bible studies; we have a lot of students who choose to live in the dorms to have a ministry.

The Goal = To turn your holes into buckets. In 2011, we hope to be able to see that laborers is no longer a problem but a bucket that we can draw from to address the inevitable holes of 2011.

So we spend an entire hour during planning filling out two big post-it posters on what our Holes and Buckets are.  We narrow it down to 3-4 Holes we will tackle this Fall and then start playing connect the dots, connecting Buckets with Holes.


There’s actually 4 steps to the entire process and this PDF from Tim Henderson shows a very clear overview of the full process (right click to download):
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Some Bonus Planning Quotes to get you fired up about planning!

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior. – Dee Hock

You’ve got to think about the big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction. – Alvin Toffler

The best way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas. – Linus Pauling

photo courtesy of rubyblossom via flickr

Your Online Go-To Resources

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This post is more of a solicitation for help than having anything to offer.

This morning I was having my QT and journaling/typing through my thoughts on how prideful I am (maybe another post on that later). I was fairly easily able to diagnose the problem – I care about my glory and man’s approval more than God’s glory and His approval. But I kind of felt stuck there.  How can I practically move forward today in believing the gospel as it relates to pride?

So like any other modern, I turned to the internet/my computer. Thank God (genuinely) I found a great resource in a John Piper sermon transcript – perfect for what I needed. All of John Piper’s sermons are transcribed, way faster/easier to get what you’re looking for than listening to 45 minutes (and I prefer reading Piper than hearing him). I also found great insights in the Gospel Centered Life bible study (that I mentioned a few posts back).

I found Piper’s sermon by going to Justin Taylor’s blog and searching the Gospel Coalition (which to me, sounds like Superman would be a part of: “Gospel Coalition, let’s go get some bad guys!”) site.  Unfortunately it appears that their search does not return “blog posts”, only sermons and articles. [there’s a search box on the right hand column that searches an individual blog] What I was looking for was a good couple Justin Taylor posts on Pride.

But it made me realize I am severely lacking in good online resources.

So, help me out, what are your Online Go-To Resources?
Not so much for ministry help/philosophy.  But for help on pursuing Christ or when you’re writing a talk/Bible study?

Here are my top 3 (off the top of my head):

  1. Desiring God Resource Library – all of Piper’s books in PDF form (searchable!), all of his sermons transcribed (quick reading!).  Amazing.
  2. Dr. Constable’s FREE online commentary of the entire Bible – I will not teach a passage of the Bible without first consulting with this commentary.  Dr. Constable is a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary.  I’ve been studying through Romans in my Quiet Times this summer and his commentary has been an immense help (and I love that you can copy and paste notes from it into a Word document (where I journal).  In addition to his commentary I was using the Expositors Commentary and I found Constable’s to be far better (and he actually quotes the Expositors Commentary half the time).
  3. Gospel Coalition site – specifically Justin Taylor’s blog but the whole site is searchable from there

Photo by Heather from Flickr

Pancake vs. Waffle

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This is a snippet from our most recent prayer letter.  The reason I decided to start this blog is to share resources – those of you who send out prayer letters and want to use the above .jpg for your letter, right click here to download (the linked file has the references to the “University of Arkansas” removed).


This video gives a good snapshot of what God is doing in spreading his name to every “waffle pocket” at the University of Arkansas – students reaching students in their spheres of influence:

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Are college students antagonistic or ambivalent toward religion?

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It’s either or.  As a whole, college students are either hostile toward religion or ambivalent/open toward it.

Yes, I know every college student is unique and they range from passionate follower of Christ to atheist.  But when you think about doing college ministry, especially evangelism, what college student are you imagining you will encounter?  An angry, Christian-hating atheist or an open-to-discussion student.

Obviously, your approach to evangelism (as a ministry and as an individual) will be vastly different depending on your answer to that question.

Two landmark books have been published in the last few years on spirituality among the college-aged:

unChristian  &  Souls in Transition

I highly recommend both of them.  Incredibly eye opening.

I just read Souls in Transition this summer and will unpack its content over the next few weeks on this blog.

But, although they have some similarities in their findings  (and both are rather dry books written by researchers – Souls is far tougher to wade through of the two), I think they paint a very different picture of Young Adults (as they call those of college age).

This is a gross generalization but here’s what they conclude about Young Adults:

  • unChristian - There is a growing tide of hostility and resentment toward Christianity
  • Souls in Transition – Most “are OK with talking about religion as a topic, although they are largely indifferent to it”

Working with college students in the Deep South I find the results from “Souls” to be much truer to my experience.  But we live in the Bible belt and I know our students aren’t typical of the average American college student.  College ministers at Cal Berkeley or NYU obviously will encounter a different audience.

What has been your experience in working with “outsider” college students (as unChristian calls non-Christians)?