5% or
less of our graduating students join or staff or enter into full-time
ministry. 95% go into the marketplace. We pray for them and they go
into a typical mainline evangelical church. They get lost in the pews.--Jim Kercheval, CCC Staff, Cal Poly Pomona
Jim speaks to a crisis that the church faces; how to MISSIONALLY develop young adults post-graduation. For those of my non-leaders who graduate and do not go on staff or into full-time ministry, I have little hope that they will have more kingdom influence than they did during college.
Campus Crusade should start a church-planting movement to facilitate the spiritual development of our post-graduate, non-student leaders and bless the church by overseeing the transition of our students from college to the marketplace.
Quotes from the following post that were powerful:
- In some ways, don't you think the pervasive church planting energy of 2009 (and the exodus of which you speak) is akin to the campus outreach energy and passion prevalent when Crusade was launched sixty years ago or so?--Phil Henry
- First, a genuine missional renewal necessitates its operational center to be located in the local church. Those Crusade staff who are invested in the leadership of local churches are in a better position to get it. Eventually, quite a number of these staff members will leave Crusade and become pastors like myself.--Raymond Chen
- What if the local local "bodies" of Christ in college-towns moved towards one another because they re-organized their relationships around the welfare of the university --- AND --- around the making of disciples of "all student groups" in town. The fruit and glory would be thrill our souls--Daniel Curran
- Looking
at CCC, we might be in the nostalgia/questioning stage of the
organizational cycle, but it seems some good changes are finally being
made to allow more opportunity for leadership to happen at the local
level--Jon Eastwood
I do not see CCC starting our own church-planting movement to compete with other church planting movements. For me it's a stewardship issue: we have invested four to five years of mission, vision, and values, they have taken steps of faith in our movements and view their time (generally speaking) in CCC as worthwhile and valuable.
My guess is that if we did something like this, we would retain SO MANY students that they would inevitably pour into other church-planting movements, or have the ability to partner in more powerful ways with other groups.
Excited to hear your comments. Thanks to all of you so far who have weighed in and provided valuable insight into this discussion!
