The Necessary Things

Twitter Outreach Vision and Tactics

You Will Draw What You Build; Designing a Structure for Your College Ministry

Ministry Start-up Reality: It's not about WHETHER college students will come; it's whether those students are the RIGHT ones for your ministry.

It's been so encouraging to see people get involved in the Starting a College Ministry ebook project. I'm working on Chapter 2--Designing a Ministry Structure.

It can be so easy to merely rearrange the pieces of other people's ministries to form your own structure (I like the way ministry x does co-ed bible studies, but the way ministry y does their weekly meeting, etc), which we all do in some capacity.

However the long-term health of your ministry will be directly related to the design and refinement of your structure.

A major challenge when initially designing the structure is that it feels so disconnected from your current reality, which is usually low numbers and students that lack leadership ability. It can be extremely tempting to design a structure that seeks to RETAIN students rather than DEVELOP them.

This could look like:

• Filling your schedule with a variety of social events that lack any connection to your mission, vision and values. If there are no training times or minimal events where leadership-minded students can display their abilities they will eventually find somewhere else to go where they have an opportunity to develop.

• Requiring only attendance as a qualification for a leadership role. Again if you only have ten students coming it's easy to place someone in leadership that is not quite there yet. My experience is that less than 10% of the students I have placed in leadership roles hoping they would "get it" have actually stayed on and developed.

• Limiting the amount of legitimate places where students can take ownership. If there are less than three places for a student to take ownership then your structure probably needs an adjustment. I've also seen the value in creating micro-leadership roles (event coordinators, outreach team leaders, etc) where I can take a risk to discover a student's leadership ability. Often times staff members cannot select leaders well because they simply have not allowed any students to lead. 

Have you been part of designing a ministry structure? What have you learned or experienced that makes for a good one?

photo courtesy of dunechaser

Twitter Outreach Friday!

A woman took this picture literally seconds after being approached by two women from Campus Crusade (thanks @destinoeric for the link).

The caption of the tweet that accompanied this image read: "Those girls from Campus Crusade tried their mightiest to convert me."

What an unprecedented opportunity to extend an evangelistic conversation beyond the first meeting!

I do a poor job myself of "listening" to the twitter stream for evangelistic opportunities but I would love to try an intentional Twitter outreach with a few other people that would entail:

• Use Seesmic or Tweetdeck to search for a variety of keywords "Campus Crusade," "Church," "Jesus," "Hate," etc.

• @reply those tweets with some sort of intentional follow-up

• seek to share the gospel either through twitter or going onto another channel 

simple enough? want to join me? leave a comment and we'll get it going!

please re-tweet this as well!

photo courtesy of @facetiae

5 Links to Save Time and Be More Effective at Everything in College Ministry!

At my recent ministry director conference we discussed a variety of college ministry issues: effectiveness in evangelism, discipleship, leading a team, and more. (this is a picture of me and two of our regional directors at the retreat).

A common theme emerged for all of these issues in terms of what keeps us from becoming more effective: TIME.

This may not come as a surprise to you since everyone could use more time.

I did want to share some links that I have found that relate to time management; if you have some links to productivity/life hack stuff please share the links in the comments.

If we all saved even 10 minutes a week imagine the time we would save every year that could be invested into significant areas of college ministry such as evangelism, discipleship, and leadership.

Books:

• Upgrade Your Life--Gina Trapani: I bought this book a year ago and leave it near my bed to read whenever I have three to five minutes--excellent tips on being more effective around the computer, and integrating different online tools to make your work-flow much smoother.

• Small is the New Big--Seth Godin: More philosophical than tactical, but excellent for thinking about how to major on the majors and not the minors. Also short chapters that are easy to digest.

Productivity Tips:

• Inbox Zero--Michael Hyatt: Perhaps the most passed around link when it comes to email, but for a good reason. After reading this and putting it into practice for just two weeks I was committed. I would estimate that this process saves me up to 20 minutes a week.

• Visual Mapping Tools (free & paid)--courtesy of Sacha Chua's blog: we are all seeking to make our meetings and planning times more effective; this is a great outline of what's available.

• Using Google Wave for Task Management--courtesy of Chris Brogan: Google wave is still a new tool but this might get you to try it. 

thanks again @bobfuhs for the twitpic!

Does Your Content Match Your Promotion in Ministry?

I've had an amazing time this week at my ccc ministry director's retreat (the picture at left is from our rented beach house).

One of the hottest topics for discussion was promotion for our Winter Conference.

The disconnect many leaders experienced in promoting for the conference was the gap between what was being "sold" (program) versus what most students valued (relationships--current ones with friends from their campus & past ones with those whom they have gone on a summer missions trip with).

I'm not advocating either program or experience in promoting for a ministry event but raising the observation that often times those leading see the program as much more valuable than those attending because they have invested time, energy and resources into setting the program up.

I've been to MANY conference in my ministry career and to be honest 95% of what I valued/remembered was what the conference/program facilitated--not necessarily the program in and of itself.

As you think about your largest ministry event what percentage of the promotion is program vs experience?

Is it Worth the Wait?

I'm sitting in LAX waiting to go to my destination.

There's a lot of people all waiting to go different places.

My guess is that you are waiting in some form for something. Is it worth the wait?

You still have time to change the destination. If the destination is too safe, known, or comfortable it's probably not the right one.

The New E in Evangelism--Engagement

Campus Crusade has placed a high priority on evangelistic EXPOSURES because there used to be a linear relationship between exposures and decisions for Christ. Post-modernity/Gen-Y/Gen-Me/Millenials have disrupted that linear relationship.

Evangelism pre-2000 (I'm approximating here) assumed evangelistic engagement came along with exposure.

Yet on the ground today I can spend thousands of dollars and time generating un-engaging exposures (read campus newspaper and flyers). My evangelistic statistics could look amazing yet show little fruit.

The new evangelistic landscape will be engagement. At some point the exposure bubble will finally burst and a whole new set of tools, presentations, and success criteria will emerge. There have been glimpses of this trend already: Soularium developed by CCC and The Four Cirlces by Intervarsity. Both uniquely emphasize engagement over exposure.

I brainstormed three other elements of evangelistic engagement:

1.  Listening instead of shouting

2.  Bite-sized chunks of the Gospel over the whole enchilada.

3.  Mixed media tools and presentations--start offline and online, end offline or online

What do you see as you look out into the evangelistic landscape in your context?

here's a video of the four cirlces in action:

photo courtesy of pressthebuttononthetop

This Blog Cracked the Top 100 Church Blogs! Thanks For Your Engagement!

Thanks to all of you who have commented and discussed college ministry, leadership, and ministry philosophy related issues here on this blog!

PostRank released their top blogs. You can submit your blog for consideration as well! Click here to get started.

Here are the top 100 in:

• Christianity

• Church

These lists are a great place to start subscribing and reading blogs more regularly.

If you think of reading blogs like you think of reading email then you will never enjoy it.

I suggest thinking of them as healthy snacks--you do not have to eat them, or even eat all of them, but whatever you eat will make you healthier.

If you are still daunted by the RSS world here's a video that explains it:

Social Media and Your Summer Project

Many of my readers are CCC staff; for those who are not familiar with Campus Crusade we host summer projects annually both here in the U.S. and abroad.

I recently hosted a seminar on how to integrate social media into your summer project. Feel free to pass these slides along to any staff or download them yourself when you head off to your assignment.

Social Media & Your Summer Project

View more presentations from Campus Crusade for Christ.

Deciding on a Ministry Structure--What Should Be in Chapter 2 of the eBook?

My goal is by the end of 2010 I would have completed an ebook on how to start a college ministry. I'm starting to think about what to include in the chapter on deciding on a ministry structure.

These are the main thoughts running through my head as I consider it:

• Most new college ministries adopt the previous structure without any changes.

• Many structures serve those students who are LEAST committed/involved at the expense of those who are MOST committed/involved.

• Many student leaders and paid/full-time staff have trouble communicating how their structure serves and facilitates the mission, vision, and values of their ministry.

If you have started a ministry what sort of elements did you take into consideration when designing your structure? Was there a previous structure in place, or did you start from scratch? What was the biggest challenge in designing your structure?

Chapter one in its first iteration. Click here to read it.

Or if you would like to join the Google Wave and be part of the process, leave a comment and I will get you connected.

photo courtesy of swisscan