The Necessary Things

Check it Out--Reaching the Campus Tribes

Like many of my recent connections, I met Benson Hines via my blog and the CCC Blogference. I enjoyed his perspective and comments as he was a non-CCC college ministry guy with a broad range of experience. He has a passion for helping those in college ministry grow and become more effective, and recently wrote a book that he is giving away free online. Here's what Benson shared about the process of writing this book:

"After my yearlong trip exploring college ministry around the U.S., I wrote this book to help all of us value college ministry more and practice it even better. For college ministers, it's a chance to see a little bit of what I learned and to think about a missiological approach to our work. But my real hope is that this book would spread to those outside of college ministry - pastors, parents, Christian leaders, etc. - because Christians greatly need to prioritize college ministry more and understand it better. I deeply want to help develop our field of ministry, and the trip and this book are the first pieces of that!"

Benson's heart to truly benefit others shows in his giving away the book. I wish more great resources such as this would be released free on ebook.

Click here to go the download page.

You can find Benson here:

• His Blog
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Join the Reaching the Campus Tribes Facebook group

Blogference Recap

I'm so thankful for the manner in which this year's blogference turned out. I hoped to expand the reach of the blogference beyond the scope of CCC, as well facilitate connections between staff members who did not know each other but shared a common ministry philosophy, values, strategy, and heart.

My favorite parts of the blogference were:

• Reading comments from staff overseas! Hopefully as they process and share what they are learning with their teams, the world will be changed in some small way!
• My intern Dan Birch wrote a comment on one blog that was encouraging to a staff in Singapore! When I think about Dan's role here on campus, which is to develop and mobilize our emerging leaders, this is an outstanding developmental opportunity! Not that his role here is small, but being able to interact and even minister to a leader overseas is profound. Social media has truly changed the capacity to develop leaders!
• The BlogTalkRadio show on Moving From a Tool to a Tools Mentality in Evangelism. To date over 160 people have listened to the show. I've received some great questions spawned from the show as well. 

Where I would love to see future blogferences head:

• I'm working on developing a wesbite that would host the various topics and bring all the feeds to a centralized place. My hope is that by building a better platform that more ministry leaders will be able to participate and contribute.
• Expanding the diversity. Benson Hines commented on many of the posts. He is a non-CCC campus minister, and it was awesome to read his comments and questions. The more people who are similiar but different we have commenting, the more robust the discussion becomes.

Overall I could not have been more pleased by the outcome. Thank you so much for participating!

Blogference Day 3--Saving Cultural Christians

"So if you were to explain the Gospel to your friends, what would you say?"

Kelley Otto, one of our staff here at Chico State, follows up every person she meets on campus during evangelism who claims to be a Christian with this question. I'm inspired by her courage and intentionality as in many cases the question reveals signs of a lack of saving faith.

Ken's blogged about It's Not Our Job To Reach Everyone. A growing category of students that we do have the opportunity to reach is cultural Christians, as many of them are in our movements, often times completely unaware that they are in fact a false front like the image above.

During our most recent outreach we had a student go out and share the Gospel on one day, and then check the box that they trusted Christ for the first time at our meeting the next day. As we discussed this issue and debriefed the outreach the underlying question became, 'How can we help cultural Christians discern whether they in fact are saved?'

I'm curious to hear your experiences and particularly if you have been able to have conversations with students that have been fruitful in producing either awareness or a genuine decision for Christ.

Some observations from my experience:

• Many of these students are often prideful, materialistic, and self-centered. In many cases the soil of their hearts feels harder than that of a raw, party-going student that revels in their unbelief.
• Some of these students demonstrate that they probably are but might not be saved. Often times I find myself waiting for an official sign so to speak that they are not saved so that I can engage this issue.
• I've yet to discern what knowledge and experiences they need to be assured of their salvation. For me personally it was the understanding of the Holy Spirit and the real life experiences that demonstrated his activity in my life. I'm not sure that this resonates as much with today's student, as so many exude this spiritual pretentiousness and 'feeling spiritual' with the work of the Holy Spirit.

Some Initial Questions:

• What percentage of students in your movement/ministry/etc would you estimate are culturally Christian? Have you seen this grow, decline, or stay the same in the last couple years?
• What are you doing about it? Have you engaged in any sort of training of staff and student leaders that specifically addresses this problem?
• It seems as though our job in CCC has become more complex in this realm. Especially in the Fall or gathering season of ministry, we now reach out to worldly non-believers, mobilize believers, AND follow up cultural Christians. Have you experienced this complexity? How have you responded? What changes have you made to adapt to this reality?

Blogference Day 2--Free The Tools!

Yesterday's comments encouraged and sharpened me! The beauty of the blogference lies in its ability to include a broad range of participants that a physical conference rarely includes.

If you have the time, I would encourage you to check out the online radio show Dan Birch and I hosted yesterday--Moving From a Tool to Tools Mentality in Evangelism. It can easily be added to iTunes to be savored at a later time :) Alex Costa graciously called in and shared some challenging thoughts with us.

One of the realizations I recently made is how similar our role on staff is to an entrepreneur. I'm not sure why it took me so long to make that connection. Actually if you have yet to think of your role on staff as such I'd encourage you to read one of my posts from last year on Redeeming Our Apostolic Calling. 

As I scour many entrepreneur blogs I realize they possess two things that are often in short supply in CCC: money and courage. Many of them have learned valuable lessons that can be applied to ministry and evangelism. 

Josh Kopelman, a Venture Capitalist and entrepreneur, brings to light the importance of free in the process of any new venture:

Most entrepreneurs fall into the trap of assuming that there is a consistent elasticity in price - that is, the lower the price of what you're selling, the higher the demand will be...The truth is, scaling from $5 to $50 million is not the toughest part of a new venture - it's getting your users to pay you anything at all. The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny. --from his post The Penny Gap

When developing evangelistic tools, the same principle applies. Just as we seek to remove any intangible obstacles that a person faces in trusting Christ, we must remove any physical obstacles such as cost that can significantly restrict a Gospel tool's efficacy. 

I love the steps our Global Short Film Network have taken to produce and distribute culturally relevant, high quality evangelistic short-films. My campus (Chico State in Northern California) used the films during our evangelism training time and our recent Spring semester outreach. However, when I apply  Kopelman's Penny Gap (click to see diagram) to this evangelistic tool, I notice these things in relation to cost:

• They cost $1.99. Two bucks you say? What's the big deal: "I can't think of a single premium (meaning one that costs anything) service that has acheived truly viral distribution."--Kopelman. Cost inherently restricts distribution. An evangelistic tool cannot spread virally when it costs even a penny!
• They cost 8 Clicks: 1 click to go to site, 1 click to go to 'Films', 1 click or more to select the content I want, 1 click to check-out and proceed to payment, 1 click to register (assuming I'm a new customer), 1 click to sign up, 1 click to confirm payment, 1 click to start the download process. In internet time that compares to four hours in the real world--not exactly but you see what I mean.
• They cost cultural credibility: NOT in quality, BUT in platform. What comes to mind when you hear 'have you seen this YouTube video?' Probably some inappropriate things, but overall I think 'funny, universal, popular.' Let's be honest when a non-believer on campus hears 'Campus Crusade for Christ' I do not believe those same words come to mind. 

Here's another blog snippet from this post that offers helpful distinction when I think about freeing up our evangelistic tools (from another venture capitalist and entrepreneur Andrew Chen:

• Viral Branding--Do something really cool and people will tell their friends.
• Viral Action--Do something that is really easy to spread to other people.

I would love to see evangelistic tools with viral action. Even our summer project videos do not have the kind of viral action they could.

• Type in the phrase 'campus crusade for christ summer project' into the search bar on YouTube. You get this, but why didn't this video come up? The title is 'Hooray Viral Video' It has an element of Viral Branding but severely lacks in Viral Action. 

Brian: Why are you such a buzzkill when it comes to CCC videos?

• Because FREE, CULTURALLY RELEVANT, AND MASSIVELY POPULAR PLATFORMS exist--YouTube, Facebook, MySpace.
• Because FREE, CULTURALLY RELEVANT, AND MASSIVELY POPULAR CONTENT exists--Josh Otto, one of the staff here at Chico, shared how effective secular movie clips, shown on an portable media player could be in evangelism. He gave the example of the scene from The Dark Knight when the two boats faced the decision of whether to detonate the other and save themselves.
• Because The Penny Gap limits the transferability of ANY premium evangelistic tool. The beauty of the 4 Laws is in its transferability, as so many staff mentioned yesterday. To harness the power of social media in evangelism its has to have the viral action that facilitates transferability.

I'm hammering away on this one because I believe that there is someone out there with the ability to produce a culturally relevant, massively popular, viral action, evangelistic tool that could affect millions. Unless we as an organization die to this premium model philosophy in not only evangelism but in other areas as well (a great topic for the next blogference), we should not be surprised at our lackluster results in spite of a high investment of resources.

I do believe our videos are producing tremendous results. However, in light of the potential for viral content to scale (David After Dentist is currently at 18,679,668 views), I believe we have tremendous room for improvement.

Kelly Cain has some great thoughts on the power to use social media to create movements.

A few questions to kick-off the discussion:

• What are some physical obstacles you see in either our current tools or in developing new ones?
• Have you done anything in your ministry that would qualify as viral branding or viral action? What kinds of results did each produce?
• Have you experimented with using secular media as a means of starting an evangelistic conversation?
• What role has mobile (cell-phones, iPhones, blackberries, Zunes, iPods) played in evangelism on your campus or in your ministry? Where would you like to go with it? What would you like to do if you had money and courage?

Blogference Day 1--The Death of the Four Spiritual Laws

From the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1951.

Look at the US Government's racial categories on the far left. The crude racial distinctions seem to be from another world. Yet Dr. Bright engendered The Four Spiritual Laws in this environment. 

I'm shocked when I stop to think about how long The Four Laws has lasted as CCC's primary evangelistic tool given the dramatic cultural and philosophic changes that have happened since 1952. It's amazing that something developed over fifty years ago still powerfully influences people for Christ even to this day. Yet there seems to be a growing sense that it's efficacy is dwindling, especially in the US. 

I'm not advocating killing the Four Spiritual Laws as an evangelistic tool---I am advocating killing the Four Spiritual Laws as THE evangelistic tool. Instead of having one 'blockbuster' tool, we need to have many 'indie' tools that speak and target specific groups of people instead of the masses. 

The person for whom Dr. Bright developed the tool rarely exists on today's college campus: a modern-minded white, upper-middle class student from a single income, dual-parent household where Christianity was the family religion. With so much cultural and religious diversity on campus, it's pretentious to think that one tool can adequately satisfy all of the evangelistic demands.

I would love to discuss what it would look like to shift from a GENERAL/MASSES driven perspective on evangelistic tool production to a SPECIFIC/NICHE driven one.

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson addresses the changing forces the world is undergoing. He says this about the demise of the general/masses driven perspective:

"Today there seems to be less demand for blockbusters than there is for focused or targeted content that isn’t for everybody!"--The Long Tail pg. 82

Although 'targeted content that isn't for everybody' sounds inherently un-evangelistic, I believe it's the place we need to move evangelistically. It's not because The Four Laws does a poor job communicating the Gospel--it is because we have an unprecedented opportunity to develop specific/niche driven evangelistic tools that are highly effective for some, and completely ineffective for all.

Anderson explains how this is possible:

• Democratization of Production: "The best example of this is the personal computer, which has put everything from the printing press to the film and music studios in the hands of anyone...Give enough people the capacity to create, and inevitably gems will emerge." --The Long Tail pg. 54
• Democratization of the Distribution Process: "The PC made everyone a producer or publisher, but it was the Internet that made everyone a distributor."--Ibid pg.54
• Connecting Supply and Demand: "This can take the form of anything from Google's wisdom of crowds search to iTunes' recommendations, along with word of mouth, from blogs to customer reviews."--Ibid pg. 56. People no longer have to settle for content that kind of fits--these changes have made it easy for people to find exactly what they are looking for.

As I examine these three forces, I am convinced that the next generation of effective evangelistic tools WILL be developed from the fringes. We cannot wait for our president or national office to lead us in this area. The tools to develop and distribute relevant, effective, and specific Gospel content demand that we pioneer evangelism on the local level.

I would love to see more evangelistic tools with the following characteristics:

• Less polished and rough around the edges--even unfinished and dependent on use for completion--move the lab from Lake Hart to the Campus baby!
• Focused on one part of the Gospel rather than the whole--why not something just on the atonement, or solely focused on exposing God's love or wrath or ________?
• Short shelf life--developed with the mindset that it will be used for a specific amount of time.
• Built on secular platforms (more on this later...)--YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter. Why do we continue to build tools that are incompatible with these social media giants?

Some questions to kick-off the discussion:

• Why do you think CCC still has a silver bullet mentality when it comes to evangelism? What steps have you taken locally or organizationally to change this?
• What are the drawbacks to moving to a niche-driven mentality? What are you fears?
• What excites you about pioneering new evangelistic tools? What characteristics would you like to be true of them?
• Are you fearful of experimenting evangelistically or developing new evangelistic tools? What keeps you from innovating on your campus?

Evangelism Discussion on BlogTalkRadio Recap

My staff team hosted an impromptu online radio talk show this morning on BlogTalkRadio. It started out as a way to test the platform for the upcoming Blogference, but it turned into an enjoyable and inspiring conversation.

Some highlights:

• Four of us spent just 20 minutes promoting the show via Facebook, text, and email. We saw at least 45 people listen into the show. It was amazing to be using social media to host and promote the show! Extremely powerful demonstration of social media.
• Global Platform: Our show was airing alongside professional and other amateur shows that spanned many different categories. Anyone could listen in and there were definitely non-believers who trusted the site.
• Wide-Range of Listeners: We had students from our movement listening in, other CCC staff, and one of our staff member's father who is also a pastor. I loved that the dialogue was not contained or restricted to a specific group of people.

If you would like to listen in, click here.

I'm hosting an extended conversation on evangelism next Monday at 2pm.

Evangelism Talk-Show This Thursday

Thanks to John Havens, author of Tactical Transparency, I have explored BlogTalkRadio. It's an amazing site that has tremendous potential for those seeking to communicate audio content to broad and specific groups of people.

In preparation for the Campus Crusade Blogference that I'm hosting Monday-Wednesday, April 13-15th, my staff team and I are hosting a 30 minute discussion on evangelism this Thursday, April 9th, at 11 am PST.

You can actually call in and comment. We will plan on sharing some information, but would love it if it turned into a discussion rather than a monologue.

Click here to go the show's website.

If you happen to explore BlogTalkRadio, let me know what you think!

Blogference Posts from Last Year

I'm so excited for this year's blogference! I'm hoping that the exchange of knowledge and wisdom between staff members and non-Campus Crusade leaders will increase and facilitate innovation, learning, and change in the way ministry is done.

I wanted to provide some greatest hits style links from last year's blogference. It was so energizing to have a broad range of authors last year, and I'm hoping for the same this year.

Check these out if you have a minute:

• Lead Change By Bridging the Gap, by Ken Cochrum
• Making Servant Leadership Relevant in Diverse Contexts by Brian Virtue
• Listening to God by Shane Deike
• Faith that Combats Fear and Hopelessness by Brian Barela (me)

Enjoy and join the Facebook Group if you haven't yet!

Blogference Coming Soon! Invite Your Friends

 Last year I hosted Campus Crusade's first Blogference along with 4 other staff. It was a refreshing time for me of sharing my heart for apostolic ministry and participating in conversations with staff from around the country and world!

We as an organization have so much experience, wisdom, and insight gained from stepping out in faith repeatedly in different contexts. Yet there are enough similarities for us to have a seamless conversation about ministry with almost any staff.

This year I hope to utilize social media tools to allow for maximum interaction and connection. Dialoguing through comments is great, but I'm working on some other tools that will make the experience more personal.

Although it's the brainchild of CCC peeps, I would love to see more non-CCC people participate.

What can you do?

Invite 5 people to the Facebook Group.

Blog about the Blogference and spread the word!

Twitter about it, status-update it, etc.

Blogference Recap

Since many of you have joined the group after the blogference officially ended, I wanted to share the links from each host once again. This would be a great post to bookmark for future reference and discussion of these topics. Some of the links are to all of the posts, others are to each specific post. Click on anything underlined to read more. Here are the authors and their topics:

Brian Virtue's Posts--Leading Change Through Servant Leadership

DJ & Alisha Jenkins Posts--Leading Change Through Pioneering Evangelism

Brian Barela's Blogference Posts--Leading Change Out Of The Faith/Future Base

Shane Deike--Leading Change Through Movements Everywhere...

• Change Please!
• Ideas?
• Leading My Friends

Ken Cochrum--Leading Change Through Bridging the Knowing/Doing Gap

• Lead Change By Bridging the Gap
• The Leadership Edge: Initiating
• Speaking Change: Over/Under to Among
• Leading Change: A Second Look at 2T2.2
• Blogference Wrap: Do What We Know