Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Campus Church Network

Last week I was pretty excited to be a part of some very significant meetings in CA - we were wrestling through HOW to the gospel in front of every student of every culture. Good stuff.

During the course of these meetings, Grace Yao (Crusade staff with the San Fran Metro team), passed on some intriguing information. She told us of some young Asian American wild men who were involved with rapid church planting in the campus setting. These guys were using CPM (church planting movment) methodology in a campus context and watching the Lord do fantastic things.

In reality, I first heard they were a couple of young evangelists. I pictured in my mind gifted speakers who were able to gather crowds and were convincing with gospel in their cultural context. (It is funny how are presuppositions will move us to thinking in certain ways).

JL (John Lamb) heard from Grace and suggested we hook up with these fellas. The plan was to do a nice breakfast on Friday morning, but our schedules did not jive. So, we invited them to our last evening with all the men. So in at a crowded table at the Claim Jumper I was able to hear the passion and vision of Jaeson and Matt. Two men who definitely have the Lord's hand on their work.

Swanson has a good debrief on his blog here.

You can check out the over arching philosophy here.

Here is what Jaeson says about going for the campus:

Throughout history almost all great revivals and missionary movements started on the campus. The campus is where the future leaders of tomorrow are located, trained and most available. Statistics show more than 90% of all Christians make a decision for Christ before the age of 25. There are over 550,000 international students from around the world who attend American universities. If we can reach the campus we can reach our cities and the world for Christ.

Why Churches?
"And on this rock I shall build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." Matthew 16:18

"The single most effective way of evangelism is to plant new churches" Peter C. Wagner
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I guess they are evangelists after all. We will be hearing more from Jaeson and Matt.

1 comment:

Steve Van Diest said...

Pretty impressive site. I have been reading their stuff the past couple of days and have been encouraged. We're seeing students here at CU catch the idea of planting new movements/churches. Recently we had some student guys come up on their own the need to split and give birth to a new group. Instantly that group grew to 10 guys. It is amazing when you take the time to invest in students, believe in God and take appropriate faith steps what God will do.

Thanks for leading the charge.