Anonymous Guest Ranter on The Mission

A good friend send me this blurb on movements everywhere. May the innocent be protected:

I know we have talked lately about not saying multiple movements, but movements everywhere instead . . . . and I agree. But I think maybe we need to go one step further.

In my opinion, people are not motivated by movements everywhere, but I do think they care a great deal about reaching every student. As we continue to cast vision, I think we really need to weigh heavily on casting vision for giving every student an opportunity to hear and respond to the gospel. And not weigh as heavily on starting movements everywhere. Not to say that we shouldn’t talk about movements everywhere, but always in the context of reaching every student.

Thinking back to [large state funded institution of higher learning], it was the reality of seeing that we are not reaching every student, and we CANNOT reach every student with our current structure that led to change. We either needed to change our mission or change our way of going about our mission.

(Side note: This is also where our thinking eventually turned to cell groups… If God really answered our prayers to give every student on campus and opportunity to hear the gospel…. Even at the 25% (parable of the soils) that is a movement of 5000! There is no way we could house all those new believers in our current structure. It was too staff dependant, and there was no way we could train and disciple all the leaders to lead all those students. That is what lead to conversations about new structure, and ultimately our decision to do cell ministries. This is why I think it is impossible to talk about movements everywhere apart from Organic/cell/simple church ministry).

Anyways, my point is shifting back to really casting vision for giving every student an opportunity, and then talk about movements everywhere. But focus and weigh on the every student part. That is what makes the messiness of movements everywhere worth it. I think this is something to think about in how we communicate.

So that led to another thought - Mission Statement:

Back at [same large state funded institution of higher learning], we felt our mission was to reach the whole campus. We talked about it all the time. So the “stop saying we are trying to reach the whole campus or change what we are doing” was true. But in truth, that is not our mission in CCC. It is turning lost students into Christ centered laborers. In all reality, people ARE fulfilling our current mission statement. When they think of their mission, it is easy to feel good about it. Because our mission says nothing of scope. It talks about the lost, but not the every. If part of our mission is not every student, then we don’t really see our need for movements everywhere. We don’t need movements everywhere to fulfill our current mission statement [emphasis mine]. In fact, traditional Cru movements will work just fine. I think subconsciously this may have something to do with not seeing the need, feeling like what we are currently doing is accomplishing our mission (because verbiage wise we are accomplishing our stated mission - so no need to fix was ain't broke).

Aw . . . .the insights of youth.