A Struggle for 5000

One of our stated goals in the Campus Ministry is to get to 5000 movements (a mile marker on our way to everhwere). In 1992, we were at about 180 and then we began to move toward all the schools we traditionally had not targeted. In 10 years we jumped over 1000 under a new structure some new ministry philosophy (well, the philosophy was not that new, it was simply finding student leaders from a distance - rather than working on just one campus). We are at about 1500 now.

Now I am an optimist at heart. I believe we (and certianly God) can do anything. He is looking to us for faith to believe and act on that which may seem impossible. So, in light of that, 5000 in just playing around.

But on the other hand, I think we have some serious rethinking to do if we are to achieve this mile marker. Prayer is a part, Revival is essential and Boldness in faith must happen. But even with this, it seems difficult to scale what we are doing to this number - much less 'everywhere'

Here is what I mean. Recently we did a little impormpto survey with each regional team. One of the questions related to how many teams were needed to get to the all the students. The answers were interesting. No matter the size of the region (we vary from 750k - 2.1 million) the answer was between 20-30.

At the same time, there are only a few local teams in the country that coach more than 20 movements. Some do 10, many do 3-4, but most do 1-2.

Just for fun, lets say that we could move to a point where the average number of movements coached by each local team was 10 (I know this is a a stretch, but it is good for the numbers). So, if we have 10 regions, and each region has 30 teams and each team coaches 10 movements we get . . . . only 3000.

Even to get to 3000 we will have to have someone somewhere shift a paradigm or two. And even then, we are still just at 3k and trying to run what we have built (only harder and faster - doesn't that sounds fun). We will either need to add teams to regions, or ask teams to coach many more movements.

One of the reasons (and there are others) that this will prove difficult is because of our concept of coaching and heirarchy (or we could say 'span of care'). Individuals only have so much capacity for direct reporting relationships - it is hard to be directly responsible for the conduct of 50 people - a more realistic number may be 10-15.

Looking at the size of regions and numbers of teams each region wanted - it is interesting that there was not much correlation between student populations and number of teams. My hunch is that, because of how we view direct reporting, that each region is only able to supervise a maximum of 30 and this artificially caps the numbers of teams a region sees as needed. If you go much beyond this, it really taxes our reporting system.

Of course this is part of the issue we run into on for each local team. With our current coaching philosophy, anything beyond 10-15 seems daunting (ok, Ben Rivera does like 50, but is approaching jedi status). For the rest of us, this can seem like the old 'more bricks' scenario.

So lets say we are winning, building and sending as well as planting and growing new movements - and doing all of this well. We still run into a roadblock of scalability. We are simply adding new stuff, not really multiplying from our starting point. If we have to have new movements / teams report directly, then we will be hard pressed to move beyond 3000 . . . . much less 5000 . . . not to mention everywhere.

However, I do have hope - and lots of it. I think that we simply need to rethink the way we go about getting to students and releasing students (and teams) to run after the mission. This is the point where things could get messy. But messy, with volume, is what gets the job done. Not to mention, this is what 'movement' is really like.

The question is, will we have the courage to move this way?