Students in Denver

I had the privilege of discussing kingdom pronicples with over 600 university students at a recent conference in Denver. The goal of the session was to help them move toward planting authentic faith communities on every pocket of campus - about half of the conference attendees showed up at this session.

We then divided up into groups of 3-5 people (all from the same school) and discussed five broad principles of kingdom expansion. Each small group was considered an 'apostolic band' - or a group sent to the campus in order to bring the gospel to as many people as possible.

First we discussed 5 Key Principles of Kingdom Growth:

1. The Principle of Sowing (the Farmer of Mark 4)
2. The Principle of Oikos (Households) (Matthew in Mark 2)
3. The Principle of “People of Peace” (the Woman of John 4)
4. The Principle of Apostolic Mission (The 70 in Luke 10)
5. The Principle of Mission Focused Prayer (Jesus from Matthew 9)

We engaged in a brief discussion on each topic and then went to work. Each team identified at least 40 people groups on their perspective campus. After some time of prayer, each groups selected 5-10 of those groups based upon what they felt Jesus was leading them to do and then each team created a simple action plan for that community. There were only a few rules for each plan.

1. Based in prayer and focused on the mission
   
2. It could be implemented in less than a 48 hour period (see Luke 10)
3. It involved revealing the gospel in Word, Deed or Power - or a a combination thereof.
4. It 'outed' yourself as believer - in other words, you were not trying to sneak up on people with the gospel (so if you did a service project for a group, you did it in the name of Jesus).

After only 20 minutes of work, this group of students developed over 700 kingdom focused action plans for their universtiy environment. Very cool.