Hope

Back in the early 1990’s Rick Hove and I used to joke about some of our Crusade tag lines. It went something like, “why do we say every student every year when it is neither." It was not that our hearts were not into iit it simply seemed that our directives and dreams were pie in the sky because no matter how hard we worked the plan, we could never see it happening. No matter how big we stretched our models, they always failed to break into the whole of the campus.

Here is how I saw it: If you took the average campus, you may typically have 1-2% of the student body involved in spiritual things (from the Newman Center to the Abundant Word of Living Faith Gospel Tabernacle). At only 1% (and usually bunched up in 5-20 groups), this group of believers is fairly ineffective at getting the gospel to the whole.

As a result, many non-Christians may never encounter a believer on campus. Or better said, they never encounter a believer in a real life setting. They may see Jesus posters, or get caught in a random conversation, but they can easily avoid the lives of kingdom people.

But what if you could radically raise the percentage of believers involved in missional activity? What would it look like to actually get to 10% - or even 20% of the students? At that point, everyone would know someone who knows Jesus. At a school like Ohio State we are talking about 5,000-10,000 committed believers mixed in with the whole. But getting to that level seems like a daunting task.

Part of my dilemma is I lack a paradigm for this type of growth. I traditionally think about how big each existing group would have to be in order to accomplish this. Or, how huge my organization would have to be to get to every.

But what if we looked at getting to the whole by moving smaller, more organic and highly missional?. This is the essence of saturation church planting – churches (or movements?) that max out at 20 people, split, and max out again. In each case a leader (a student team) is in charge of the group and is trained. Trained to train and to split.

In my 15 years of working in college ministry, I have never heard anything that gives me as much hope as saturation church planting with a simple/organic flare. If we could mobilize and launch just 20% of the students currently involved, it would radically change the campuses we are on.

Of course I am one of those guys who jumps onto potential solutions while it is still very potential. I am ready for the new thing. Only in this case – it is an old thing. A very old thing - dating back to the initial expansion of the kingdom. Rapid growth through group multiplication centered on body life and those who are lost.

What we need are some working models and some leaders willing to risk a brighter future by leverage the pretty decent present. More on that later - but for now . . . . this just might work.