Dave Lowe: Why Mvts Everywhere?

Last week I had the awesome opportunity to spend time with the Cru/Epic/Destino/Bridges gang at UC Davis. Tina Greenwell And Dave Lowe are doing a wonderful job of decoding a multiple movement / movements everywhere strategy. Dave’s skills are definitely in adopting a movement building strategy to multiple entities. This is one of the reason I think they are seeing some of their success.

Here are some of Dave’s thoughts regarding how they landed on their current direction - and how they are trying to pull it off.

What made you decide to launch multiple spiritual movements on one campus?
The diversity of our campus made it apparent that there were large segments of the campus population that we weren’t reaching through our traditional Cru approach to ministry. We saw that ethnically, there were many students who would not get involved with our group. In order to reach them, we had to be willing to take a new approach. We had to sacrifice the idea that there would be only 1 group on campus.

Every campus has its share of diversity. One-third of our campus population was Asian American (it’s nearly 40% now). Initially, we thought that we could have a movement that was “multi-cultural”. It turns out, that “multi-cultural” simply meant having an ethnic diversity of students that had adopted the white (Cru) culture. We had about 20 Asian Americans that were involved in Cru so we thought we were doing pretty well. But we realized that there were a lot of Asian American students who were checking out Cru at the beginning of each year, and ending up somewhere else. We weren’t growing in our influence within the Asian American culture. With that group being such a large percentage of the campus population we expected more than 20 Asian Americans to be involved in a “multi-cultural” group.

As we began to look at the reasons why many Asian Americans were not sticking around and getting involved in Campus Crusade, we found out that many were plugging into other ministries where Asian Americans were the dominant culture. At that point, our Epic ministry decided to step out and have a meeting of their own. 40-50 people showed up and at least 20 of them were new students who had never come to a Cru meeting. We realized right then that there was a need for a ministry that reflected Crusade’s distinctives but allowed Asian Americans to be the dominant culture. Hence, Epic moved in a direction of becoming more separate.

We have encountered some resistance to having separate ministries from students and even from staff. But what is surprising about all this is that we have developed more leaders. When Epic was simply a group within Crusade, there was no need for many of the Asian Americans to step up and do things and to lead. But when they decided to go out on their own, they needed to find people within their group who could lead events, plan events and give leadership to the overall ministry. That fact alone has increased the number of committed leaders within our groups.

If you were asked to be the local leader at a new a new campus, how would you approach the job?
The first thing I would do is de-code the campus and determine what the different cultural groups were. Then I would seek to launch a movement that targeted the group that represented the largest percentage of students. I would seek to build within the DNA of that group the idea of reaching the lost, and being willing to cross cultural lines to do it.

We talk about going overseas, and we invite students to participate in cross-cultural missions overseas, but we don’t always invite them to do that here at home. Getting multiple movements started initially will entail somebody crossing a cultural barrier. Once the barrier is crossed and leaders are raised within that culture, then the movement begins sustaining itself and those within the movement are simply reaching their own. However, I would continue to try to build, within the DNA of every movement, the value of reaching out cross-culturally. Then you will have movements being launched by other movements. Then those movements will then launch other movements, etc.

What do you these different spiritual movements do together/separate?
Some of our movements are in the embryonic stage and do almost everything with the large group (Cru). Other movements that are more developed, like Epic, do most things on their own. They have their own weekly meeting, their own small groups; they do their own Orientation week events; they have their own ministry teams, etc.

However, we do some things together because it is beneficial for maximizing our resources. We do our Fall Retreat together. We do Saturday afternoon training seminars about once a quarter. We promote those together and do them together. We do our men’s and women’s retreats together. We do our Spring retreat together. We have a corporate meeting together about 2 times per quarter. We rotate who leads those meetings. We have a mixed leadership team. Our Shepherd team is comprised of leaders from many of the different groups who meet our leadership criteria.

Here’s how I look at the multiple movements strategy. On our campus, we easily have a dozen evangelical Christian groups. They all have their niche and their way of doing things. Some are ethnic specific, some are church-based and some are para-church groups.
I find that many of the Christians on our campus are uncomfortable with the notion that there is more than one Christian group. “Why can’t we all be together”, is what some have said.

Some on our campus have tried to bring us all together by doing inter-fellowship events like praise nights or worship nights, etc. But what I notice whenever I attend these events, is that most of the students sit in groups with other students from their own group. So there is very little “inter-fellowshipping” going on.

I think what unites the different groups is our common bond in Christ. The reason we are separate groups is related to the fact that we have different mission statements, different purposes, different ways of doing things, etc. The only way to truly have one group on campus is for every group to adopt the same vision and mission. But that would require some groups to change their vision and mission in order to accommodate the other groups.

What we are doing with a multiple movement strategy, is creating a number of groups that have different audiences, but who share the same vision, the same mission, and the same conviction regarding how we are going to do things. Now, when we do a “corporate” event, we are bringing together different groups that really do share a common vision; groups that have a similar conviction about what our mission is and how we’re going to fulfill it. When you bring these groups together, the atmosphere is electric and energizing. There really is a sense that we are all in the same boat, even though we are involved in separate groups. There is a sense of camaraderie.