Go Students Go

I spent part of last week the first full day of new staff training for Campus Crusade for Christ in beautiful Daytona Florida (don’t fret – it was cold). What a great group of young leaders.

I had the opportunity to speak with them on God’s passion for all people and what we mean by ‘movements everywhere so that everyone knows someone who knows Jesus.” It was a fun time.

As I shared the vision of going for every kind of student in every category, you could see the excitement in the faces of these men and women. I think they are up for the task of creating a new reality for Campus Crusade that is very pleasing to the Lord – one that involves thousands of movements involving students of every type.

After I spoke, a number of these new staff members came to me and talked about our future direction. One student from Cal Poly Pamona shared how he had been involved in starting various new movements at that campus (good job Jim and Alisha in unleashing students to lead). I experienced something similar last week in San Diego where a young Latino student told me about launching movements in 3 different ethnic categories on campus.

The thing that continually jumps out at me is that students can do this. They really can. Of course not all students, but as we put the challenge before the right students, it is amazing how they respond . . . .and develop as leaders in the process. My fear is that the messiness can scare us from believing that they can do it.

So how do we determine who are the right students? I guess we should challenge them all and see what happens. Surely the right ones will rise the occasion.

On another note (ok a similar one), the birth, growth, multiplication and even death of movements should be much more common place in our understanding of how the kingdom expands. Corporations are started and then simply last forever (or fail) – however this is not the model for the kingdom. The kingdom model is an organism and organisms live, multiply and die. For an organism to begin and then not birth another is simply not natural. We would call that organism sterile. At the same time, that organism may birth a few new like organisms and then die . . . .and that would be considered natural.

Our “movements” function in a way much more kin to an corporation / organization. The seldom give birth and they never die. I am sure I have more to say about that, but I think there is a football game on . . . .and this line of thinking is becoming a bit too convicting.

(Also, one thing I told each of these new staff is that they should consider it part of their job to launch and develop new evangelistic movements - (I should say birth and grow) - so if you have a new staff member showing up near you any time soon, give ‘em the reigns and let them run!)