Casting Our Vision Part I

After a couple of years now at UNC, I felt like it was time to really codify and articulate a big-picture, over-arching vision for what our fellowship was going to be about. Late in the summer at some IV staff meetings we discussed the importance of vision and discussed how a vision is often an answer to a problem. So I got together with my co-staff, and we hammered out both the problem at UNC and our vision that is the solution to the problem.

Here's what we came up with:

The Big Problem:
UNC is a campus full of prodigals, cynics, skeptics, seekers and cynics who are surrounded by remnants of "southern church culture" but few of whom are relevantly engaged with the gospel.

So the crux of the matter here is the reality that we've got all types of folks on campus and we've got all these churches everywhere (Charlotte, where 1/3 of UNC students come from, has the most churches per capita of any city in the U.S.). But there's an increasing dissonance between how people inside Christian communities talk about life, the world, faith, and the like and how people outside of Christian communities talk about those things.

So when conversations or conflicts or discussions happen, it's like ships passing in the night.

Add to that the reality that so many of UNC's students spent some portion of their lives in the church but are not currently pursuing a relationship with Christ in Christian community-- "prodigals." These students have a whole different set of issues.

All of this is a problem. At least for those of us who believe that God loves people and that God designed people to be in a relationship with him in community.

So here's our response:

The Big Vision:
To be a missional community of grace bringing the hope of the gospel to every corner of campus.

Key words: community, that's critical--it's in our DNA as humans and it's a hugely significant part of how post-moderns experience and understand bigger realities. But it's also critical that we exist for something bigger than ourselves.

So we want to be a community that is missional--obviously in our case, the campus is the place where we exercise and fulfill that mission. We believe that it's our job as a community to equip and bless students to be missional exactly where God has placed them on campus: the dorms, their academic disciplines, other clubs or organizations where they are active. That is, we want to cover every corner of campus.

And we want to be full of grace for one another and for the campus. Grace being that gentle but firm invitation to repent of a life of worshipping all kinds of other false gods and follow the one Real God that has come to get us, made himself known to us in Jesus Christ.

That's where we're headed for as long as I'm here, anyway! It's been fun to really feel like I've re-gotten to know this campus where I attended as a student, left for 9 years, and then have been called back to to serve and to bless.