Putting Christ Back into My Christian Campus Ministry

So you'd think that as a Christian religious professional it'd be easy to keep Jesus in my work.

But it's actually much easier as I meet with students on a daily basis to slouch into giving good advice. After almost fourteen years in this business, I've got some good stuff to say about just about any college student problem.

Boyfriend giving you troubles? No problem! Roommate issues? Go it covered. Family woes? I'm ready to listen. Not sure what to do with your life? Let's talk. The cafeteria giving you some digestive tract issues? Here are some healthy alternatives!

But, as Tim Keller argues, the gospel is not good advice. It's good news. And if it's true that God has come in the form of a person to die for our sins and be raised back to life in order to offer us life, then this news changes everything.

The gospel changes everything. That's a core principle of my ministry and life that I've articulated throughout the years. But I forget it sometimes. And I can get away with it for a short period of time but after a while I find myself tired of the lack of genuine transformational power of good advice.

So I've been turning over a new leaf on campus as I'm meeting with students. I'm either thinking or asking the question: How does the gospel change or apply to this situation right now in real time? How does Jesus speak into this persons life? Or even better--Jesus is already here and at work in this persons life, how do I get on board with what he's already up to?

And of course it's also good medicine--physician, heal thyself. I need the gospel to be changing everything from how I change diapers to how I drive on my commute to how I relate to family, friends, co-workers and students.

The gospel is powerful. If I'm spouting off good advice but not good news, I'm offering people appetizers instead of the seven-course meal that has been prepared for them at great cost to the Lord of Hosts.

So while some Christians lobby to keep Christ in Christmas, for me this year I'm feeling like it's time to put the Christ back into Christian campus ministry....even how I think about digestive tract issues.

Gender, Humor, and Public Speaking

The last couple of weeks we've had a couple of fantastic speakers at large group. They've both been women.

This has sparked an ongoing conversation with my wife about the challenge for women to find good models for public speaking. This is especially true in evangelical-Christianity land, where I spend most of my time...and especially to find good models for speaking to mixed-gendered audiences versus women-only audiences.

This has gotten me thinking about who shapes and decides what makes for a good public speaker. Which of course has gotten me thinking about comedians.

And here the market is decidedly male-dominated. Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, the Saturday Night Live crew past and present is largely male-dominated, "The Office" is, I believe, written by men and it's certainly a male-dominated culture that it's mocking.

There are certainly huge exceptions--Tina Fey, for example. But a couple of the more notable exceptions are Ellen Degeneress and Rosie O'Donnell.

Of course I'm not saying women can't be funny or that women can't be funny and be straight. I'm saying that humor is a huge part of how we communicate and connect and evaluate public speakers in our culture. And the men who dominate the humor market shape how we think about who's funny and who's not.

My guess is that as evangelicals in our country become more open to women teachers and pastors we'll see more and a wider variety of women who can serve as models for younger speakers.

And it'll be interesting to see how they use (or don't use--see John Piper for a guy who's not exactly bringing the house down with humor but who has a huge following) humor as a way to connect with their mixed-gendered-audience listeners.

The Brothel, the Casket, and Labor Day

Labor Day weekend every year comes at just the right time for me. Not only is it a chance to rest after the frenzied pace of the first couple weeks of school, our annual Labor Day tradition reminds me why I do what I do.

Her senior year, my wife Kelly lived in a house of nine women in Chapel Hill/Carrboro. All of these women were involved in InterVarsity as undergrads.

At the end of their year together, they (along with a couple of women who didn't live in the house me and my roommate referred to as "the brothel") committed to reuniting every year on Labor Day.

Fourteen years later, we just returned from Ocean Isle Beach. This weekend's festivities included 29 people--the original women plus husbands plus a fleet of children. Unfortunately, a couple of folks couldn't make it this year.

Most of us were involved with IV at UNC while in college. We have all been together often enough over the years to feel like family. Fourteen years later, all the marriages are still intact. Fourteen years later, all of us are still walking with the Lord.

I have been doing this job long enough to recognize that campus ministries go through seasons--some times things are strong, other times the group doesn't quite gel. We were involved in a particular season of IV at UNC that was extraordinary.

My goal for my students is that they will graduate UNC with life-long soul-caliber friends. Friends who will bring them to Jesus. Friends who will stand with them at their wedding and carry them out in their casket and in between love and encourage and rebuke and speak the gospel to them.

Kelly and I had just such an experience. And this weekend, I was reminded what a tremendous gift it is.

Why I Love My Work: The Pep Talk

I am sitting here in my office, less than one week away from the start of year number fourteen on campus. And so if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to give myself a little pep-talk today, a reminder of why I love my work with college students.

I love my work because in four years I get to watch people grow from wallflowers to leaders, from basically high-schoolers to adults, and sometimes from non-believer to leader in the Christian community. Four years, dramatic transformation.

I love my work because it's part theology, part sociology, part psychology, part business management, part organizational dynamics, part coaching, part pastoring, part training, part marketing, part event planning, part public speaking, and a heck of a lot of coffee.

I love my work because I spend most of my days with people talking about things that really matter.

I love my work because I love watching people change and grow and grow and grow and grow.

I love my work because after fourteen years I have alumni all over the globe serving, leading, teaching, drilling wells for clean water, working in cube world, teaching in elementary school classrooms, leading in churches, serving on the mission field, and on IV staff on other college campuses all in the name of Christ.

I love my work because Jesus loves to do amazing things with college students--most of the revivals in the United States have started with college students praying.

I love my work because locally, regionally and nationally I get to interact with some of the most gifted and creative and intelligent and thoughtful and dynamic people in the world who are all doing this same thing I am and often doing it better.

I love my work because I love college. It's the time in your life when you have the most discretionary time, the most margin to ask big questions and to wrestle through to get to the answers.

I love my work because right now I'm probably working with one or two or three or four or five students who will some day do what I do and do it much better.

Heck, yes, I love my job. The clock is ticking. Year fourteen kicks off officially in about six days. I have a heck of a lot to do. This little pep talk here, it reminds me why I'm doing it.

Back to Work Day 10: Celebrating My Superfluous-ness

So I've wrapped up ten straight days of work after a four month sabbatical from my work on campus. Looking back at the fall, things started off fairly atrocious but they were in stable, if not spectacular, condition when I left.

I'm delighted to report after ten days back that things in our community have improved greatly in my absence. At points in my life this would have been somewhat disheartening. Who doesn't like to feel like the world would stop if they disappeared?

But for this season (today, at any rate), I'm celebrating my superfluous-ness. This was, after all, the original point of rest in the Scriptures.

The commandment to take "sabbath" in the Old Testament was radical in its context. In an agrarian society, when the crops need to be planted, you plant. When they need to be picked, you pick.

Taking a day off no matter what stage the crops were in was reckless. The command to rest on the seventh day was the command to take a day off and trust the Lord with the results. It was to be a reckless rest of faith. God was to be their provider. This was a weekly reminder of his sovereign provision for them.

And so as I return to this InterVarsity community that I am certain that God has called me to serve, it is great news to me that I am not as important as I often like to think that I am. This is God's work. He was here long before I got here and will continue to be here long after I leave.

This relieves me of thinking of myself too highly, as too important or central. And this is the only way I can be free of the tyranny of a burden that is too great for me to bear. The weight of the ministry is not on me. It is on God.

I am not as important as I like to think that I am. Instead, I am more deeply loved than I ever hoped or imagined.

About Me to Be About You, Two

So here's how it works. We get something to do: get married, have kids, do some sort of ministry or leadership or service, do a job, do your schoolwork. We start out with a sense that we're given this work and it's important and we're focused on the task at hand.

And then we hit speed bumps. The marriage struggles. The kids' first word is "no!" and she means it. Your service isn't appreciated it the way you think it should be. Your small group Bible study is full of socially awkward people--or no one shows up at all.

And suddenly we realize that the mission or work matters, but if we listen we realize that we've made this whole thing about us in ways that aren't healthy (see yesterday's post). And so there's internal work to do.

So the cool thing is this: God does the internal work while at the same time allowing us to be doing things that matter. The mission and work of marriage or child-raising or leading doesn't stop so that you can get everything fixed inside of you.

So there's these two parallel things happening at the same time: there's the internal work of God freeing us from being propped up by others and there's the mission or task we've been given to do.

Both of these things matter. Depending on your temperament, you're probably more in tune with one side of the equation or the other.

Most of us live our lives on the surface. We think that the most important thing is the marriage or small group that's not going well or the kids or the work. And we're inclined to look for surface answers and quick-fixes to issues that have no quick fixes.

We need to slow down, reflect, begin to ask questions. Frustrations are the rumble strips intended wake us up to ask deeper questions: not simply 'how can I make this feel better quick' but 'what is God wanting to teach me here?'

Some of us are by nature more introspective, contemplative. We are all about what's happening in our internal world.

Those folks need to see the value not only of what God's doing on the inside, but also the importance of the mission and the work, and doing it well. It's not just about character formation. It's also about real work prepared for us in advance, that we are called to be faithful to do with all our might, as unto the Lord.

I think holding onto this tension and living in the dual realities of God's work in me as well as God's work through me is one of the hardest parts of my discipleship. I'm always falling off on one side or the other. Fortunately, God's patient with me.

And every so often, he gives me four months off to re-teach it to me all over again.

It's About Me to Make it About You

As I was looking back during sabbatical over the start of my time in ministry, I noticed an interesting process that I think might have broader application than just for people in ministry: I thought I was all about students, but really I was all about me; and then when it became all about me, it started to become all about students.

When I first started in ministry, my mindset was, "it's about serving students." I was full of optimism, idealism, and grand visions.

Then I hit some serious bumps. And what I discovered as I hit conflicts with students and as the community I was "leading" went from 50 to 15, was that I was really about me. As the work fell apart all around me, I struggled deeply to believe that I was gifted, valued, helpful, called or loved by God.

In other words, I needed validation. And I wanted it to come from successful ministry and students liking me. And when that didn't happen, I realized that I wasn't nearly so pure-hearted as I had initially imagined. I was actually in this for me, all about me, to make me feel good and important and like I was doing something important in the world.

This is one gift of disappointment--it strips away so many of the lies we tell ourselves about our motivations to get to the raw places where God can actually begin to do the hard work of helping us to be healthily re-wired human beings.

So what happened in the aftermath was interesting: the Lord began to make it about me.

He took my broken confidence, my questions, and my shaken identity and he began to re-make me. My identity and sense of who I am was never supposed to come from my work. It was always supposed to come from him. And he spent many, many months drilling this lesson into my very, very thick skull.

And what happened as a result was interesting: as the Lord made it about re-making me, I began to actually be able to serve students. I was no longer looking to them or my ministry to validate me. I was already validated, loved, cared for, accepted. So I could freely love them--I wasn't using them to make me feel good about myself.

It is impossible to serve in genuine humility from a place of vulnerability and fear. It is only possible to truly serve others from a place of confident freedom and security. Jesus offers us that place, offered me that place. And from that place, he invites us to serve. It's the only place where we can genuinely do so.

Like I said, I think that this has application beyond ministry--parenting, perhaps. I see this process of stripping away happen often for my student leaders as they hit disappointments or frustrations.

The hard part, at least for me, is fighting back self-protective cynicism and remaining soft and teachable...and being willing to continue to lead and serve, even when it's hurt before.

My Key to Joyful Re-entry: The Right Preposition

So on Friday I talked about my goals coming into sabbatical...and how good the Lord has been to help me get traction towards those goals. Goal #4 ran the deepest, here's what it was:

To seek the Lord about what it means to do campus work healthily--some in terms of expectations and margins, but especially as it relates to keeping my identity separate and distinct from the ups and downs of ministry.

The idea here is to develop healthy emotional distance between me and my work. There's my own identity in Christ. Then there's the work God's called me to do. They are related, but not identical...something that I often forget.

I've been particularly aided in this task over the past week as I've been reading the book "Boundaries." And the idea that I've been meditating on is replacing the wrong preposition with the right preposition; replacing for with to.

In "Boundaries" they contend that at the core, emotionally healthy people have a clear sense of what we can and can't control. What we can control is ourselves, our responses, our actions, our decisions. What we can't control is what other people do, how they respond or react.

They argue that to emotionally healthy people understand that they are responsible to other people but not for other people.

So as a parent, I'm responsible to my children to parent with love, discipline, encouragement, teaching, correcting, play, etc. but I am not ultimately responsible for how they turn out. As they grow older, they are responsible for making their own decisions. I'm responsible to them but not for them. They are their own people.

The same principle applies in marriage, work relationships, family dynamics, etc. We are responsible to one another but we are not responsible for one another. We have to realize where we end and where other people begin. That's healthy emotional boundaries.

It's also really hard for control-freak over-achievers like myself.

And so as I return to work tomorrow morning with the rest of America, I'm praying for holy and healthy prepositions to help me: I'm responsible to the community of InterVarsity students that I serve, but I'm not responsible for them. Some students will stay and flourish. Some will stay on the periphery. Some will be regularly frustrated or critical of things we do. Some will leave. As a whole we will inevitably have seasons of growth and seasons of struggle.

I have a responsibility to serve and lead as faithfully as I can. But ultimately, I cannot make the community or individuals in the community do or be anything. I must do what I can to be a healthy, whole, mature human being, speaking truth as faithfully as I can, in step with the Spirit.

The rest is up to the people that I serve to respond to the Spirit as He does His work. Doing this would go a long way towards making me a healthy campus minister...not to mention a better husband, dad, and son.

The key to this whole thing is the right preposition....I knew there was some reason why I was an English major.

Processing Criticism

A couple days ago I had a hard-but-good conversation with a student. He struggled to trust me. We talked it out, worked through some good stuff.

However, in the process it became clear that his issues weren't his only, but also those of some friends of his. Some folks (not sure how many or who) had met with me and felt like I had "mass produced" answers to their questions or issues that they were dealing with. They had felt like I was overly-intense and pressed and offered too much before they really trusted that I was for them and understood them.

I have spent probably overly-much mental/emotional energy thinking about this conversation over the past couple of days. Here's a little glimpse into my inner-world churnings of how I process criticism: the good, the bad, the ugly.

1. The Scripture has nearly nothing about the value of defending/vindicating yourself and a TON to say about the importance of being teachable, being willing to hear a rebuke or corrective word. I want to be able to hear hard things, even when they feel hard or unfair or whatever. This seems to me to be most of the point of Proverbs.

2. I tend to take criticism of this sort more personally because it hits the core issue in my life: people-pleasing. I want people to like me. Hearing that people have met with me and come away not liking me doesn't make me happy. I expend a lot of time and energy and effort trying to keep people happy with me. When that doesn't work, I get upset.

This, of course, is sin. God has been good to put me in a job where it's impossible to please everyone all the time. Criticism forces me to face this idol down and call it what it is: death.

3. But while my job isn't people-pleasing, all ministry is inherently built on relational trust--it is the currency of my work. If I'm losing trust with people, then I cannot do the good work of speaking the gospel to people and have them hear it. This is not good.

4. But the problem isn't only "functional" (i.e. "I want to do a good job") it's also relational: I genuinely DO care about my students. I want them to be listened to and taken seriously. One of my core principles in ministry is that I think many if not most people go their whole lives without anyone taking them seriously enough to really listen to them. If nothing else, I can give them that gift. To have people feel like I haven't done that hurts me. It's what I want to give to them.

5. I hate it when I've met with people older/wiser than me who haven't listened to me all the way or who I've felt have launched into sermon #63 on whatever the issue is that I'm dealing with.

6. Ergo, I don't want to hear a students' issue with their boyfriend for 3 minutes and then pull out MY sermon #63, the Alex Kirk treatise on dating, that I then launch into for 45 minutes. I want to take this person, their struggles, and what the Holy Spirit is doing right now, in real time, much more seriously than that. I don't want it to be about me sounding infinitely wise while steamrolling people and not taking them seriously.

7. But the Scriptures do have things to say about the wisdom of those who are older and have gone before us. I DO have good things to offer students about dating/roommate problems/knowing God's will/decision making/other college student issues because God has taught me a lot about those things through the years. I want to offer those things when I can, but again, not in a heavy-handed, rushed sort of way.

8. This conversation wasn't just about this student. It was these other people that he had talked with, too. How many people? Who are they? Would they be willing to talk with me about it? Can I make it right? Do I need to be reconciled? Are there many, many more out there who feel like this? Is my approval rating actually more like G.W.'s than I would imagine?

9. I say I care for my students (see #4 above) but do I really? What is my motivation? Am I over-eager to impress or direct or sound intelligent?

10. I think that this happens more often with students that I have one-time meetings with. If someone wants to meet with me and talk about a specific issue, I assume that they trust me (ish) and want to really deal with it. With those people, since it is just a one-time meeting, I think I tend to be more aggressive/directive and offer more of my own thoughts. I think that the people I meet with weekly I have a more process-oriented approach. I know that we have more time, more space and that we can cover the ground over the course of a couple weeks or a semester.

But all that is just my own self-evaluation. Is that really true? Does it matter?

These are all the bases that I've circled (and circled and circled) over the past couple of days. I think that this morning the Lord finally broke the vicious circle. But this post is long enough for one day already.

Trials

Sunday afternoon our new small group Bible study from church met up for the second-ish time. I decided to lead us through James, based on the suggestion of one of our members.

So we hit up against a passage in James 1 that has regularly been used by the Lord in my life: 2 Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. 4 Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

The next day (Monday) we hit a trial in our lives. Kelly had what we expected to be a token day of jury duty. It has turned into possibly an eight-day ordeal. She can't tell me much, but most jury duties go for a day or two, so this obviously isn't a jay-walking case.

With three kids, we don't really have many options in terms of child care. I'm having to take this week off of work as she's sitting in a courtroom all week. I'm really wrestling with the Lord over this, and not because I don't know what to do with/don't want to be with my kids.

This fall on campus has been and continues to be rocky. My impulse (and perhaps neurosis) during such a time is to roll up my sleeves and try to fix it. We only have a handful of weeks left in the semester. I desperately want us to finish the semester at a stable place.

And now this. A trial that's a trial. It just feels like one more thing that's gone weird this fall. Another week where stuff isn't normal, isn't in sync, isn't in rhythm. I've had too many of those the past nine weeks or so.

So I'm trying to hang onto the promises of James. And I'm trying to work up some mustard-seed sized faith that all of this is okay. But right now, I'm having a hard time counting it all pure joy.

Working and Trusting

For reasons that are regularly re-curring in my twelve years and eight weeks in ministry, I was wrestling with the Lord last week about my work and his work. What role does doing things with excellence and thoroughness and thoughtfulness play in the work that he's given me to do bearing fruit? At what point does the pursuit of excellence become this never-ending, exhausting, foolish, pride-full and deeply sinful activity that forgets that God does the importnat stuff?

This tension plays out in me more or less constantly.

On the one hand, we need to do things well. In InterVarsity, we have students who lead small groups. We don't just tell those students to "let go and let God." We train them--darn well, in my humble opinion. There are skills involved that help to create holy space.

But I am aware that this can play out terribly. The temptation for Adam and Eve was that they would be like God. If excellence becomes an obsession, I can have ministry be place where I'm eating the forbidden fruit. I become the center of things rather than God. This is the cause of approximately 95% of the misery of the world. The rest is caused by country music.

In the midst of my wrestling freshly with this question last week, the Lord gave me a good passage to consider from the Psalm 4: "Offer right sacrifices and trust in the Lord."

So there's the work that we are commanded to do (offer right sacrifices) but our trust is not in those sacrifices to somehow secure our lives or successes or whatever. We have work to do, and that work matters. But our hope is in the Lord.

My trust is to be in him, even as I offer right sacrifices. And this means that there actually could be wrong sacrifices, which I need to ask the Lord for guidance about. I can do my work poorly, I need to continuously be a student, learning my craft and my trade.

But in the end, my trust is in the Lord. For all of it. Me, my staff team, my students. I work, but then I wait in trust. Today, I think I get that. Ask me again tomorrow.

And I thought I had a Weird Job...

So imagine packing up your life and hitting the road for a school year on a quest to see just about every major (and many minor) universities that you could think of?

That's basically what Benson Hines is doing. He interviewed me last week in his quest to get as much information as possible about campus ministry styles and flavors from different organizations. He told me he hopes to write a book that will raise the value and profile of campus ministry in church world.

Which, of course, I'm all for.

A lovely chap, check out his site: exploringcollegeministry.

The Long Trip II

About a month ago I blogged on The Long Trip from consumer to mature follower of Christ. It's a difficult thing to take a culture full of people who function primarily as "consumer" (even if we don't cognitively think of ourselves in those terms) and to move them to becoming people who are willing to lay down our rights, our time, our energies, our very lives for the sake of God's kingdom, his work, his priorities.

I was still thinking on these things when I came across this passage from Hebrews 13:

11The high priest carries the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place as a sin offering, but the bodies are burned outside the camp. 12And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. 13Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. 14For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.

The invitation to go and join Jesus in the place of shame, disgrace, and pain "outside the camp" captured my imagination for several days.

If our culture is full of "consumers," then let us imaginatively consider what it means to meet them at the "marketplace" in the city. Isn't that what incarnation is all about? Doesn't the Jesus event mean that God takes seriously the human context and that he does whatever it takes to engage people exactly where they are?

But of course we cannot stop there. The work is this call from the writer of Hebrews: to encourage movement to a new place outside the camp, outside the city gate, to the place of disgrace with Jesus.

So here's the challenge for your church and for mine and for my ministry on campus: to simultaneously engage the secular culture of consumers at the marketplace while at the same time leading people away from the marketplace to the place of disgrace outside the city.

Can we have structures and events operating at a consumer level while at the same time trying to wean people off of their consumerism? Or in attempting to do both at the same time are we automatically reinforcing the consumerism and thereby making the journey outside the city gate even more difficult, maybe impossible?

Silver & Green

Several weeks ago when we had Timothy Paul Jones come and speak at UNC we had posterboards on display for people to interact with on their way into his presentation. At the top of each posterboard was a prompt or question that corresponded with an issue of forgiveness or unforgiveness in their lives. For example, one of the prompts read: "I or someone I know cannot forgive a former friend for something they did."

We handed students a red dot as they passed by and invited them to put the red dot on the posterboard that they most resonated with.

One of the posterboards read, "I or someone I know struggles with guilt or shame over something done or left undone." Here's my camera phone picture of how covered in dots that particular one was:


One week later I gave the talk "freedom from shame and guilt" that I've been blogging from these past several days. At the end of the talk, I invited students to respond.

We passed around sheets of silver dots and sheets of green dots. The silver dots were for students who were Jesus followers who realized that they were carrying around guilt and shame unnecessarily and were ready to step into the light and leave their guilt or shame there that night. The green dots were for people who weren't following Jesus or who hadn't been for a long time who were ready to make a decision to do so.

As we sang several songs about the power of Jesus to free us from guilt and shame, we invited students to come forward and cover up a red dot on the posterboard with a silver or green dot--a symbol of the old being swallowed up in the new life we have in Christ.

Here's the "after" picture:


Lots of powerful silver...and one glorious dot of green.

I'm not so foolish as to think that this is the end of shame or guilt for me or for my students. But the process of being freed from shame and guilt is a process made up of hundreds, maybe thousands, of decisions--both big ones and small ones. And I believe that for many of the students there that night, the step to put a dot up on a posterboard was an anchor-point decision that they can look back on next time the voices of shame and guilt come to haunt them.

Goliaths

So in contrast to last week's great expectations for our Thursday night gathering on campus, this week's prospects look rather bleak.

Consider:

1. A home basketball game at 7:00 (our normal starting time) so we bumped large group back to 9:30. Will students come after already giving up two hours of their night to a basketball game? Hmmmm....

2. It's forecasted to be pouring rain at 9:30 tonight (real feel temp: a balmy 33 degrees).

3. I'm speaking and it's 6:29 and I'm not ready to speak yet.

Any of numbers one and two would most likely cut deeply into our turnout. Both? Not likely to be a great night.

David in meeting up with Goliath has a vastly different take on the obstacle that faces him as compared to the others around him. All the warriors to this point have been looking at Goliath's size and power in comparison to their own stature and abilities. What David does when he shows up is ask "who is this jerk who dares to stand up against the army of the Living God?" (loosely paraphrased). Rather than compare Goliath to himself, he compares Goliath to God. It makes all the difference. One smooth stone later, and Goliath is laid out.

So I'm trying to hold out hope that God's bigger than a home basketball game and that he can make the rain hold off for an hour or so and that he can help me pull this talk together in the next two hours.

I just struggle to really believe it.

Awesome

So last night's event was spectacular. We had a packed house at 5:00 and a packed house and some in the live-feed overflow at 8:00--somewhere between 850-900 students attended the sessions last night.

Dr. Timothy Paul Jones did a fantastic job of discussing the issues of variations in the New Testament documents and who changed what and why from a very orthodox Christian viewpoint without attacking or demeaning anyone. He built a strong case for why the Scriptures as we have them are reliable and trustworthy. He was willing to admit where there were guesses or suppositions along the way that could be disagreed with.

If you're someone who struggles at all with trusting the Bible, I'd really encourage you to check out his web site, read his book(s).

As we wrapped up the second presentation, I couldn't help but be proud and overwhelmed with the gifts and commitment and work of my student leaders. Liz worked hard and did fantastic , strategic p.r. to get the word out all over campus. Kelsey worked hard to get us great spaces for the two presentations and to get us the overflow room at the very last minute. Jenny stepped up and emceed in front a huge crowd with poise and graciousness. My students took risks and invited friends.

As I was praying in the car on the way home, I had this unique moment of clarity. This was my first time pulling something of this magnitude together. I made lots of small mistakes along the way. But none of them de-railed the event like they could have. As I was reflecting on how it came together, I had this thought: last night was most definitely a unique work that God had prepared in advance for us to do. It was his work. And he worked through my students and me and Timothy Paul Jones to make it happen. But it was his work. He made sure it happened. And we got to be a part of it.

Awesome.

Ministry Post-Modernly

Last week I posted The Long Trip about Willow Creek's realizations that they had engaged consumers with the gospel but had not done a thorough job of moving them from consumers to disciples.

Brad Barret asked this great question (along with some other good comment-ers) that I thought was worth posting about:

What do you make of the "you-centered" approach of post-modernism? Is it too much that we go way out of our way to reach the postmodern generation (which, I guess, is you and me), that we orient most of our programs around the comforts of the attendees?

Basically what I'm getting at is that the primary message from these churches is NOT "Jesus loves you", but rather, "we want you to be comfortable here..."

I think that there's an interesting tension developing in evangelicalism. On the one hand, there's the mega-church and post-mega-church movements. Guys like Rob Bell and others who have taken Willow Creek's baby boomer, seeker-oriented model and post-modernized it a bit, made it a little less suburban and more edgy. These are the types of churches that Brad's concerned about.

Then there's the reaction against the mega-church: there's the emergent church, and other off-shoots. But there's also a small but growing number of evangelicals who are moving away from pop-main-stream evangelicalism and moving towards more traditional, high-church experiences, full of history and liturgy and ritual and tradition and mystery. There have been a number of high-profile evangelicals who have converted to Catholicism over the past couple of years. And my own church and the movement of evangelicals to the Anglican tradition is booming.

So basically, there's folks who are really feelin' what Brad's concerned about. They're Christians who are concerned about the you-centered-ness of some of our churches. And so they're moving to a more high-church experience with more emphasis on the mystery; the vertical as opposed to the horizontal. And of course there are others who are taking what Willow Creek started and developing it for the next generation.

I believe strongly that we have to have both arms of the evangelical church to survive the shift to post-modernity. What has made and kept evangelicalism vibrant and alive in the U.S. is our tradition of re-inventing our ministry without losing fundamental and essential elements of Christendom. We might not even agree on all of what those are (Scripture, a conversion narrative of some sort, salvation in Christ by faith alone are a few core principles), but they're a part of our evangelical ethos nonetheless.

The urgency of the need to find ways to communicate the gospel to each successive generation because something is legitimately at stake if we don't has compelled us to re-think our forms in some radically good ways in the past twenty to thirty years.

Take a look at the Christian church in Europe for what happens when we stop doing this. The ministry situation in most of Europe is basically a complete re-start and it happened in one generation, maybe a generation and a half. This is what happens when we dig in our heels and say "this is how we've always done it." The mistake there is to think that those forms were somehow un-affected by cultural norms and expectations (in this case usually modernism as opposed to post-modernism) and so "that's how it ought to be." The fact is, modernism was no more amenable to the gospel than post-modernism is. It's just different battles we have to fight.

The culture and consumer engagement churches like Willow Creek force much of evangelical culture to at least consider how they're relating to the broader, un-churched world. I think that this is a really, really good thing...even if it there are some poor applications of it along the way.

The Long Trip

Several months ago I listened to a podcast out of Willow Creek, the church that launched the seeker-oriented mega-church movement in the mid 1980's. In the podcast Bill Hybels, the founding pastor of Willow, was debriefing the results of a long study of their own congregation involving focus groups, surveys, the works.

The study found that the satisfaction rating among the congregants was highest among those who were not Christians or who had mostly recently become Christians. The longer a person was involved in Willow and the longer they had walked with Christ, the more likely they were to be dissatisfied with the church.

Hybels talked about the findings as a shock to him and to his staff. He talked about the need to move his church culture from a program-oriented one to one that is creating what he called "self-feeders." He confessed they had not done a good job as a church staff challenging them as a congregation to move to radical self-motivated, self-disciplined discipleship in Christ. Christianity Today picked up on the rumblings around Willow with their on-line blog post Willow Creek Repents?

I think that Willow's in a hard spot. They excel at engaging a culture that is consumer-driven. They do a fantastic job with programs that meet non-religious consumers exactly where they are. What they have discovered is that it is a long trip from consumer to mature disciple of Jesus. Programs can't do it. Personal spiritual disciplines and authentic community are the essential practices of a growing disciple.

I feel this tension myself. I work with 18-22-year-olds who have been deeply programmed to see themselves as consumers. The ones who grew up in Christian community often relate to those communities as commodities. In some ways it's not their fault. It would take a fantastically mature 18-year-old and/or outstanding parenting to fight against that flow.

So how do we both engage consumers right where they are and call them to something that requires a good deal more work than they're used to? To disciplines which frequently yield much less immediate results? I'm still working this out myself. My guess is that as Willow Creek "repents" they'll probably lead much of the evangelical sub-culture into the next twenty years of genuine discipleship of the consumer generations.

Men and Christian Community

One thing I thought about some over the Christmas break was the issue of men in Christian community. In InterVarsity nationwide, our numbers of men, particularly white men, have gone down while other numbers have gone up or remained relatively steady. This problem, of course, is not simply relegated to IV. The church around the world is largely made up of women. I was asked to participate in a panel at our National Staff Conference to present ways to get and keep men in our chapters.

I think one piece of the puzzle might be the VARK proportions.

There are four different learning styles: Visual, Auditory, Reading/writing and Kinesthetic. Church services (along with InterVarsity large group meetings) tend to be high on the Auditory. The sermon (at least in most Protestant circles) is the high point.

But the problem with that is that men tend to be visual and kinesthetic learners. So if we're not finding ways to engage them with images and give them opportunities to actually move somehow in response, it makes sense that they stop coming to our meetings and disengage from our communities.

I think that in order to engage men we've got to find ways to increase the use of images in worship and in our teaching. And I think that we've got to find ways to invite tactile response. I love that in our Anglican service each week we take communion. It's an active response to the preaching of the word. In my large group talks I've been trying to be more active as well for response times: exchange a slice of cheese for a cup of water, write your vow on a Duplo block and add it to others as an altar to the Lord, etc.

The Lord has made many men (and not only men but women too, obviously) to be visual and kinesthetic learners. Why do we not tap into our God-given creativity to find ways to engage men more effectively with the gospel?

Go v. Accommodate

A friend of mine recently told me about a church plant that had as one of its eight core values "incarnational ministry to the city." But when an opportunity presented itself to share the space of an African-American, inner-city church facility, the head pastor evaluated his congregation and said, "we're not ready for that."

My friend went on to reflect that this is a pivotal place of difference between the church and the parachurch. Parachurch ministries have "mission" at the very core of their culture and they can afford to continue to have mission at the forefront of their values. Churches, by contrast. often have to choose between mission and tending to the people in their congregation.

Of course, these two aren't always in tension. But there seems to be critical junctures in the life of Christian organizations when they have to choose between mission and accommodation.

In one of the gospels, Jesus' last words are a resounding "GO!" And that "go" has echoed throughout the past two thousand years of global history--sometimes faithfully, sometimes less than faithfully.

So I love mission. Not at the expense of people but as an opportunity to bless people. And I love the church, especially when it's on mission. And I'm quite content for now to be in para-church world where I don't have to apologize quite so much for having mission at the forefront.

My guess is that one day I'll end up in church-land. Hopefully my experience of mission at the forefront in InterVarsity will be a blessing to me and to the people I have the opportunity to serve and work with.