Casting Vision II: The Elephant in the Room

Thursday I posted about our big-picture, capital V, Vision: to be a missional community of grace bringing the hope of the gospel to every corner of campus.

As we talked about this big-picture vision, we realized we needed to break it down into some initial steps for this year. Keeping that capital V Vision in mind, what is the problem that we want to tackle this semester?

We started talking about the status of our community and realized that we've got an elephant in the room: if you press people about the status of their community, most everyone's actually deeply lonely. And we realized that this isn't just a problem in our chapter but all over campus. It's a campus full of beautiful people with plenty of social life. But push beyond the outward appearances and you discover that there's this deeper ache of alone-ness.

So here's the problem we're tackling this semester: A pandemic (lit: all people) of loneliness on campus that leaves people created for community disoriented in the most important areas of life: identity, spirituality, and purpose.

We believe that we were created for community. So when we don't have it, we're lost about these most important areas of life: identity--who am I?--spirituality--who is God?-- and purpose--what the heck am I doing with my life?

So based on that, we crafted our vision statement for this year: "A missional community of grace living out Jesus' invitation to raw, intentional, transformational relationships in order to bless the campus."

We believe that Jesus invites us to live a different type of community that is both more risky and more attractive than standard UNC-relationships. And so we're pressing into that, praying that God would use our community to change us and then to change the campus.

We've only just begun to really engage this vision this fall, but a couple of things are for sure: 1. it's got a lot of our students dealing with the elephant in the room and 2. I don't think that this is solely a UNC-student phenomenon. Perhaps many of my readers who are no longer in college know a thing or two about this elephant as well.