After that is done, I have this dream of tweaking our give site to be branded better and fit our giving situation better. All this is done with the intent of supplementing our face to face fundraising effort.

There’s still lots of questions if this is worthwhile or not but it can’t hurt right? Does anyone else have examples of how your ministries online presence has helped with fundraising?

Other LTI posts kinda like this one:

1. Does being online help spiritual growth?
2. Sunday Inspiration
3. Collaboration across the organization

Some days the task list can wait. Some days I just need to be around the energy of students who are trusting the Lord for something beyond themselves.

Since Tuesday is our movement coaching/launching day, I had the chance to make the trek up to Washington State University – Vancouver to visit with a few of our student leaders today. I hadn’t been up there since last term and I had no idea what to expect.  WSU-V is on the edge of our scope and I’ve been coaching them via email/phone and occasional visit. It’s all student run with limited interaction with us. We resource and do our best to put fuel on the fire.

I could have said no to this trip. I have a ton of other tasks, phone calls and emails I could have worked on…but I drove the 40 minutes in the pouring rain in I-5 traffic to get some face-time with these students.

I met up with some “Coug Cru” students at a promotional table and I immediately began to get a taste of the flavor of things by asking a new girl who was helping out how she got involved. She responded by saying, “I met Phil and they seemed to talk about outreach a lot and that’s something I care about so I got involved. Also, I love that they pray a lot!”

I think that’s a good sign.

After we’re done with the promo table I sit down with two student leaders and begin to ask questions. The responses are about as ideal as you can imagine in campus ministry. They want to see believers connected in community…a community that is involved in the mission of seeing their campus reached for Christ. They want their friends to know Jesus. They want to courageous with the gospel.

Woah, woah, woah…settle down people. We’re just starting another Christian club here.

I walked away from our brief time in the bone chilling rain reflecting on the fact that a year ago there was no one on campus with the intention of making Christ known and now the environment of the campus is changing because some students started praying. Praise the Lord.

Other LTI posts kinda like this one:

1. Does being online help spiritual growth?
2. Response to Anti 1-1 Discipleship post
3. How are we allocating our staff in Portland?

• Hit Command +, or Command – to increase or decrease font size.

• Hold Shift, command, 4 to bring up the cross-hairs for you to highlight (click and drag) an area to take a screenshot. It automatically saves to your desktop.

• Hit Command, spacebar to bring up the Spotlight feature to search for an app, document or whatever

I know you experts out there have these all dialed in, but what other shortcuts do you get asked about on a weekly basis? (I just used command-i to italicize)

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1. Most helpful Mac applications for me.
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Evangelism is both a process and an event.

I stole this paragraph from a CPG article that summarizes this statement well. Launching from a place of understanding that everyone is somewhere on the spiritual journey pictured below…

it is key to realize that moving people along that line is both a process and an event, we can continue to reach out to a person in many different ways and forms of witness – e.g., our testimony, a book or podcast, serving them in some way, hanging out, playing sports together, inviting them to be around other Christians at a Cru meeting or social event, or coming along to church. But since sharing the Gospel is also the event of them hearing the Gospel, there will need to be a time, or perhaps many times, when someone verbally shares the Gospel with that person. For some non-believers, we will be involved in both the process and the event, while for others we may only be in on the event, and others will be in on the longer process. Whatever our role is, we walk in the Spirit and let God use us in His overall plan in other people’s lives.

What I really like is that the article points out that sharing the Gospel includes people hearing the Gospel…with words, but doesn’t discount the effort we make to serve, invite and spend time with people. Maybe I’ll put it like this – verbal proclamation of Jesus is the backbone of evangelism that is surrounded by the mission to care for, love and serve those in our sphere of influence.

How do you train students in the reality that evangelism is both a process and an event?

Other LTI posts kinda like this one:

1. Evangelism – what’s working, what’s not?
2. Thoughts on evangelism; skepticism and proclamation.
3. Links of the week!

1. I believe everyone is on some sort of spiritual journey.
2.  I believe that God is able to transform lives.
3.  I believe I’m called to take the initiative to bring Jesus to those that don’t know him (leaving the 99 to go to after the 1).
4.  I’m called to have a posture of incarnation – being present with those around me, listening with respect, engaging, serving, loving.
5. There will be opposition – those that are angry, those that don’t respond, those that are neutral.
6.  I get to be an ambassador for Christ and help people come to a point of decision. “Do you want to respond to Jesus right now?”
7.  I want to be known for talking about Jesus – a natural outflow

Am I missing anything? Are any of these challenging to you?

Other LTI posts kinda like this one:

1. Evangelism – what’s working, what’s not?
2. Thoughts on evangelism; skepticism and proclamation.

Train a bunch of students in evangelism principles that will last a lifetime? Mobalize hundreds of students to have quality evangelism experience in a crazy city like Portland? That’s not daunting at all.

Our team was tasked with creating the evangelism training and outreach (Gospel in Action) for the annual Cru Conference this year. All logistics aside it was a dream come true to mobilize 600 people to go share their faith in Portland. That doesn’t happen everyday here. Kicking a dent in the kingdom of darkness. Here’s where we landed…

Pre-conference we asked students and staff to bring socks and stocking caps to benefit the Portland Rescue Mission (who we love) as a way to bless the city. The response to this was really good.

Day 1 training included a good look at the reality of our context (city, portland, individualistic people) that hopefully helped students have compassion that provoked action. It also included a general overview of the explorer role from Cojourners with the tools of asking questions and listening being the key take aways. Students then spent some time in the city, riding our amazing public transportation, exploring peoples stories and trying to identify where people were at in their spiritual journey.

Day 2 training was the guide role of Cojourners.  We walked them through how God calls us to be competant in proclaiming the message of Christ, dependent on him and and not-weird. Sidenote* I’m starting to believe whole heartedly that this is Cru’s niche in the evangelical world. We then walked them through how to use a tool we call the Knowing God Personally booklet that helps guide people to Christ. The outreach that day was also in various parts of the city where students were tasked with exploring where people were at spiritually and seeing if God opened doors to use them as a guide.

Day 3 was a workshop on how to practically connect major themes in life (guilt, shame, joy, hurt, forgiveness, etc.) to the gospel. Hopefully students realized that just about anything can be used to launch into deeper conversation about Jesus. At the end of the time we also trained them to use a “sometime” question. There are lot’s of variations, but they all sound something like this…”Sometime would you like to talk more about this?” We had students pull out there phones and take 10 minutes to text or facebook their friends back home to set up appointments for the first week back on campus. One kid texted 20 guys and got 18 positive responses…he’s gonna be busy this week.

There are a few things we’d probably change, but in the end the Lord showed up, students were bold and real in our city and people lives were changed.

Should we have done anything different?

Other LTI posts kinda like this one:

1. Evangelism – what’s working, what’s not?
2. MTL Conference
3. Spring Break – Urban Immersion

• I’ve recently become a big fan of Ed Stetzer. Not only are his views on evangelism biblically sound, but he’s responded to my tweets a couple of times.  Challenging words about themes the Christian church is facing here, which I think have implications for our campus ministries as well.
• This article from Christianity Today (also by Ed Stetzer) on “Proseltytizing in a Multi-Faith World“. It’s a long one, but really practical principles in how to proclaim the gospel in a multi-faith world.
• This article from Brian Barela completely resonated with me on leading with limited capacity. Apparently it’s common for us 30 year olds.
• Lastly, this post from Tim Casteel on developing more of a culture of sharing within Cru. This is a message I’ve preached from the rooftops, but even now find myself with such limited capacity that it doesn’t happen as regularly as I’d like.

Enjoy some reading this week!

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1. Links of the Week!
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1. Launching at Portland State University
2. Links of the Week!
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Here’s some tips to consider that are incredibly applicable to college ministry…especially in the operations context that I live in.

Keep two lists: I wrote about this a while back here. Two lists, one for urgent items and another for important ones. Do not let the urgent items compete against the important ones on the same list….the urgent will always win.

Make a daily “focus area.” Somehow designate up to five tasks in your to-do list that correspond to a priority project. Regardless of whatever crops up that day, the focus area must be cleared before bed.

Don’t dwell. Scott says that wen urgent matter arise, they tend to evoke anxiety. Do not dwell on possible negative outcomes. Break urgent items down into action steps and challenge yourself to reallocate your energy to the important as soon as the action steps are completes.

Don’t hoard urgent items. Even if you delegate well you may find yourself hoarding urgent items as they arise. The project your working on is important to you and you want to solve things yourself. “When you are in a position to do so, challenge yourself to delegate urgent items.” Scott says. The cost of not doing this is that our energy gets shifted away from the long term goals.

Create windows of nonstimulation. Window of time dedicated to uninterrupted project focus. Preserve blocks of time during your days as precious opportunities to make progress on important items with little risk of urgent matters popping up.

All of this requires discipline. Which I’m still working on.

Other LTI posts kinda like this one:

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