I get asked all the time, “how is your staff team investing on the 20+ campuses in Portland?” Honestly, this is the question we have to deal with and I’m not sure we’ve figured it out but here’s what we’re doing right now.
We’re treating Portland State (largest university in Oregon) almost like a staffed campus. This is where our staff spend the most time. We share our faith, we disciple students, and we invest heavily with our physical presence. This allows our team to have an environment that is great for new staff development and have fun just doing ministry together.
We’re treating the rest of the campuses way more hands off. Probably more like what Campus Crusade staff know as catalytic. We want each of our staff to have their hands in launching and/or coaching a ministry eventually because there is incredible value in that experience, but at this point we will not ask them to invest more than 1 day a week anywhere else. Whatever they do on the other campuses must be done on our launching/coaching day of the week (tuesday). This makes it easy for us to say no to opportunities that are beyond our teams capacity.
So as you can see we’re doing our best to accomplish forming a great staff environment (motivating, accountable, developmental) AND reaching our scope. We have a lot to learn about launching and coaching movements and we’re constantly reevaluated our schedule but so far it’s been a great step in reestablishing our presence in the city. Also, obviously the Spirit is at work opening doors that we never would have imagined so we hold this schedule and strategy with an open hand.
What do you think? Any metro/catalytic staff out there want to weigh in on how they allocate their staff resources?
Matt, these are excellent thoughts and insights. Thanks for sharing.
I especially like the point about fitting in all the coaching work into
Tuesday. It seems like that provides a really straight forward
framework for your team to operate within.