Rich's Travels

Time for another special Mythbuster edition!!

3)    Building numbers vs. building movements.  It’s not all about the numbers.

Ever heard someone talk about how many hits their website gets?  It’s one thing to have a website that gets lots of traffic (people coming to the site), but that is only a fraction of what is needed in order to have an effective web ministry.  How are you doing not only answering emails, but attempting to build movements?  One site does not make a fully functioning web ministry.  Perhaps you have a great everystudent.com website.  Congratulations!  That’s a great start.  However, it is  only the tip of the iceberg in getting to building virtual movements.  How do you get someone to go from a lost student to a fully devoted follower of Christ?  It’s going to have to be more than one site that can do it all (win, build send).

 My good friend Wourter in the Netherlands has a great analogy as to what this might look like.  I call it the rocks in the stream analogy.  I’ll try to do it justice.  He talks about coming to a small river with no bridge.  How do you get across?  Most of the time, there are small rocks that you jump onto in order to get across.  If you are with a group of friends it is rare that you use the same path to get across.  It all seems  like a pile of rocks, but people choose their paths based on their height, athletic ability (how far I can jump), confidence (how far I think I can jump or feel confident I can land a jump without getting wet!) or just sheer preference (it might be fun to jump to that rock) etc.  A virtual movement is kind of like that.  Students more than ever want to be able to choose where to go on the internet.  Also, not just where to go, but what format they want to be able to receive information (podcast, youtube video, mp3, etc.).  We need to put together a bunch of sites and strategies that are loosely connected and loosely directed.  That way, people can move from one stone to another in the same way that someone can move from a non-Believer to a fully devoted follower of Christ in 4 years! Not an easy thing to do, but if we want to be move beyond just sheer numbers to virtual movements then we have got to go for it.

4)       Virtual movements- it’s just a big event.  

I’ve heard plenty of students talk about how they use the internet on their campus.  After spring break (when the campus school calendar is notoriously slow) staff will set aside a week to advertise the internet.  They chalkboard blitz the entire campus, hand out fliers, put ads in the school newspaper etc. …all great things by the way. 

However,  building virtual movements is not a one week in the campus calendar type deal.  It’s not a big event (hosting Josh McDowell, Andre Kole, keynote etc.)  Building a virtual movement is something that needs to be done on a consistent basis..more like a weekly meeting on campus.  There is also more to building virtual movements than just advertising for a website.  With students today spending so much time on the internet (last survey showed 6 hours a day globally) we need to engage students everyday all day…not just for a week long blitz. 

5)      “Computers are going to replace me!”

A common fear among us older types is that if I start implementing virtual strategies then it will result in having a robot replace me in my job.  May it never be!!!!

In fact, just the opposite is true.    We can use the internet as  a powerful filter to get to interested students.  When I was on campus, I lived to talk to a non-Believer who had serious seeking questions about Christ.  We did surveys, weekly meetings, special campus events and everything under the sun designed to get  an interested student give us  a valid name and phone number so I could call them back and meet with them to answer their questions about Christ.  Now, I can have a computer filter that contact for me (the ugly work) in order to have more face to face (or online) conversations with spiritually interested students!  It doesn’t get any better than that!  Remember the Terminator myth…computers don’t build movements…Spirit filled Believers do!  All that work I did just to have one conversation when I can now have 2-3 a day through the power of virtual strategies.

Whoever said that a picture speaks a thousand words is absolutely right, but I’ll bet they had never heard of youtube.  Youtube has changed the way the students of today communicate.  Students can now express themselves in a 10 minute or less video and their video can be viewed by millions of people all over the world.  I use youtube cross culturally as a video can communicate a concept or tell a story much better than I can tell a story or explain something.  A lot of people ask me what I do and sometimes it is a bit confusing to communicate.  This video might explain it better than a long winded explanation of what I do. Watch this and then I’ll explain:

When it comes to virtual movement building (or “internet ministry”) many people wait for the finished product.  I love this video, because there really is no finished product.  As soon as we were to provide some sort of  finished product (a website or groups of sites that seem to do all of our ministry for us), then the technology becomes obsolete.  It is like we have to continue to build an airplane while flying (as ridiculous as this video demonstrates).  Once we develop some sort of strategy it is time to get it out there and go on to the next part instead of waiting until every part works perfectly.

My point?  Don’t wait for the vista version of “Christian internet ministry” 2.0.  It doesn’t exist and will (hopefully) never exist.  It is about students having spiritual conversations with their friends on the internet, on their cell phone, via their blog or facebook profile..or even face to face.  We already train students how to share their faith face to face, but can us old dogs (those of us over 30) get out of the way and allow this new generation to approach ministry in a little different way?

In the meantime, pray for me as I help develop this constantly changing airplane…while flying at 35,000 feet!

Winter!  What a concept!  I was in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan  (took me about 10 tries to finally get the spelling right) in January for a conference with some of our key campus directors from all over Central Asia.  The temperature was downright cold.  I had more fun packing for this trip than any other trip in distant memory.  Why?  I had to go through our garage and actually find winter clothing!  So much fun to pull out nice warm sweatshirts I haven’t worn in a while. I also threw in my suitcase a pair of Sorel boots.  I hauled them 7,000 miles across the globe just so I could hear the sound of them crunching against the snow.  Not exactly a sound I hear very often in Florida.

While I was there, I was able to talk to our people about studentstan.  This is a site in Central Asian Russian dedicated to proclaiming Christ to the students of Central Asia.  Studentstan can either mean, “the land of the students” or in another way it can mean, “students wake up”.  While both of them are great meanings, I love the idea of students’ waking up.  May the students of Central Asia wake up and realize that the deep longing in their hearts is for a relationship with Jesus.  We talked about  how to answer emails like these:

Probably I would like to receive Jesus in my life….please explain more…. 

If I believe in Jesus, will it be wrong? I am a Muslim.

We talked about how to answer these kinds of questions and many others in a training I gave in answering some of these questions thoroughly and effectively.  Pray for our brothers and sisters in Central Asia who are daily answering questions from students in Central Asia.

Central Asia is exploding in its infrastructure and especially in its internet access.  5 years ago I was in Kazakhstan and had to find out how to set my computer’s modem to “pulse” dialing and now you can get free wi-fi all over the place and most educated people have high speed internet access in their homes!  The country has literally changed overnight.  The first people group of any country to change are its university students.  We must be prepared to change with students as their world and culture changes. That is the ultimate challenge of doing university ministry.

Hopefully, I’ll be invited back next year where I can experience winter for another 4 days.  Until then, it is back to the 50 degree “cold” fronts of Florida and box living for my Sorels.

 (Enjoying some “small” steak with a friend in Argentina)

I never really understood what it means to be a carnivore until I went to Argentina!  I have eaten enough red meat to be permanently banned from PETA for life.  However, I was there not to eat, but to engage with national and area leaders of CCC from all over the world.  However, the eating sure was fun!

Once a year campus leaders from all over the world, endure long plane flights (some traveled over 40 hours!) just to come together to talk about global trends in university student ministry and how we as global campus leaders can begin to tackle those problems.  Leaders from close to 30 countries from Australia to Egypt to Korea to Costa Rica were represented there.  While there it was great to hear stories of what God is doing in student’s lives throughout the world as well as tackle some of our major problems.

As a group, we went through a lengthy process of agreeing on some major problems that either our organization is facing or that we are facing as ministers on the university campus. Here is a small taste. Together we said that we:

1) Are not giving students enough ownership of their local campus ministries.  Too many staff lead our movements on campus and the students just follow their directives.  Instead, we believe, it should be the other way around.  How do we as leaders help create that environment where our students lead the show.  After all, our students have the natural relationships with their non believing friends as well as it is their enthusiasm and excitement for the Lord that will eventually win the day.

2) We as global campus leaders are not taking advantage of the incredible opportunity that the internet brings in winning, building and sending the students of the world to the students of the world.  The average student spends 5-6 hours a day online.  We are not equipping our students to do win, build and send online.  We must engage students where they are spending most of their time outside of class (and sometimes where they spend MORE time than going to class)!  This needs to take place in all of our countries not just our wealthier ones.  One of my friends who oversees the campus ministry for parts of Africa tells me that even African students all have cell phones. Some of them have 2!

3) We must do a better job of coaching our staff..especially our National Campus Directors.  You could pray for me on this one as I am coaching a couple of our Arabic national campus directors.  Pray I would be more effective in helping these men do an even better job than they are doing in leading the campus ministries in their countries.

There are many other major problems that our campus ministry is experiencing worldwide including the rise of militant Islam, governments from both oppressed and “free” (including the USA) limiting our access to students on grounds of “tolerance” or “fairness”, and needing to partner better with all like minded Christian organizations to reach the world’s 130 million university students.  Pray for all of us as a group as we go after some of these problems.

Next time you sit down to have a steak, will you pray for the campus leaders who met in Argentina?  Bon apetit!

I’m off to Buenos Aires, Argentina this week for a meeting with the Area of Affairs Campus directors for the worldwide campus ministry (did you catch all of that??).  Basically, those who do the job I used to do when we lived in France.  I will be addressing the issue of how do we use online strategies with tradtional ways of doing campus ministry.  We will be talking about how we can weave those two together.

I think this picture best expresses what I’m going to be talking about.  I took this picture while on my last trip to Jordan.  It is the traditional way of making a carpet in the Middle East.  If you think about a carpet it is a beautiful thing to look at…all those colors and shapes so cleverly and creatively arranged.  It is what we have always strived for in the student ministry world.  One beautiful picture…but how did that picture get there????  Varioius colors are weaved in and out to make one nice carpet.  You have vertical threads and horizontal threads being strategically woven together to make that carpet.  So it should be with the relationship between traditional face to face campus strategies and virtual strategies.  Those strategies need to be interwoven and not separated.  I’ll let you know how it goes!

Ps. Madonna is going to be playing the first night we get there, so that makes the title of this post even more appropriate.  I’ll let you know if I see her!