I shared this with our Leadership students this last week and I think it was really helpful in clarifying what we want them to accomplish.

Quick background: We’ve noticed that our student leaders are great at doing ministry but not great at recruiting new leaders to join with us (whether that’s to Winter Conference, Summer Project, to our weekly leadership time, or even initiating with new people at Cru).

So we’re seeking to create a culture where Leaders not only do ministry but act as mobilizers.

Kind of like “Teach them how to fish”,

“Be a Barnabas” is sticky – it vividly and memorably captures what a leader does.

Just wanted to share for others to be able to use/adapt for their leadership times.

Here’s my notes:

• Tell me everything you know about Paul [greatest missionary ever, wrote most of the New Testament, persecutor, dramatic conversion, etc.]
• Now tell me everything you know about Barnabus [not much- the only response from students: “he was an encourager”]
• Lets read A...

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A conversation I had this summer with my brother-in-law:

Me: “How was fishing this morning?”

Brother-in-law: “Um, it was fun in a different way. It was a lot of work.”

Me: “What do you mean?”

Brother in law:

“Well, I never got to fish. I took a friend and his kids out fishing.

They’d never been fishing before so I spent the whole time baiting their hooks, netting their fish they caught, retrieving fishing poles the kids dropped overboard. So it wasn’t fun per se. More rewarding than fun- but so fun to see their faces as they caught their first fish.”

What a great metaphor for ministry.

I told my team that story and we used it all fall: “Remember, teach students how to fish even if it means that you don’t get to fish much yourself.”

I’m convinced that staff’s primary job is not to do ministry but to equip others to do ministry.

But the problem is that most staff go into full time ministry to fish not to make fishers of men.

If you’re interested you can read more thought...

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Great quote from Brian McCollister, Cru director at Ohio University:

 If you’re not growing the number of small group leaders:

• You either have a problem on the front end – involving more freshmen
• Or on the back end – of identifying and developing leaders

I think the converse holds true:

If you’re not growing the number of freshmen involved, you are not raising up enough small group leaders (we count “involved” as # of freshmen in Bible studies).

Either way, the focus remains: I think the primary win for the spring is growing the number of small group leaders who will lead in the fall (here are some thoughts on how we plan to do that).

Let’s say we want to involve 80 freshmen in the fall. We need to work backward from there:

• If an average study has 6 students in it. . . we need 14 successful freshmen studies
• If each study has 2 co-leaders, at the very least we need to have 28 students leading freshmen studies
• So our goal for the spring should be to raise up 28 freshman Bi...

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I started blogging to share. As I stated in my first post:

“Inspired by others who have taken the time to share their thoughts/learnings/resources I thought I would stop mooching and start contributing to the conversation.”

 And blogging has been a better investment than I initially could have imagined. Definitely worth the time.

Especially for those of you in college ministry, I’d encourage you to consider how you could contribute to the conversation in 2012. I’d love to see more staff in Cru sharing – always love to see what other campuses are doing and learning. You can read my recent post,

Shares Well With Others, on CruPressGreen for more thoughts on Sharing.

With that being said, here’s a look back at what were the

#1 – Everything you need to know about the Cru name change

• By far the most visited post of 2011 – more people looked at that post than the rest of the top 12 combined. Still don’t understand what the big deal is re: the name change ...

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Continuing a series of posts on putting together a Spring Gameplan. Click to read Post #1 on our Timeline for the Spring and #2 on a couple of shifts we made to better raise up a reaching freshmen team.

One of the most effective things we did last Spring was something we dubbed the Leadership Pledge.

Hopefully it’s helpful, if only for the thorough description of how to set up a good 5 Things Discussion (at the bottom of the post).

Here’s how the Leadership Pledge worked:

• We had a speaker from the Travelling Team speak at our first Cru of the spring on how God has used college students to change the world.
• After the talk I stood up and gave a short 3 minute challenge to the effect of:

• Hudson talked about young people who have been used greatly by God
• They put their yes on the table
• This semester you have things pulling for your time and attention
• Will you allow God to use you in the lives of students around you?
• Would you be willing to be used by God here at the U of A?
• Hudson asked the questi...

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