M29 is our weekly Leadership and Training time at the University of Arkansas.

M29 is short for Matthew 29 which is not written in the Bible. As you probably know Matthew 28 ends with Jesus issuing His Great Commission to “Go and make disciples of all the nations”

M29 is our response to the Jesus’ Commission and a desire to write the next chapter of the Great Commission with our lives on the college campus.

M29 is the primary way we equip and train students in evangelism, leading Bible studies, and multiplying their lives

Eventually the M29 material will be on CruPressGreen but I wanted to make it available sooner so you can make use of it in the fall.

We created all of the material and tried to attribute to original sources whenever possible (since very little of this content is original to us).

Feel free to adapt the content for your purposes!

Click the Title to view files for that class (where you can download each file individually if so desired).

Or click on the Z...

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We do one thing all year to raise money for our ministry – a Fellowship Dinner. And every year we see God provide abundantly ($50-$75k).

It is a lot of work but I am a firm believer that it is THE best way to fund your ministry (read how one ministry raises over $400k/year).

My hope is that more and more Cru movements around the country begin to have Fellowship Dinners so that they are abundantly funded.

Cru Staff: for more info on how to put on a Dinner email Jim Dempsey who is THE expert (or for details on what we do, leave a comment).

We’ve been blessed by professional Graphic Designers who have produced high quality materials for our last few Dinners and I wanted to share those with anyone that wants to use them:

  Designs are by an Arkansas Cru alum- Kelsea Walkley of petit4prints.com

@petit4prints on Twitter

Kelsea has generously donated her talents and design for our Fellowship Dinner and allowed me to share them with you!

From Kelsea:

“If a CRU movement interested in using these designs, th...

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Our job as leaders is to see what others don’t see- to look at the same reality that everyone experiences and be able to perceive what is really going on and what needs to happen next.

A big part of that is accomplished through concentrated days of Team Planning – where we chart our course for a new year.

In most of college ministry, that time is now.

So toward that end here is some, hopefully, very practical stuff you can use to set up your planning time:

A couple key thoughts on planning:

• Click to read yesterday’s post on our favorite way to do planning
• We are big fans of Buckets and Holes solutions:
• Using what we’re good at to fix what we’re bad at

• Our planning is framed by a 12 year plan to accomplish the vision: “that everyone on campus would know someone who passionately follows Christ”
• We’re committed to building a movement by reaching a progressively larger freshman class every...

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This is the best idea I’ve ever come across for planning.

How do you take all that is going on in your movement (the good and bad) and all you hope to accomplish (with often conflicting team opinions on what we should focus on next) and make sense of it all to determine what your team needs to focus on in the fall?

A few years ago I read the book The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam. The author described a brilliant way to take a LOT of information/issues/problems and emerge with THE best solution. We’ve found this approach to be incredibly effective and a lot of fun (something no one has ever accused PrEFACE of!).

Roam calls it the garage-sale principle:

“Regardless of how well organized all the stuff in our garage may be, laying everything out on tables in the light of day yields a completely new perspective on it all. The same is true of data: when it is packed away in individual files and records, it’s impossible to look at the big picture – but getting everything out in the open makes otherwise ...

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“9 years ago we had our first fund raising dinner and raised $24,000.

Last year we raised $230,000”

Like it or not, as a leader one of your chief jobs is to raise money to fund your mission (for more on this read my post Money to Fund the Mission).

And I know of no better way for a para-church ministry to raise money than putting on an annual fund raising dinner.

This upcoming Friday will be our 11th annual Fellowship Dinner.

Most years we have 150 guests and raise $50,000 at the dinner. It’s the only fund raising we do all year. (I don’t share that amount to brag. I share it because by doing so I hope to encourage many  more Cur movements to do Fellowship Dinners).

A few days ago Ryan Sather, the co-director of Here’s Life Inner City (a ministry of Cru) in Minneapolis, tweeted this:

ryansather 109 tables & counting for the @hlictwincities Fellowship Dinner on April 28th! Join us and bring some friends! http://t.co/UuSLkuC5

(which makes me wonder – I’ve benefited tremendousl...

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