There are a lot of ways to say it:
If you don't know where you're going, you won't know when you get there.
If you aim for nothing, you'll always hit it.
And, my personal favorite: What gets measured, gets done.
However you word it, it's all about setting goals. A goal stretches you. A goal helps you and your team know what's important, so you can choose that over the urgent. A goal keeps you focused on the right things.
Here at the start of the fall, we always had a goal for evangelistic conversations we wanted to have before our Fall Retreat, or at about the 6 week mark. For teams that I led, that was usually 50 for the men and 40 for the women. That included me as the Campus Director. Having a goal like that ensured that we were all focusing on the right thing at the start of the year: getting face-to-face with freshmen.
Just to be clear, an "evangelistic conversation" is any conversation with a student (preferably a freshman here in the fall), that includes Gospel content. That usually involves an opportunity to respond to the claims of Christ. That included when I was talking with a Christian student, as well as non-believers. We wanted to share the Gospel with every Christian we met because they either needed to know where we were coming from as a ministry, and because most of them had no idea about assurance of salvation.
50 is not a magic number, but it is both stretching and realistic. And, it makes the chances that you will actually have students show up to your small group go way up.
For you campus leaders out there, I'd love to hear how you use goals here at the start of the year to focus you and your teams in evangelism. How have you seen not having goals hurt you? Are there other things that you set goals for?
last year we focused primarily on exposure via passing out flyers. we saw a low turnout at our weekly meeting and adjusted to incorporate more surveys.
we didn't see a dramatic increase in our numbers at our weekly meeting, but i believe we engaged and filtered more quality contacts.
i'm hoping that our larger leadership group can follow up and pursue more of these contacts, which should lead to a better year down the road.
Posted by: Brian Barela | 08/28/2009 at 03:01 PM
We went for a goal similar to the one you described - 50 evangelistic conversations prior to Fall Retreat. We set that goal just prior to getting smacked in the face with a new campus policy that makes it significantly harder to get into the dorms, forcing us to set up appointments with freshmen. Students are a lot less willing to talk when you're not face to face with them - any thoughts on getting around sticky dorm policies?
Posted by: Dan Goodson | 08/31/2009 at 11:10 PM
Dan,
Ah, sticky dorm policies! You might need to make sure you have someone in each dorm who can escort you and your staff every time you are in there.
At UCLA, only freshmen lived in the dorms, so at one of our first meetings we asked everyone to fill out a survey and one of the questions was, "Would you be willing to host a Bible study in your dorm room?" It allowed us to at least have a place to meet very quickly. We asked the freshman to host for 4 weeks and then we could decide from there if they wanted to continue. That way they were not necessarily locked in to a 15 week commitment.
What kind of restrictions are there?
Posted by: Bob Fuhs | 09/02/2009 at 11:37 AM
Dan,
Another thought: You have to think of a way for it to be hard to say no to meeting with you. Can you say, "I'll buy you lunch." You could even invite more than one to meet with you at the same time so you increase your chances of at least one showing up.
Posted by: Bob Fuhs | 09/02/2009 at 11:40 AM