Bob Fuhs

Roger Hershey on Building Movements

Roger Hershey, a campus ministry guru, recently addressed the Cru team leaders in the Pacific Southwest Region. Here are the MP3's of his 2 talks:

Download Roger Hershey Movement Building #1 P

 

Download Roger Hershey Movement Building #2 P

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Outreach Idea: Pizza Discussions

A campus leader in the Upper Midwest Region was once asked what he needed by way of resources to reach more students on his campus.  He responded with one word, "Pizza."  While I'm sure he was being a little simplistic, it's amazing how the lure of free pizza still draws college students.

With that in mind, one of the outreach strategies we have used with some good success has been a "Pizza Discussion." (Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure it was that same ministry director who said the above quote who told me about Pizza Discussions).  The concept is pretty simple: Invite some friends over to have a discussion about your spiritual beliefs and you supply the pizza.  We know those kinds of discussions were going on at the wee hours of the night anyway, so why not offer an organized forum for those kinds of discussions?

At the end of this post there is a link for you to download a short Leader's Guide and Training Guide for having a Pizza Discussion.  I think you'll find it a very effective way to get students together to share their thoughts on God and spirituality.  Let me know how it goes if you end up trying one.

Download Pizza discussion guide

Download Pizza discussion training

3 Keys To Aligning

Step 1: Love

The people you are leading and trying to align to a plan or program need to know that you love them.  They need to know that you care about them and their welfare.  If they don't believe that, they are very close to being used and seeing your alignment as simply running them through the meat-grinder. My friend Jim Sylvester used to say, "People will take anything from you as long as they know you love them."

Step 2: Listen

Hear them out.  Listen to their wants and needs.  Ask lots of questions about their work and what they feel is going well or not so well.  This is Steve Covey's "Seek to understand before you are understood" principle.  If you are feeling resistance to a new emphasis in your ministry, perhaps you need to spend more time listening to your people.  They will feel more comfortable with change if they know that you understand them and their concerns.

Step 3: Involve

Nothing creates buy in more than involving people in the change process.  As a campus leader this usually meant involving our leadership students in our strategic planning sessions.  A few years back we were struggling with our weekly meeting space as we grew and could not find a room big enough to hold us.  We got about 20 of our top leaders together and walked through a problem-solving process together. By the end of the time we were all on the same page as to the solution.  That created way more buy-in that if me and the staff team had simply come up with a solution ourselves and told them.

As the adage goes: "Involvement breeds commitment."

So, if you are experiencing alignment issues in your area of influence, odds are the problem can be traced back to one of these three things. Maybe it's time to step back and ask yourself, Do the people know that I love them? Have I listened to them? Have I involved them?

What To Do With Freshmen At A Cru Fall Retreat

It's been said that freshmen are the lifeblood of a campus movement.  I wholeheartedly believe that! Freshmen bring new life and excitement to your movement.  Freshmen are also very strategic in terms of building a movement that will reach the whole campus.  So, as a campus leader I did everything I could to do a better job year-after-year of reaching and involving freshmen.

One of the ways we did that was to pull together the freshmen for a meeting at our Fall Retreat each year.  We actually did what we called "class seminars" which were special meetings for students in each class. This helped to bond them as a class and it helped them see thier unique role in the movement.

Below is an article explaining what I did for that freshman time.  Feel free to copy it and send it along to anyone you think might find it helpful.

Fall Retreat Freshman Meeting Leader's Notes -

One Genius Fall Retreat Idea

Have the students bring snacks.

Seriously...I learned this when I spoke at a Fall Retreat for the University of Toledo a number of years ago. As students were registering, they each brought a snack item. Some brought a bag of chips, others brought cookies, some brought 2 liters of soda, etc... I learned from then Team Leader Nancy Bartolec that, part of the cost of coming to the retreat was to bring a snack item to share. So simple, so genius.

The previous year at our Fall Retreat, the camp foodservice was so miserable that we blew so much money trying to make up for it with various snack foods, so I was very excited to try something new.

And it worked great! It just wasn't a big deal for a student to pick up a bag of chips on their way to the camp and we had tons of great snacks all weekend. We asked a couple of students to serve as "snack wranglers" and set out some on Friday night and some on Saturday night to even things out.

I'm not sure why it worked out so well.  I guess that there's a principle in which people don't mind contributing in some way over and above the cost of the event.  But, it needs to be a small price and one they are willing to pay.  It can't be frustrating, like airlines charging for your bags. Bringing a snack is small and an easy way to contribute that really did keep the cost low for the retreat.

John Mott on 100% Sent

“The Student Movement renders the further important service of trying to place upon every student who is to go out to the non-Christian world to engage in other than the missionary calling, a burden of responsibility for advancing the interests of Christ’s Kingdom….In filling these men with the determination to make their influence tell for Christ, the Student Movement is doing a work scarcely less valuable than the raising up of an equal number of missionaries.”

John Mott, The Decisive Hour Of Missions, pp. 136-137

 

Today in CCC’s campus ministry, there is a renewed call to set a goal of sending 100% of students who graduate from our movements to influence the world for Jesus, not just those who decide to go into what we call “full-time Christian work.”  That effort has been branded, “100% Sent.”

 

These words from John Mott, founder of the Student Volunteer Movement, were written about 100 years before anyone in Campus Crusade for Christ thought of the term “100% sent.”  Pretty amazing, isn’t it?

 

Here’s the deal: Your movement has to give much effort and lift to sending everyone as a missionary.  Gene Appel of Eastside Christian Church said this past weekend, “God takes a full-time minister and disguises them as a police officer, a teacher, a government worker…” Everyone is a full-time minister, it’s simply your setting that changes.

 

Felt Problems Vs. Real Problems

The adage goes: “A problem well defined is a problem half-solved.” But, how do you go about discovering the real problem?

I was in a strategic planning session today where we were talking about problems facing our ministry.  The leader of the time had actually brought a list of 5 or 6 for us to think about, and, as we discussed the problems around the room we discovered that there were problems behind the problems. 

Have you experienced that in your leadership? You come to a point where you think you have discovered the problem, but after some thought (and probably getting a second opinion) you discover that the real problem is different.

I am watching the US Open Tennis tournament this week (stay with me, I have a point).  The world #1 player is Darina Safina and she was recently ousted.  On the surface, you might look at her game and think, “She needs to work on her serve…” or, “She should work on her backhand.” And, if you were her coach, you’d come up with a certain solution.  But, what if the real problem is in her mind? What if she doesn’t believe that she can close out a match in a major? Now you have a whole different solution to pursue. See what I mean?

How do you discover the real problems? I think there are probably lots of things you can do, but here’s a couple thoughts:

-You have to keep asking the why question until you think you’ve gotten to the bottom of it.

-You get brutally honest with yourself and with your team.  Don’t be afraid to uncover a sacred cow or call a spade a spade.

-Ask “What?” instead of “Who?” I wrote about this in an earlier post.  Instead of blaming people, ask, “What in our system, or our way of doing things is causing the problem?”

What do you think? How have you been able to define the real problems facing your ministry or business instead of wasting your time coming up with solutions to problems that aren’t the real issue?

Goooooal!

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?

Emcee and Weekly Meeting Training Audio

Download Emcee and Weekly Meeting Training

I led a training time on how to emcee a weekly meeting, as well as basic principles that will help your weekly meeting become more effective!