A LOT has been happening in October and November! I’ve not posted nearly as often as I should have. In this post I’ll talk about InterVarsity’s recent national management meetings held annually – this year in Dallas, TX (Nov 11-14). All staff directors across every ministry line in InterVarsity gather for updates and training. Here was our opening gathering with VP Jason Thomas giving several reports of God doing terrific things in scattered locations across our movement.

The training part of Cultivate consists of breakouts staff opt into depending on their ministry team needs. For us in Graduate Faculty Ministries, we spent our time focusing on staff recruiting. The images below will give you some feel for how GFM as a whole fairs these days. What do you see when you look at numbers like this?

Is GFM growing?

AFR means Annual Field Report. Lyn Gill our National GFM VP is here sharing stats from recent AFRs as well as trends from the last decade. The red numbers reflect in significant part the impact of the pandemic and economic downturn most ministries experienced (from 2020 to 2022 and beyond). It’s encouraging to see signs of forward movement when one looks at the 1 Year line in comparison to the 10 year trends. Numbers of campuses, numbers of groups and Faculty participation have all pushed ahead in the picture. You can see the dip in numbers of grad student participation, though. In general our faculty work has outpaced our grad student work in recent years.

Staff Recruiting – a major concern!

While Planting numbers look positive on the whole, the screen above that gives me the most pause is Staffing. These numbers say at least two things I want you to think about and pray about for my leadership in Grad Faculty Ministries. We are not growing in staff leadership. The loss isn’t drastic- we’ve added enough new staff to almost break even. The trouble I see is in the low numbers of CSM. CSM means Campus Staff Minister and it represents full and part time paid staff who are fully engaged with GFM ministry teams on a weekly basis. CSMs also are staff who are raising budgets. When the total number of New Staff is only 8 out of 33, that means that we’ve only added 8 paid staff. It’s encouraging that 14 of those 33 are volunteer staff. Volunteer staff provide vital leadership for the campuses they are active on. However, paid staff are generally shouldering a much larger responsibility for planting and building groups. And even in the mix of paid CSMs, the very best ministry building capacity we have is from full time, fully funded Campus Staff Ministers.

When I first came back to the InterVarsity staff director role, I was convinced recruiting for GFM staff would be a matter of collaboration with undergrad InterVarsity. If we track well in our Region with experienced staff working with undergrads it should be a matter of time before many of them might want to transition to work with grad students. That in fact was my experience with Chad, one of my staff at Iowa State who joined our GFM team a couple of years after I arrived.

What we’re seeing in our recent recruiting efforts however is we just can’t depend on undergrad staff maturing then gravitating to GFM contexts. We need a broader profile of who to look for. I’ve blogged recently about the spiritual and practical challenges of staff recruiting. On our Central Area team we’ve NOT recruited new staff for over 2 years now. Please see my Central Area Staff Recruiting Profile for details on who we are looking for and how you can help connect us with staff prospects. You can also pass along the link below that will also take a potential staff candidate to a helpful landing page on our national website. IF you do direct someone there, please let me know their name as well. If an interested person fills out an initial interest survey, that will be copied to me as well.

https://gfm.intervarsity.org/get-involved/work-with-us

PS – just a quick family news item in case you haven’t heard me blabbing about it everywhere else. Our two sons have in the past month or so welcomed new babies into their families. The first to be born this fall was Lewyn Reed Perry (Oct 18). Silas is such a great new dad with his son. I got the chance after my meetings in Dallas to hang out with Little Lew. He’s a killer of a napping buddy! More on our other Tennessee grandbaby in my next post!