One of my jobs in our 17 state Region of GFM is to help staff be effective in evangelism. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, that takes the form of a strategic ministry plan all 60+ of us staff are reaching for. The strat plan invites staff to engage a basic 3-2-1 strategy with their fellowships on campus: Staff, students and faculty commit to praying for THREE non-Christian friends, campus fellowships commit to hosting at least TWO hospitality events per year that non-Christians are welcomed to attend, and at least ONE appropriate invitation to faith given in an appropriate setting throughout the course of the year.

As the new year is underway groups have been increasing their visibility on campus with outreach events (the hospitality part of 3-2-1). New students are being invited to events and groups. Faculty groups are getting reignited and known new faculty members are being reached out to. Coffee is being drunk by the gallon as staff do lots of one on one follow-up. Many if not most new contacts are with christians looking for fellowship. But the beginning of a new year, the presence of so many new people means that many connections are being made with people who are curious about Christianity, but may not be christians themselves.

3-2-1 Happenings

Here’s a look at our first gathering of 3-2-1 Happenings. The idea you saw me in the last post pitching to our region, is up and running! Each month our Regional Leadership Team and myself will be hosting a regional video call for sharing 3-2-1 stories. 3-2-1 Happenings we hope will become a hub of communication, prayer and enrichment in the area of faculty and grad student evangelism. In our first gathering we had our staff member at Kansas State share from his experience of friendship with a couple of atheistic/agnostic faculty members. Nothing is better fuel for outreach than to talk about actual life on life influence. When you hear about non-believing professors responding to friendship with deeper openness and spiritual curiosity – it leaves you thinking “you know, God IS at work in soil I would have thought would be impenetrable.”

Part of the challenge with Christians, especially in the setting where we do our ministry, is that we assume spiritually open people will just somehow find us! The myth of the seeker is that being far from God doesn’t always result in a posture of seeking. When Christians refer to non-Christians as seekers its a bit of misnomer. In the sweep of scripture’s narrative, God is more often the seeker! In Genesis 1, sin didn’t make Adam a seeker – it made him a hider. God had to seek Adam out. The shepherds of Israel failed to seek people out in care, nurture and healing (Ezek 34). Jesus comes as THE GOOD SHEPHERD who goes after the lost. Graduate Faculty Ministry will live out the seeking passion of Jesus for sheep as we embrace that role and join him in his search. A monthly call to encourage staff in OUR work of searching and seeking can help us attend to people on broader horizons than just trying to find more Christians for our groups! We need a better theology of seeking to put it simply.

Pray for 3-2-1 Happenings to grow. There are about 70 staff in our 17 state region. My vision is that our screen could go from being a tidy 3×3 Brady Bunch to a 4×4. Then a 5×5, and beyond. My hope is that more and more staff will get excited to get on the monthly call and share an outreach HAPPENING from their ministry. Pray for me and my team as we work on ways to be more visible to grad students and faculty members – not just the Christian ones. Pray for us to turn connection into friendship. And friendship into witness!

Thanks so much for your prayers and your giving. Thanks for enabling me to be a part of InterVarsity’s mission in the University.

Hope you are enjoying your Labor Day! Cheryl and I have just spent three days with our kids in Tennessee and are making our way back to Omaha. This post is coming to you at 70 mph! It’s Cheryl’s turn to drive so I can get work done on the lappy!

The image above finds me at RSC on the first day of August at the Scarrett Bennett Center in Nashville. Regional Staff Conference happens for us most summers in late July. About 40 of us from our 17 state territory gathered for four days of team building and ministry leadership enrichment. This was my shot as a regional leader to give our staff an evangelism update. We do a self-assessment on how well we’re doing at personal witness and how well we’re leading our fellowships to engage their mission field. If you’re curious about my report you can scan through it here. Pray for our staff and our fellowships to grow in outreach effectiveness. We’re midway into a four-year strategic plan and we have seen some encouraging signs of global evangelistic warming.

Our staff conference theme this summer was “New Wine Skins: ministry in a changing ministry landscape.” We had the good fortune to get David French as our visiting scholar for the event. If you aren’t familiar with New York Times columnist David French, here’s a podcast that will give you a sample of his work and thinking. We invited him because of his incredible training and incredible Christian impact in the areas of culture, religion and politics. David was very valuable servant to InterVarsity during many years of our contentious history with university access and free speech in the 90s and early 2000s. Rather than burning more characters here, I’ll drop a few pics from my journal notes and you can get a feel for his presentation. David gave a great talk on how we wound up where we are politically as a nation and why our ministry context has many of its current cultural and political challenges.

My scrawlings while David French was talking: (Good luck figuring this out! OR, just get the book The After Party!)

I would love your prayers as I head into September! here are a few things I’m concerned about.

• I’ll be hosting a new Regional Staff Team video call we’re branding 3-2-1 Happenings. Monthly we’ll try to round up staff to share stories about outreach happening on our campuses. Pray for us to get off to a strong start next week!
• Our staff are also having their first regularly scheduled events of the semester. At some schools lots of new students have found their way into our fellowships. I’d love your prayers for a couple of challenge spots: in my hometown at Creighton, we have been denied access to the student orientation events for professional schools. It has made meeting new students much more difficult. At Kansas State Univ my staff member Mark is taking on partial leadership for a group that is unstaffed after his team-mate retired earlier this summer.
• Pray for Lindenwood University – we are in the process of transitioning off one staff member – pray for Karen (the remaining staff member) as she assumes more leadership of the faculty fellowship there.
• Probably my biggest prayer request for this entire year is staff recruitment. There are several currently staffed schools that will have staff transitions in the coming years. There is a faculty fellowship at Mizzou with no GFM staff member in Columbia. There are places we’d like to go but have no staff and no fellowship (Univ of Nebraska at Lincoln.

There’s lots more to tell you – we’ll keep the posts coming. Thanks so much for your prayers. Thanks so much for your giving!

tim.perry@intervarsity.org