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!
PBR 