I’m sitting at my first national staff director meetings since joining GFM.  A wire basket of rocks sits under the seat in front of me.  “How cute, we’re going to do something gimmicky with these before the night’s over – I just know it.”  I keep having the same on-ramp experience:  the first Mundelein meetings since I left IV in 06, the first Regionals since Great Lakes West meetings in Wisconsin.  Management meetings used to be in Madison, now they’re in Milwaukee.  Tom Lin had just given us a stirring call to the 2030 Vision.  It was now process time.  All heads bowed.  All journals open.  Nothing but the sound of pens scratching paper in a room of about 200 IV staff directors.

“Take a minute to sit with your rock.”

OK…rock-sitting.  Check.

“Just like in the days of Joshua, think about God’s leadership of your life and ministry here at the outset of our 2030 Calling.  This is an Ebenezer moment everyone!  At some point, you’re going to look back over how far the Lord has taken us as a movement and your particular path in that journey.  Can you begin to imagine it?”

“Now.  Consider giving your rock a name.  What word comes to your mind when you think about what 2030 will require of you to pursue?”

Courage.

Courage is what I thought of right away.  Courage, because our 2030 Calling is very ambitious.  It’s a revival-proportion longing for God to expand ministry everywhere on every campus.  Courage, because with Graduate Faculty Ministry, the land to be taken can seem like it’s swarming with giants.  I have a territory that covers 4 states with groups needed at multiple campuses, and multiple tier one institutes with no GFM staff member living in the community.

I filled about a page in my journal.  Praying.  Questioning the Holy Spirit.  Asking God for the empowerment to lead well.  Will GFM even take off in the very community I live in?  We have a fledgling group of Occupational Therapy students at Creighton University who aren’t yet affiliated with GFM.  That’s it.  I personally know about two dozen Christian faculty members at Creighton,  UNO and UNMC combined.  How do I begin to recruit more GFM staff?  How will I get staff placed in Lincoln, Columbia, Ames and beyond?  This will be one of those posts I hope my team and I can drag out a decade from now and have an Ebenezer moment with.

For the past 14 months I’ve been working on three teams.  The support team of ministry partners who fund me.  The team of Area Directors I’ll be leading with under my Regional Director.  And the team I’ll be leading and building – the Central Area Team – Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Missouri.

Left to Right:  Keven is in Iowa City at the University of Iowa, George is at K-State in Manhattan along with the guy next to him – Mark.  Carrie has been leading this team till I can get myself funded and installed.  She and her husband Randy Bare were early leaders in framing up Graduate Faculty Ministries regionally and nationally.  Jake is at Kansas in Lawrence.  Keli and her husband Ryan Weed are building graduate student groups at Wash-U.  George Stulac is working with faculty in St. Louis at Wash-U and two other schools.  Here we were at a three day retreat at the St. Benedictine Center in Schuyler, Nebraska.

So…I stole some left over rocks.

I brought them from management meetings to my team meeting.  Ipsissma Petros! (the ones at our Milwaukee meetings just got piled on a table at the back with nothing written on them – what a waste of good rocks).  We had a great morning together in the scriptures looking at some witness-rock-passages.

You can download our study at this link:  Stones Will Cry Out

I then invited our team to the same exercise staff directors experienced in Milwaukee.  These are the names they were drawn to.  Each time I intercede for my team I grab up a different rock and pray for their leadership.  It’s exciting to think about the trajectory this group will take.  Pray for us as we long for God’s work on every corner of the campuses we serve, and the many more campuses we wish we could cover.  Seek God with us that he’d make these stones come alive in our leadership in the years ahead.

Thanks so much!

tim.perry@intervarsity.org

For me the first casualty of a frantic schedule is losing my grip on what I care most about.  It takes serious reflection to fully appreciate even half of life’s best events.  Just think about this time of the year and how many students are graduating.  Graduating from college.  From high school.  I even have a FB friend who recently celebrated her child graduating from preschool (with a 4.0 I might add).

My kids have been dropping milestones on The Perry Timeline left and right this spring!  Let me talk about two.  First, our nuclear family graduated from one generation to two.  Poppy Nora Perry graduated from the coziest classroom ever into the big, bad world on April 8th –  just a few minutes after midnight.  Talk about showing up “early on your birthday”.  This child is going to be punctual I predict. My son Aaron and his wife Savannah graduated from the world of couple-hood into the world of parenthood.  Silas and Phoebe are now Uncle Silas and Aunt Phoebe (both are amazed at how much older their names sound with uncle and aunt in front of them).  Tim and Cheryl graduated from parenthood to grand-parenthood.  I can’t begin to tell you how cool it is to be grandparents (when the word itself sounds so cringy from the outside).  Actually we did what all other rebellious first-time grandparents do.   We subverted the stodgy “Grandpa” and “Grandma” by renaming ourselves.  I shall be called “Pops” by my offspring’s offspring.  Cheryl will become “Amma”.  Pops and Amma.  Pops and Poppy!  I really like the sound of that…

A second defining moment happened last week.   My awesome fine-arts daughter who has been training since age 6, got her first serious offer from a ballet company.  She’s been applying and auditioning for over a year.  I once saw the four-page spreadsheet of companies she sent her reel to.  129!  The tenth company down the list on page four was the winner:  San Diego Ballet.

This is huge.  This means Phoebe has graduated not only with her BFA from University of Missouri Kansas City, she’s also graduating from living with her parents, living in Omaha (in fact, living anywhere near extreme corn fields).  She has got a shot at life on the coast, in a big city, where things are far more diverse, expensive and admittedly exciting.  Way to go Phoebe!  I’m not going to talk about how much our home and our town are going to feel your absence when you leave.  Not.  Going.  There.

However, if you know of people in the San Diego area who could be of help with Phoebe moving there, give us a shout.  Her contract starts in mid-September.  She’ll need to find a place to live and somewhere to hang her massage therapy shingle.  Oh, did I mention she’s graduating soon from Midwest School of Massage here in Omaha?

 

When a new generation is born whether in the arts, in a family or in education, a profusion of life and energy stages a fresh display of God’s creative being.  We are made in his image to constantly germinate truth, beauty and goodness everywhere.  These incredible family milestones push me to expect more from the mission God has called me to.  Cultivating the Kingdom of God in every corner of the university is a lot like training in fine arts.  A lot like parenting.   Hard yet rewarding work, nurturing vast potential over many years.  May God’s creative power pour out from his people so his glory can been seen on campuses today.  Thank you for partnering with me.  Thank you for how your investment in InterVarsity blesses my family and enables me to serve GFM staff, students and faculty.

Click here to be taken to my donation page at InterVarsity.

 

For the past four days I’ve been with a group of 30+ Evangelism Champions here in New Orleans.  I was selected to be an Evangelism Champion (yes that’s the official title) for my region in Grad and Faculty InterVarsity.  We’ve been exploring ways to intensify and improve evangelism in our movement in light of a renewed commitment nationally to planting new groups.  Staff from all over the country are here – staff from a variety of ministry groups (Greek, Undergrad, GFM) are at the table.

Yesterday we took a break from all the analysis and conversation to actually make campus visits.  E-champs divided into three groups and headed out for a day of interaction on campus using a tool called a Proxy Station (a visual, interactive Gospel communication station positioned in a visible, high-traffic area on campus).  One group went to UNO (University of New Orleans) another went to Tulane and the third was sent to Louisiana State – up the road in Baton Rouge.

I got to be with the LSU group.  An outdoor proxy near the student union.  Most of the team made contact with students passing by the proxy or took off for fraternity row looking to connect with greek students.  My teammate and I headed across campus to connect with a Christian faculty member in the Department of Mass Communications.

By the end of our day at LSU we’d had a really helpful conversation with our faculty member who was delighted to learn that InterVarsity would be coming to her campus.  The groups reaching out to undergrad students had generated over 40 contacts and visited 17 fraternity/sorority houses.  Before returning to NO, every student we made contact with was invited to a vision casting follow-up session at the campus chapel.  A small but promising group of students gathered to explore next steps for launching Greek IV at LSU.

I’m really grateful for my Regional Team freeing me up to be a part of E-Champs.  The idea this tactical team is to join E-champs, get oriented to what they do then engage in an assignment that’s funded from national resources.  Tools, strategies, groups, events are all generated in a climate of careful experimentation and development.  More on E-champs in a future post.  My last morning session is about to get started.

E-Champ Team of IV staff at the end of our planting-day at LSU.

I came to this event 12 years ago when I was first contemplating a change in direction with InterVarsity. At the time I was nearing the end of seminary and nearing the end of my first 19 years with IV. I was a guest that spring.

This spring was my first experience with GFM National Staff meetings as an appointed staff member. It was great connecting with some familiar faces. Several staff I once knew from undergraduate ministry are now with GFM. By far the nicest surprise was bumping into Marcia Wang- a member of one of my Downstate Illinois staff teams way back in the day. Marcia is now the Associate National Director of the ministry division I work for.

Mundelein was also the first National Staff gathering since the announcement of the 2030 Calling. The 2030 Calling is the outcome of InterVarsity’s most recent National vision campaign and it reads like this:

Longing for revival, we catalyze movements that call every corner of every campus to follow Jesus.

Numerically,  2030 aims to see movements raised up at 2,500 campuses across the U.S. by the year 2030.  Three broad initiatives undergird the vision -1) Become a thriving organization of thriving people (a great work of God should start with staff who are flourishing and growing from the inside out – not just people who generate more work) 2) Mobilizing more effective ministry partnerships (this won’t be solely InterVarsity’s thing – the scope is just too great) and 3) Planting exponentially (not additive, not incremental – based in the past decade of planting cohort work).

At Mundelein GFM was able to unpack 2030 and begin wrestling with its implications for reaching grad students and faculty. GFM can be thought of as a IVs top shelf contextual challenge. The true test of a vision aimed at reaching every corner of every campus may ell be:  “Will it connect at the Grad-Faculty level?” Every corner includes every department, every program, every professional student, every researcher, every professor, every instructor, every adjunct. Every administrator? The whole university as a community and as a structure. That’s overwhelming to think about.  The claim of the Gospel is that Jesus is Lord over everything – what does it look like to scale our mission comprehensively?

I’m excited to help my team grab a hold of 2030. I think some of our craziest stories are ahead of us. Do we really know what we’ve gotten ourselves into? If 2030 is genuinely from the Spirit of God of course we can sink our hopes into remarkable happenings in the days ahead.

In this post I want to introduce you to one of my GFM staff and tell you about a very cool event happening at Washington University next month.  I think you’ll not only want to know about the event, but if you’re not too far from the St. Louis area you might want to go!

Here’s a quick look at the event and a link  to more details including registration.  Its a free event, but you have to register.  They’re anticipating a full house!

https://www.carverstl.org/the-carver-conversations-event/

Our staff member with Graduate Faculty Ministries at Washington University is George Stulac (photo).  George joined GFM in 2014 after a 33 year long tenure as the senior pastor of Memorial Presbyterian church in St. Louis.  George is a deeply thoughtful pastor and scholar.  GFM was blessed to welcome his maturity and undimmed energy for the mission of Jesus.

In one of our team’s zoom sessions a number of months ago, I remember George saying that he was excited about an initiative at Wash-U involving Christian faculty members coalescing around an outreach strategy.  Dr. John Inazu is one of the faculty George was talking about.  You can read about him on the Carver Project website.  More about Dr. Inazu in future posts, but for now, I’ll say I was thrilled to find out that he’s on the Board of Trustees for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship USA.

I was also excited to discover his book.  I’ll have more to say about Confident Pluralism and John Inazu – but for now wanted you to be aware of the event and to be praying for George’s GFM faculty group at Wash-U.  This will be a terrific event that will help propel InterVarsity’s ministry on a pretty challenging campus.  If you have questions about GFM at Wash-U or how the Carver Project connects with InterVarsity’s ministry there, feel free to email George.

george.stulac@intervarsity.org

March 2018 marks one year of working on my fundraising goal of $97,300.  I’m oh so close to having a year’s worth of funding either already donated or pledged.  As of today, $89,630 has been committed.  I’ve also been on payroll with InterVarsity since September and am earning about 85% of my full pay.  Let me just stop and say how grateful I am for everyone who has helped me get here.  I could barely think about where this was headed a year ago!

I have two milestones yet to accomplish with funding.  1- I do still need to get to 100% of my annual budget in order to begin working my full job description.  My supervisor is paid not to budge on that!  2- I now need to reassess some of those early jump-start funds people gave me asking the question, “Is there enough on-going giving to sustain my budget into the future?”

When I first started working this Piktochart, I figured I could get to full budget with about 61 donors.  Seems a bit random though it made sense at the time.  You can tell from the numbers that this pretty much did bear out. Well, almost.  I’ll likely need more than 6 new givers to make full budget.  I’ll also need to supplement some of those jump-start gifts with new monthly and annual donors.  How much longer might that take?

Please keep praying for my funding to firm up.  I’m so encouraged with where I’m at.  I’m soooo close! Help me find my “Finish-Line” donors who’ll push me to 100%.  I’m so grateful for where I’m at – but I’m really not where I have to be yet.  Some evening soon you’ll be out on a walk in the warm spring air and you’ll hear a lunatic shouting for joy in the distance.  That would be the sound of me making full budget.

Wanted to get a few details to you about this week’s event.  The Graduate & Faculty group at Kansas University in Lawrence is sponsoring their first Veritas Forum.    Dr. Mary Poplin who I introduced you in a previous post is speaking at a couple of events.  Please pray for our GFM staff member there Jake Evans.  Jake has been coordinating all the effort to bring Dr. Poplin.  Check out the KU’s InterVaristy GFM Facebook page for the details.

I had a quick conversation with Jake yesterday.  Dr. Poplin will be speaking at a Faculty Luncheon at noon this Thursday before the public event on campus at 7:00pm.  Pray for terrific attendance and for Dr. Poplin to connect well with her audience.  Jake is hopeful that the event will be a huge encouragement to the GFM fellowship.  Pray for people who attend the event to land in follow-up events and groups after the week wraps up.  Dr. Poplin will also at a local church Friday morning for a question/answer session.

If you know someone at KU that you’d like to put in touch with Jake, he can be reached through the Facebook page or email him at jake.evens@intervarsity.org

 

There’s a vocational counterpart to buyer’s remorse.  You’re all too familiar with buyer’s remorse.  At least I’m pretty sure.  No one who lives long in a world where almost everything is oversold will go unscathed by the phenomenon.  You buy something like a house or a laptop or a car or for that matter a cat.  Within your first few days (or minutes in some cases) of brand spanking new ownership you sense something squirming just off the edges of your radar.  The dishwasher leaks – what else doesn’t work that I don’t know about?  The cat likes to pee anywhere but her litter box.  The car develops a suspicious noise.  Why did I buy this car?  Why this cat?

New jobs do the same thing to us.  No newsflash about that.  The peeing cat in my new job was my own lack of first hand experience with Graduate Faculty Ministries.  I know InterVarsity well enough.  I worked in undergrad ministry for 19 years.  I have a masters degree in divinity – I’ve actually been a graduate student.  But I realize how little I actually know about doing ministry among graduate students and faculty in the secular university.  What was I thinking?

On my way to the new job, one of my former IV supervisors gave me terrific book – The Two Tasks of the Christian Scholar.  It became the first of several great reads that helped me get a better idea of what I was getting into.  My second book was Finding God Beyond Harvard.   This book fueled my baby vision for GFM.  Kelly Monroe Kullberg talks about the evangelistic ministry of Veritas Forum.  In grad school after grad school at our nation’s top universities she writes a travelogue of all the ground work that went into Veritas outreach events.  The stories are so inspiring.  The more I read the less I’m worried about my peeing cat.

Here’s another conversion story you should read about if you have a minute.  Yes people at Harvard do find Jesus.  Like Sarah in my previous post, Mark Shepard’s story has similar starting points.  Non-christian background.  Actually rejected his family’s Jewish beliefs and gravitated to atheism.  Firm belief in the incompatibility of faith and rationality.  “Life should be based on logical optimization and be free from emotional thinking.”

Finding God for Mark began the same way as with Sarah – friendship with a Christian.  A thoughtful, outgoing Christian tutor unafraid of extending his faith.  Mark was impressed that Christians could be so intellectually deep and yet open to difficult questions.  Most striking to me was Mark’s insight about sin and evil.  He realized his own atheistic naturalism by comparison gave him very little explanation for the existence of evil.  He was also surprised to discover the reality of personal sin in the very fabric of Harvard’s intellectual elitism.

Just for the record, I do have a cat.  Her name is Aspen.  She’s a delightful little green eyed gray haired tortie that has never peed anywhere except her litter box.  No real buyer’s remorse with my cat or my job!

 

Getting into the world of GFM has been a new adventure for me.  In my previous 19 years of student ministry, I can’t remember ever being a part of a graduate student or a faculty member becoming a Christ follower.  I’d been so involved in the process among loads of undergrad students.  I’d helped organize and host event after event where multiple people responding gave themselves to Christ.  But I only saw it happen in my undergraduate fellowships.  Do graduate students ever lay down their world view and take up Christian theism?  How would they ever feel free enough to that?  How would they manage the potential risk to their reputation?  Could their new beliefs integrate with their work in any significant way?

In this post I’d like to introduce you to Sarah Irving Stonebraker (link here, photo above).  Sarah is an Australian professor of European History who met Jesus in an unlikely place.    Reading her story several things stand out that you’d expect:

• Set off for the university very comfortable with no belief in God whatsoever
• Assumed all Christians to be “anti-intellectual and self-righteous”
• Began to encounter Christians as friends in the midst of the university system
• Maintained honest skepticism about humanity’s ability to transcend it’s individualism and commercialism.

But also some surprising things (I’m learning not to be too surprised really):

• Discovered theological resources crafted in an intellectually compelling way
• Was shocked at what she discovered about Jesus
• The Jesus of the New Testament didn’t match the Jesus she’d always heard about
• Discovered the reality of God’s love in Jesus’ sacrificial life to be a refreshing alternative to the broken systems of the world

I hope I get to be a part of stories like this going forward with GFM.  I’m looking forward to when it’s not so out of the box for people with graduate level intellectual gifts to give their full potential to the leadership of Jesus!

By the way.  While you’re on the page reading Sarah’s story, explore a little.  Veritas Forum is a unique event catalyzing thoughtful, Gospel mission in graduate and professional schools all across the United States.

Graduate Faculty Ministry happenings are pretty different than things one might see in undergrad IV groups.  They have to be.  Undergrads have time and proximity that give them a lot of room to work with.  Grads and Faculty just don’t.  In the next few posts I’ll point you to some recent and upcoming outreach events taking place in GFM.

Here’s a list of upcoming GFM events.   Take a look at the Finding Calucutta book discussion happening at The Well in next month.  Details below.  Later in the year our group at KU (Lawrence, Kansas) is hosting a Veritas Forum with Mary Poplin.

The Well is a forum for Women in Academics – they’re the ones hosting the book group.  Since The Well deserves it’s own post let me just say for now “Stay Tuned”.  Details for the Finding Calcutta book group are here if you’re interested in signing up!

Mary Poplin is a professor who met Jesus out of her background as a committed secularist.  As a researcher in poverty work, she was compelled to meet Mother Theresa and learn everything she could from direct contact with her.  She travels and speaks about her conversion, her faith and her perspectives on poverty and justice.

You can click here to listen to Mary tell her story.  As I watched just now, I was impacted by several things.  The peculiar twists and turns in her journey of faith to Jesus.  Her mentoring style of connecting with the students in her audience.  Sharp minded.  Warm hearted.  A life of mature reflection on social justice and the Gospel.  I love her insight into the meaning of forgiveness.  Give it a watch next time you have 25 minutes to meet someone new.   You’ll see other Veritas Forum presentations while you’re there.  More on Veritas in my next post.  As I make my way into this thing called GFM, I’m so inspired with the conversion narratives of a group of people I used to think NEVER become Christians.  I think you’ll be inspired too!  We’ll revisit Mary Poplin in the weeks leading up to the KU event.