I hope you are poised for a relaxing Memorial Day Weekend. Here are a few things that instantly come to mind when I think of Memorial Day weekend during my growing up years:

• We had TONS of peony flowers growing all over our farm when I was kid. They were always in full-bloom by Memorial Day weekend.
• We would take large coffee cans, for some reason wrapped with aluminum foil, pack them with all three colors of peony flowers (white, pink, red) then take them to our grand-parents’ graves at the cemetery and leave them by the headstone.
• The Indy 500 (which I actually got to watch one year in person – Rick Mears, 1984).
• With 5 older brothers, for quite a few years in the 70s and 80s someone was always graduating from high-school in late May.

How’s the Fam – Part 1

How about I catch you up with the Perry girls today. I’ll get the guys in the next post before the weekend is up! Cheryl has been working this spring at a new job with Good Will. She serves in an education group called Youth Build. Her role is teaching and coaching adult learners wanting to pass the GED test. It’s a part time job at the moment. She hopes her group will add another program she used to teach at her former job. It would become a full-time gig if things move in that direction.

Other things keeping Cheryl busy these days?

• Grand kids! More on them in the next post, but being Cher-Bear to Poppy, Juniper and Lewyn is Cheryl’s real dream-job. The commute at the moment is JUST TOO LONG! All the grand-kids are a 14 hour drive way in Tennessee.
• Gardening! Her latest creation: wild-flower tree-stump with bird-bath. She’s also helping her Good Will students plant a tiny garden in the back of the building.
• Hamilton! A wonderful mothers day gift from Phoebe. They were seated nearly on the top row in the theatre, but it was magical nonetheless!

Phoebe: a wellness and arts entrepreneur!

Phoebe and Ryan moved back to Omaha about 2 years ago. She officially retired from ballet performance after reaching company soloist for the San Diego Ballet. Returning to your hometown after dancing professionally for 5 years actually makes you rock-star with your former ballet school. She was immediately scooped up by Omaha Academy of Ballet and began teaching. Now and then she gets to be in a show, now and then she gets to choreograph pieces. Recently I’ve just been in awe of her ability to create movement with multiple dancers with all the technicality of composing music for multiple instruments! She brings movement to life on a stage like an artist painting on a canvas (only somehow better). Here’s a few other things she’s got going these days:

• She is the sole proprietor of Allonge Massage and Wellness. She has a studio in her basement as well as offering mobile massage!
• Recently she was “hired” by Gallup here in Omaha – she spends a day a week at their offices doing 15 minute massages for their employees. Her sign up list is never NOT packed full!
• She’s certified in pilates and teaches at a local studio. She also bought a reformer (contraption you can do various pilates exercises on).
• Her and Ryan bought a home here in Omaha last August – a few needed upgrades in progress with a little help from Perry Painting and Decorating (c’est moi).
• A very precocious and adorable halloween cat named Otto!

Hope you have a terrific Memorial Day weekend!

What is Natal Homing?

Everybody knows that many animals have an incredible ability to return to their home after migrating in some cases hundreds of miles and up to several years! I had no idea how sophisticated their GPS wiring must be! Here are excerpts from Wikipedia on Natal Homing:

“Natal homing is the process by which some adult animals that have migrated away from their juvenile habitats return to their birthplace…. This process is primarily used by aquatic animals such as sea turtles and salmon, although some migratory birds and mammals also practice similar behavior. Scientists believe that the main cues used by the animals are geomagnetic imprinting and olfactory cues. The benefits of returning to the precise location of an animal’s birth may be largely associated with its safety and suitability as a breeding ground. When seabirds like the Atlantic puffin return to their natal breeding colony, which are mostly on islands, they are assured of a suitable climate and a sufficient lack of land-based predators.”

SPAPH students are like… salmon (or puffins)!

Third-year SPAHP (School of Pharmacy and Health Professions) students set off on a sort of migratory journey. They are doing their field work assignments in places like Minneapolis, Rochester, Chicago or Kansas City. Here in the last month of their final year their “geomagnetic imprinting and olfactory cues” kick-in and back to Omaha they come! Graduating Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy and Pharmacy students make the trek about a week before commencement to present their Capstone project, welcome parents and other family members to campus and complete their academic life-cycle with that last walk to the podium collecting their diplomas. This year there are 7 special SPAPH-salmon I’m eager to see end their long journey. Mara Juffer (OT), Emma Wright (OT), Hannah Wright (OT), Grant Solley (PT), Karis Choy (Pharmacy), Abby Knutson (OT), and Katlyn Sims. These seven and other graduates from past classes are scattered throughout the pic galleries below.

Mind the GAP!

I’ve really enjoyed this year’s graduating class. When I first met them all in August 2022, I was thrilled with the energy they gave our group! In addition to these seven, we also started attracting students from other programs as well as grad students from other schools. They have been a solid community for one another as they’ve done their training. The constant aim on InterVarsity’s part has been to coach and mentor them in the connection between their love for Jesus and their passion for their discipline. “Mind the gap” for lovers of things British is a saying similar to “watch your step” in the American dialect. Those of us with graduating students in InterVarsity talk about GAPS differently.

GAPS stands for GIVE, ADVOCATE, PRAY and SERVE. These are four invitations we give every graduating grad and professional student in GFM. These incredible “SPAHP-Puffins” won’t be in Omaha very long before they head out again (maybe NEVER to return?) to the birthplace of their training. They’re off to career jobs sometimes back in their home state, sometimes to far away places in other countries! Our invitation for them is to:

1. Consider GIVING to the work at their alma-mater once they get situated with their new job and location.
2. Be open to ADVOCATING for GFM ministry in their new setting. Things like connecting with other InterVarsity Alumni or helping GFM network its ministry in new places.
3. PRAY for the Grad Student Fellowship they have just left and the staff members remaining in that community.
4. SERVE a local InterVarsity staff member or student chapter by volunteering to help with events or speaking to active student groups.

Pray for graduating students everywhere in GFM. Pray for their job search and transition to new living situations. Pray for them as they figure out the complexity of working, paying off school debt, relationships and family, and on top of all that, MORE testing and exams related to their professional certifications! Pray for me as I hope to welcome all seven of these students and more for a simple reception at our home on May 15th. It’s a chaotic few days with events on campus for the graduates, family visiting in town, etc. It will be hard to see all of them at the same time, but I do want to make a connection with each one. They have each been a real treasure to have in GFM. InterVarsity and I want to bless them as they move on.

Fourth Quarter Finances.

May and June wrap up our fiscal year in InterVarsity. As I conclude this post I want to you know I could use your prayers for finishing out the year in good shape. Quite a few of my ministry partners are fiscal 4th Quarter givers. I’ll be reaching out to see about their support in the next few weeks. At this point I’m watching for about $18K in annual gifts to arrive before June 30 (on top of what my monthly givers are doing).

Tim’s donation page at InterVarsity.org

Ask the Lord to help me connect. Ask the Lord to help my entire budget to come in full. If you happen to be one of those May/June givers, here’s a link to my donation page at InterVarsity. Email me or reply this post if you have any questions about giving to my account.

Thanks so much!

It’s annual performance review time with me and my staff. Recently InterVarsity has developed this set of leadership competencies staff can aim for in our multi-faceted jobs. This particular set of skills isn’t the sum-total of everything our job requires – these are the direct ministry actions that help us build InterVarsity. We also need to find funding, communicate with our ministry partners, structure our time and cultivate our own life with God. But these are our nine most important leadership roles. Staff use these tools to grow effective, missional fellowships. Supervisors use them to grow effective staff teams. What do these 9 things look like in action? Glad you asked.

A quick tour:

Assess Reality– My role as an evangelism champion for our region has led me to launch an exploration into why most of our known conversions in GFM ministry are among International Grad students (with far fewer conversions among American Grad students – and almost no conversions among faculty). Why is that?

Build Teams– although I have a current team of 13 staff members at 9 schools we have a serious need to recruit new staff. At the moment we are in very short supply of young staff, new staff and full-time paid staff who raise their budgets. How can we get better at finding prospective staff candidates?

Catalyze Diversity– Of the thirteen staff in our Area, there are three women and two Asian American volunteer staff. As we seek new staff for our team, we’re looking for prospects that will keep us younger, more ethnically diverse, and we are eagerly looking for women as well as men staff candidates.

Collaborate with others– Our undergrad InterVarsity colleagues are our most important ministry strategists. My Area is a complete overlap with the UFM Central Region – Kathy Haug and her team of Area Directors are developing undergraduate ministries on all the campus GFM inhabits. We share strategic resources and strongly benefit from collaborating particularly in planting new work and working with christian faculty members.

Communicate Vision– when we find a new ministry strategy we’d like to flesh-out in campus ministry we need to tirelessly paint a future for it. A few years back I started thinking about Spiritual Friendship as a core spiritual formation tool for Graduate students. My hope is to grow the idea into a workable model with a set of tools and stories – click here to see my rudimentary Spiritual Friendship community I’m calling Syntrek.

Develop Staff– each spring supervisors and field staff do an extensive review of our ministry goals for the year. We’re encouraged to think about our own staff development not only in terms of immediate ministry growth, but also in terms of personal growth. What kind of skills would we like to bring to our leadership? Are there educational or training experiences we can write into our job plans for the coming year. One that I am contemplating is a writer’s workshop this summer (more on that in a coming post). Other developmental experiences I and my staff have done over the years – ongoing education like seminary, ministry in an overseas setting, courses from our Learning and Talent division nationally, preparing for a ministry job change/promotion, etc.

Exhibit Emotional Intelligence– two areas come to mind immediately: a- leading teams of student and faculty leaders in growing on campus outreach (shared leadership with our national movement’s target audience requires building trust and discerning levels of risk and sacrifice others are prepared for). b- fundraising! Understanding how to talk with people about resources and invite their commitment is one of the most tricky things to navigate sometimes.

Make Decisions and Plans– SOMETHING on this list needs to be self-evident. This one is it! Budget decisions involving significant dollars, setting pay-levels with staff and deciding when they need to set aside ministry to find funding, helping a staff member retire, hiring a new staff member, knowing when to get your supervisor’s help with something one of your staff is struggling with.

Manage Change– “InterVarsity will be changing from staff communication via email to using Microsoft Teams.” For a team of largely senior staff, traveling at the speed of technology can be a very bumpy ride.

I’d love your prayers for me and my team in the month of April. We’re wrapping up a number of administrative tasks like inventories, performance reviews and our fiscal calendar year end. May is also a month of transitions for graduating students. Seven of my students in our local GCF will be graduating. Pray for me to be able to connect with them when they migrate back to Omaha for their capstone and graduation ceremonies.

This was a couple of Friday’s ago over in Iowa City. I was teaching Matt 13 to the Univ of Iowa, Grad Christian Fellowship. If you’re curious about my teaching notes, track down that QR code in the 4th picture. That’s Kevin and Maria Kummer and myself at the Encounter Cafe on Univ of Iowa’s campus. Kevin has been on staff with InterVarsity for 45+ years! It was great fun spending time with them and their students.

Thanks so much for your prayers!

tim.perry@intervarsity.org

Thanks so much for your recent prayers. It’s been two weeks with a lot of travel miles. Our team time in New Orleans was wonderful! Our team enjoyed a lot of hours of time together, lots of laughter, lots of eating, and lots of business. I’m a sort of evangelism champion for our region which just means I help our team own the value and practices of reaching non-believing grad students and faculty members on our campuses. We spent a couple of sessions assessing where we could be more effective and set a new training and communication structure in motion for our whole region. Much more on that. Much later.

We got to enjoy a few outings during the four days. We took a very chilly horse-carriage tour of the French Quarter that ended at Cafe DuMonde (powdered-sugar-drowned beignets for everyone). We drove to Baton Rouge, prayer walked part of LSU’s campus and paid a visit to Mike the mascot (actually Mike 7, the seventh such LSU live tiger mascot since 1936). What I enjoyed most about our time together was the extended time we spent in scripture and prayer looking at the theme of evangelistic leadership. We spend part of a morning studying Matthew 13 – several parables about the Kingdom of God. The parable of the wheat and the weeds spoke to us about doing ministry in full contact with a messy world inhabited by the disruptive work of Satan.

The week I jumped into after landing in Omaha was lots more miles, but not on Southwest. After unpacking Friday, napping Saturday, I woke up early this Sunday morning inspired to make a batch of my best PBCC Monsters. After church I borrowed my son-in-law’s hard copy of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, downloaded an audible copy of How Not to Be Secular by J.K. A. Smith, and tore out of my driveway in our 2014 Honda Pilot (aka The Pearl). My staff member at the University of Kansas in Lawrence hosted a book discussion. A book discussion, discussing a book, about another book! Yes, this kind of thing happens in GFM (all the time). It was rather a drive-by of a campus visit, but my February schedule was just too full for any more overnights! I think my head hit the pillow back in Omaha about 1:30am.

One last event out of town this week – Tuesday night. Again in the Pearl, a trip over to Ames for a Veritas Forum co-sponsored by GFM’s faculty ministry at Iowa State. Our guest speaker was Duke professor and medical doctor Warren Kinghorn director of the Theology , Medicine and Culture Initiative. It was a full room and a wonderful dialogue with a former ISU Faculty member in Counselling. Head on my pillow ETA Tuesday night? 1:45am.

Thanks so much for your prayers!

Tuesday to Friday next week I’ll be in NOLA with my GFM Regional Leadership Team (that’s us above last year gathered in North Carolina for the same meetings). These are my teammates who lead GFM ministry with me in a massive 17 state region called the South-Central. We gather in person, just our team, just one time per year for team building and coordinating our leadership. A few things you could be mindful of when you pray for us:

• Leon Filyaw (light blue shirt, back row) is our new RD (Regional Director). He stepped in as our leader when our old boss Don Paul Gross(back row, cadigan, behind me) took an RD job in the West last year.
• Please track with us via the schedule below. We have two guest staff members joining us for the part of our gathering focused on Spiritual Formation (Kathy and Karen).
• We’re meeting in New Orleans! Looking forward to some time with my team in a fun city (and maybe some food Nebraskans like me don’t normally get to eat).
• I’ll be helping with a few things in the schedule – pray for me this week as I prep for a couple of discussions on evangelism and lead our team in a MS study of Matthew 13.
• One fun thing we’ve got planned is an outtrip to LSU over in Baton Rouge! Allison (one of our Area Directors, on Leon’s right in the pic above) lives and works there. We’re going to hang out on her campus for some meeting, eating and prayer-walking!

Please pray for our time together! I’m excited about looking at a couple of Evangelism Self-assessment tools that our region has been using for the past two years. IF you’d like to see them click the link below! Oh, hey, looks like they also talked me into doing some cooking Tuesday night when we first get there! I hope they don’t regret that! In my experience when they trust you to feed them, you better deliver! I’m bringing a pretty safe family favorite I’ve made a million times: Tim’s Chicken Chili.

Thanks so much for your terrific support, friendship, giving and praying. I couldn’t keep this thing going without you! If I’m not too busy, I’ll try to blog while I’m down there next week!

PS: February’s GCF Brunch

The topic of conversation at brunch was Conflict Management! If you’re an old-school IV staff director you’ll recognize both resources we used: Difficult Conversations (in it’s 3rd rendition) and the trusty-dusty Thomas-Kilman conflict profile. YES, I had them take the old-school version of the questionnairre and discover thier conflict strategies (Avoidance, Accommodation, Competition, Compromise, Collaboration). I dare you to download it and take it right now! You can use the QR code above.

Three things very briefly. This newsblog is killing it! Time to read the books I already have. New Year, new journal.

A blog is no replacement for face to face fundraising! Eight years ago when I came back on InterVarsity staff with GFM I vowed to go paperless-if-possible. My tongue still throbs thinking about all the paper prayer letters I produced and mailed from 1987 to 2005. I work as hard as any staff member I know at inviting new donors to join me in the most personal way possible. 99% of the time that means getting together face to face and asking people to join my team. Once on my team, the paper-work stops! In the seven years I’ve been writing PBR I’ve posted a 171 times. That’s a news update roughly every two weeks. No stamps. No envelopes. No paper cuts. No damaged taste-buds!

Thank you for clicking those links and reading my posts! Thank you for praying! 2024 was the first year the blog received over 3,000 views! That’s terrific considering the fact that those views are logged by PBR readers who know me face to face. Thank You!

Don’t know about you, but I have too many books on my shelves that I haven’t read. 2025 will be a year for searching my library for great titles like Kevin Vanhoozer’s Drama of Doctrine. Van Hoozer was one of my favorite professors throughout my M-Div. I’m about halfway into Drama of Doctrine and of course saying to myself, “Why didn’t I read this book years ago?”

Tim’s Journaling habits.

I go through a couple of these a year. Moleskine is my favorite brand. A few of my discoveries over the many years of doing this follow. Maybe you have some of these practices too?

• I do two different things on the left side and the right side.
• Right side of the journal is where I journal my thoughts and my prayers. Great quotes. Prayer lists. Gratitude checks. Repentance. Spiritual retreats.
• The left side of the page I make into two columns. This is multi-purpose space for anything other than my direct God-conversation.
• Left side: notes during messages, talks, sermons. To do lists. Little sketches of projects I’m always dreaming up. Message outlines I’ve been assigned. Blog ideas. Teaching/training ideas.
• I don’t worry about blank pages building up on the left side (oddly I pretty much fill both sides at about the same rate).
• I re-read my old journal before starting a new one!
• It’s easier to find things when I know that the journal pages are always on the right and the creative pages are on the left.
• Last thing. The journal turned sideways (left side). is easier to take notes in while I’m sitting somewhere other than my desk.

Have a terrific 2025!

Oh, I’m also planning on drinking more beets in 2025!

Thanks so much for praying for our shared staff retreat last weekend! Undergrad and GFM InterVarsity spent the weekend together with an ice-storm keeping us cozy and close indoors! In my last post I gave you a wish-list. Many, if not all (and then some) items on that list were experienced. I’ll let the pictures do the talking below. Scripture. Prayer. Worship. Relationship building. And LOTS of fun.

Click here to be taken to Tim’s donation page at InterVarsity online.

One resource person we brought to the weekend was a faculty member from Iowa State University. We asked Alex Tuckness to share a few insights he’s distilled from his 25 years of teaching Political Science (philosophy) at ISU. I think you’ll find his five points incisive! Usually GFM speakers can be a little lofty and ornate. Alex was very approachable and practical. Alex is a known quantity to us in the GFM stream. But I as curious about how he’d connect with the undergrad staff. He was clear and very helpful to everyone in the room! Alex, thank you so much!

The Pendulum is Swinging. Five shifts.

1. Social Media Fatigue is creating a desire for authenticity. Students are hungry for face to face relationship and deeply need a community where they can experience grace and not more social scrutiny!
2. Change Fatigue is stimulating interest in old things (in Alex’s experience with student ministry he has noticed an encouraging draw to doctrine and the early church creeds).
3. Polarization Fatigue is giving way to Christian virtues. People are burnt out on be angry and feeling anger from others. The fruits of the Spirit are now more visible and being appreciated more.
4. Materialistic Fatigue may be making a way for something other than the desire for a high-paying job. There is an opportunity to help students ask questions about meaning and purpose.
5. Instability in the University stemming from a combination of the pending enrollment cliff and the broader cultural tension between populism and elitism, is creating an uneasiness about the future of higher education!

Taken together Tuckness observes that far from silencing Christian witness in the University, current cultural pressures are leading to opportunities for the mission of Jesus in higher education. Christians of mature character convinced of their calling are needed more than ever to make a redeeming impact.

Thanks so much for your prayers. Thanks so much for your giving. Please remember to let me know if you need to send a year end donation or make any changes to your giving in the coming year. At the moment I am running a typical 2nd Quarter deficit that usually rights itself in December and January. I am still trying to add to my ministry budget as I head toward the second half of my fiscal year. Thanks so much for your generosity!

A few captions from the top moving down the photo gallery:

• They left me in charge of the games for Friday night. We had a dice theme: Tenzi, Fill or Bust, Left Center Right (with real quarters, people) AND a fun print and play game called Raging Bulls – message me if you want to check it out. It was super nerdy and I DID find 3 other dice nerds who I taught it to.
• Our faculty member from Ames drove in the night before – he saw the forecast and decided that if he waited till Saturday morning to come down, he wouldn’t have come! Things melted before the weekend was over.
• My team-mate Kathy Haug – the Regional Director for the Central undergrad region was a delight to work with! We had a great time in manuscript study, she leads program times superbly as well!
• Six of my 13 member team were able to be present. Nice job with the branded merch clothing memo, George!
• We had a collaboration session on Saturday night where we broke our four-state region up into working groups around Prayer, Faculty Ministry and Effective shared Events. Just the tip of the ice-burg of how we could be adding to each others ministry.
• Kathy sent off two of the Central Region’s best leaders – Will and Esther Chu. We commissioned them as they will be leaving St. Louis to join IFES in Christchurch, New Zealand this coming summer.

Have a terrific week as you welcome the Christ-Child! As for me, I’ll get to hang out with these two cuties and their families next week (Lewyn on the left, Juniper on the right).

Blessings, Tim

This weekend my team will have the opportunity to be together with the undergraduate staff in our four-state area. Pray for our time together in scripture, prayer and team-building. Undergrad InterVarsity are more plenteous than their GFM (Graduate Faculty Ministry) counterparts. That means our grad and faculty work is more focused on R-1 universities (large schools with large research budgets and numerous PhD programs. Think University of Nebraska at Lincoln (R-1) and Creighton University (R-2). Our staff teams are on many of the same campuses. We are in separate ministry steams organizationally – sometimes we miss out on the kind of team-work we’d like to bring to faculty and students.

We’ll be together this coming weekend! Schedule is above. Please pray for us! We’ll be spending time in the Gospel of John in those rich chapters 15-17! Here’s a wish-list of ways we hope we see God work:

• Friendships enriched and incubated by time together.
• Spiritual input from scripture that feeds our missionary/pastor hearts.
• Sharing stories of God’s work from each stream (celebration and awareness).
• Refreshed vision for mission and identity.
• Pathways to more effective collaboration on the campuses we share.
• Fun and enjoyment. Spontaneous conversations. Meals. Laughter. Games.
• Sharpening each others gifts and confirming our callings.
• Opening new paths of being colleagues
• Fresh ideas for better outreach to faculty and students
• Renewed appreciation for our alumni and ministry partnerships

Pray for me and my co-director, Kathy Haug, Regional Director of undergrad ministries in NE, KS, MO, IA. On the undergrad side it’s called the Central Region. My team is the GFM Central Area. So we decided to call this thing the Central Staff Retreat (CSR). Kathy is a terrific leader – its been a delight to work with her. She’ll be co-leading the sessions with me and she’ll be teaching our MSS study sessions in John. I’ll be doing a couple of workshops (and coordinating one of the evening fun adventures). There are 42 or so people attending in all. I’ll send some pics from the weekend!

Click here to be taken to Tim’s donation page.

Just another reminder about year end finances. See the details from the past post. Let me know what you need as you think about your year-end giving or your plans for 2025! Thanks so much!

Our Christmas Progressive Dinner last Friday. Got the chance to talk about Advent – one of my favorite subjects! Great fun back at our place with dessert, Tenzi and LCR!

Two things I am powerless to do ministry without! On this first Sunday of Advent I want to you know how grateful I am for your praying and your giving. Honestly, I’m even MORE grateful that I have you in my life as a friend, a family member, or a team-mate of some sort! I love a work where I get to pick the people I want on my team. Thank you for being one of about a hundred people/families that keep me hopeful, focused and resourced. I’ve been in vocational ministry since June 1987! Never without teams to belong to, teams to lead and never without a team of intercessors and givers. Thank you!

As usual, this is that time of the year when you will be totally slammed with support needs. As usual, Tim needs to know if his team is in this for another year! IF you know you’re on-board for the coming year, NO NEED TO DO ANYTHING in response to this post! Just keep doing the terrific job you do every year, every month, every week. Keep praying! Keep giving! And PLEASE keep being my friend!

LMK means LET ME KNOW. Let me know one of two things if you’re not sure I’m aware. 1- Let me know if you are an annual giver and you need help sending your donation. Below is the link. Every year in December, quite a few of my annual donors “clear out the hopper” and send calendar year-end gifts. For some donors that is their once-a-year gift. For others who give monthly, they might send in an EXTRA gift at the end of the year. Use the same link to give, give an extra gift, or increase your monthly giving. When you hit the link below, you’ll land on your account on my donation page. Let me know if you need help! Thanks!

Click here to go to Tim’s donation page at InterVarsity

2- LMK also means let me know if you need to stop or decrease your giving. It happens every year. And it’s really helpful for me to know so I can factor that support into next year’s funding goal. It’s always exciting to bring new donors on my team. When someone has to step off, that’s a chance for God to bring more helpers. Just let me know.

You can reply this post in two ways. You can text back the notification you got on your phone (either the TEXTEDLY number or my cell phone number will do). You can also email me at my address below. I’d love to hear from you – especially if there are some changes you need to make. Thanks!

How can we pray for you THIS week, Tim?

There are three things I’d love prayer for this week. I’ll keep it short and sweet now, but post more later this month.

1. This Friday InterVarsity in Omaha is having it’s annual Christmas Progressive Dinner. It’s a great chance for our groups to hang out together – undergraduate, graduate, faculty, UNO, Creighton, Bellevue Univ, UNMC and others). I’ll be giving an Advent Devotional again like last year. I’m excited about writing it this week. Pray especially for a clear invitation to faith in the Jesus of Advent.
2. This December 13-15 the Central Region (undergrad IV) will be joining up with my GFM Central Area for a combined staff retreat. Pray for our work on that event in the coming two weeks. It will be terrific opportunity for team building and collaboration across our ministry streams.
3. Last thing. This Saturday I’ll be heading down to Manhattan, KS for a campus visit. I’ll be sitting in on George Gardner’s Brunch and Bible. George also wants me to meet an alumni named Levi who is possibly interested in GFM ministry. It will be a quick one-day trip. Pray for good travel. Pray for great conversations.

Thank you so much for your prayers and your giving. 2024 was a pretty good year for building my budget. If you recall in 2024 I had my sights set on landing in a better place on the pay-scale with my Area Director job. I was able to get a salary increase back in August! I’m about half-way toward my eventual goal of being fully funded at a level 10 salary. I need to keep going as I head into 2025. But it feels good to make some significant progress. Thanks so much to new donors! Thanks so much to old donors who increased their giving.

PS. No this is NOT the same baby from my previous post! That was Lewyn, Silas and Haleigh’s little boy. THIS is Juniper Morwen Perry. Tennessee Twinkie number two – my oldest son’s second daughter, born November 19th. So thankful for how God is growing and blessing my kid’s families. Thanks for your prayers – the waiting is over!

Poppy is SUCH a proud big sister!

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!