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.

Here’s the link to the Dec 6th Devotional.

You can check out the whole project at the link in my previous post. These are so well done. They’ve been a great on-ramp to some fresh thinking about Jesus here at the opening of a new year. Hope you can enjoy a few of these. These aren’t sentimental. It’s actually the kind of thing I had in mind when I first started The Boiler Room. By the way, Bertha did just ignite here next to me this morning!

I just sent my oldest kid back to college yesterday. We celebrated his 25th birthday on the 30th of December. Next time the Perry’s are all together there’ll be three generations in my immediate clan! Aaron and Savannah are expecting their first baby somewhere at the beginning of April! The rest of us will be firsts too – Phoebe and Silas our other two kids will be Aunt Phoebe and Uncle Silas for the first time. Cheryl and I will be something… Grams and Pops… for the first time? We haven’t made that awkward decision yet. It’s about as hard to figure out what to call yourself as grandparents as I remember figuring out what to call our kids when we had them!

So when is Christmas over?

It’s never really over as long as we await our Savior’s return. And really, anything we do to celebrate his first coming helps us long for his return. Whatever does that for us… is Christmas enough for me! In these outrageously cold post-Christmas days I’ve been enjoying a set of advent devotionals one of my teammates turned me on to back in November. They are a terrific combination of visual art, poetry, thoughtful reflection and music. I wasn’t able to “open every little advent door” and listen each day, but I’m definitely playing catch up between now and Jan 7th. You might like doing that too if you have some time.

Here’s the link to the Advent Project from Biola University’s Center for Christianity, Culture and the Arts. There’s a button that will allow to you see thumbnails of every piece. Here’s how I enjoying them best: Clear away distractions from where you’re sitting. Light a candle and just be quiet for a few minutes. Have a means for journaling nearby – you’ll have lots of thoughts to process because each piece is just packed with artful/thoughtful elements. Look at the painting for a few minutes. Read the poem. Reflect. Turn on the music and keep enjoying the curator’s reflections. Enjoy! No Christmas isn’t over!

Thought I would use the remaining days of 2017 to post some random interest connections from the GFM website. Many of my donors are not new to InterVarsity but are very new to ministry among graduates and faculty. As I’m getting more familiar with things GFM, I’m surprised to find all kinds of people, groups and events that reflect the vastly creative and thoughtful world of Christians in academia. InterVarsity’s most recent vision statement aims to bring God’s kingdom to every corner of every campus. These posts will reflect some of what that lofty endeavor entails.

In a conversation I had earlier this fall with a Christian Social Work professor at UNO, I encountered the strategic nature of academic societies. These are groups of Christians connected within a given discipline united by their commitment to being uniquely Christian in identity and influence. If you are a Christian professional working in engineering, medicine, or education for example, have you considered searching out other like-minded believers in your discipline? There are dozens of different groups located at the link immediately below. This is one of the networking functions of a group like GFM.

Here’s a link to InterVarsity’s resource page on Christian Professional and Academic Societies. Take a minute to scroll down through the page and see what you connect with. Or maybe you know a Christian faculty member, professional or grad student in one of these fields. Send them a copy of the link. If you’re aware of someone starting a graduate program help us get them connected to the GFM work at the school they’ll be attending.