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!

In this post I give you a whirlwind of things happening with students and faculty this month. Please pray for my team as they lean into lots of ministry activity in October. I’m going to try to fit two campus trips into this month as well as welcoming a new grand-baby to the Perry family in Cookeville, Tenn (ANY DAY NOW I might add)! Thanks so much for reading. Thanks for praying for my team. Thanks for your giving that makes it all possible!

First Fridays – Iowa City

The University of Iowa Graduate Christian Fellowship has a monthly large group gathering called First Friday. Our staff member in Iowa City, Kevin Kummer, has had to hit the ground running this fall. He and his wife, Maria, are coming off a 6 month sabbatical leave that included a three month stint of ministry in Barbados! Kevin got the chance to serve the Caribbean IFES movement while there through teaching and training. The wonderful thing about a sabbatical is also a challenge – reconnecting and picking back up with ministry you’ve taken a break from for 6 months! Pray for Kevin’s student leaders to stay focused and available to the fellowship in the midst of their grad work. Pray for the start up of Kevin’s bible studies as well. Tonight is a First Friday – pray for their community as they gather for encouragement, worship, prayer and teaching.

First Saturdays – Omaha

Every Friday before our monthly GCF Saturday Brunch I wrap up my RSVP with students, figure out the menu, head over to Bakers for a grocery run, then clean my kitchen! Tomorrow looks like we’ll have 9-11 students. Pray for my new student Kyra – she’ll be sharing a 13 minute TED talk on her life answering two questions: 1- How and Why am I Christian? and 2) How does my faith connect with why I’m in this professional discipline? Each year new students get the opportunity to share their TED talk with the group. I’m really excited about this year’s new students. Please pray for our time together at brunches and for students to invest in each other on their own through spiritual friendship. And just for the record I DO make cinnamon rolls from scratch every time we have brunch!

Student Retreat at Wash-U

Please be in prayer for our staff at Wash-U in St. Louis. Sarah Gregory and Joshua Ho (volunteer staff) will be teaming up with their student leaders to host a chapter retreat next weekend, Oct 12th-13th. The theme will be on Prayer. The Fall Retreat is always a good opportunity for new students especially to get out of town and forge some community with the chapter. Pray for good weather! Pray for more to sign up (I think there are just a little over a dozen signed up at this point.

Faculty Retreat w Carver Project

While I’m on things Wash-U, my staff member there who works with faculty members has been invited to team up with The Carver Project and lead them in a Prayer Initiative throughout the 24/25 academic year. The Carver Faculty also host an out of town retreat each year in the Fall. Our GFM staff member George Stulac will be at their retreat – which is happening THIS WEEKEND. He’ll be unveiling the Carver prayer initiative. Pray for his time with these influential and missional Wash-U faculty.

Technology and Story Telling at Iowa State

One last October happening you can be praying for is happening in Ames this fall on October 29th: Author and ISU alum Ethan J. Brue is being hosted by the Committee on Lectures to talk about How Engineering, Science and Faith Play! Since Ethan is also an IVP author, I’m extra eager to meet him and be a the event. Pray for Chad and Tom, our GFM staff as they partner with faculty and student organizations to bring Dr. Brue and promote the event. It’s a Tuesday night event – interesting timing! Pray for great communication about the event on campus. It is officially sponsored by University Lectures, so it will have some good promotional channels, but pray that the word will spread especially in the sciences an engineering schools. I’ll be brining you some on-site coverage from that event!

Thanks so much for your prayers!

tim.perry@intervarsity.org

I’ve got two things for you today. First a brief PSA about how my blog works. The second, an earnest plea for intercession! Let’s get the boring part out of the way first!

I have switched my distribution tool for PBR notifications. I used to use AirDroid till it got to be too much work to keep it working (like the lawn mower you have to kick to keep running). Textedly is my new AirDroid. I used to love AirDroid because it was free and it worked. Since it’s neither now, I am using Textedly.

Textedly texts don’t come from my phone number, you’ll notice. That cleans up my phone’s text message inbox quite a bit. YET there are a couple of challenges. Your phone won’t recognize the number as coming from Tim. That also means that some users will opt out before they know it’s me sending the notification. Here are a few helpful tips:

855-976-5422 (Tim’s Textedly #)

PBRREADER (Tim’s Keyword)

1. Consider adding Tim’s Textedly number to your contacts and save it as PerryBoilerRoom(Tim Perry). Don’t call that number. That’s just so your phone recognizes it.
2. IF you text back to that number when you get a notification, just know that doesn’t go to my cell phone. I will check for replies after I send an update, but if you’re just trying to text me something, my cell number is better.
3. Textedly makes it really easy to opt out of getting notifications. You just have to text STOP and you’ll get taken off my list.
4. IF, you get taken off the list, I’ll send you a quick text from my cell phone to confirm it.
5. IF, you want to be put back ON the list, you just text UNSTOP to the Textedly number. When you get a reply you then have to send back my keyword to Textedly. My keyword is PBRREADER

Whew, thanks. Glad that is over! You are also free to email me if any of that is unclear. Hopefully you’ll not have to worry about it – you’ll keep getting a notification from me when I put something new on the blog (twice monthly max). Thanks!

“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” (Eph 6:12 NIV)

Paul assures us that the spiritual struggle we suspect is happening around us is NOT just a figment of our imagination. It’s a real struggle. An invisible struggle. A struggle with an actual evil source that is potent! If all that is the case, I’d like you to help me contend in the lives of some of my staff and students. We need God’s presence and power in our work. You can help release that. Here are a few specific people.

Kevin – our GFM staff member in Iowa City has just returned from a 6 month sabbatical where he was able to serve the Caribbean IFES through teaching, training and mentoring of staff and student leaders. He is needing to get the new year started at Univ. of Iowa. One of his very best friends Gary has just passed away. At his request, Kevin is going to be sharing some words about Gary at his funeral.

George – one of our staff at K-State found out over the summer that he has prostate cancer and needs treatments. George runs Bike-Night and Brunch & Bible every weekend with his volunteers. He reaches out to hundreds of International Students each year. Pray for successful medical treatments for George this year and pray for the ability to manage his ministry through his gifted volunteers.

Tom – a retired Biology professor at ISU is also on our GFM staff team. Tom is starting the new school year after a difficult season of life that culminated in the loss of his wife Denise last Spring. Tom is well connected with life-giving friendships and is experiencing renewed energy and focus for ministry. Pray for his effective work with faculty at Iowa State University. Pray for him to continue grieving well.

Nick – Switching gears a bit to our students. Nick is a Physics senior transitioning into grad school at Creighton. He’s new to GCF – a friend who is in Grad Christian Fellowship brought him to the last brunch of the summer. “Would you be willing to connect with Nick and help me know where he’s at spiritually?”

Jon – Just met with Jon yesterday and I left very excited about his program at Creighton and his interest in InterVarsity. He’s a PT-1 from a solid Christian home in the Hastings area. I spent some time getting to know his spiritual background and painting some vision for Jon’s involvement in GCF. With all new students, the spiritual battle just seems to be priorities and time management. Pray for students to make space to engage others. Professional school can become almost idolatrous in its demand on one’s time and energy.

Sruthi – a distance student in the Doctorate of Pharmacy program. She lives in Manhattan, Kansas where her husband is an associate professor in Agronomy. Her and Sandeep are Hindu. They have connected with churches and ministries near K-State and seem very open to talking about spiritual things.

Isabella – an OT 1 at Creighton, she is from a Coptic Christian background (her mother is Egyptian, her father Canadian). It was delightful to learn about her life and get a feel for her enthusiasm for her faith. She serves in a campus ministry through the religious life program at Creighton. She’s in a 2 plus 3 program, so she’s familiar with Creighton and Omaha. With all new students I give them a copy of Spiritual Friendship and ask them to think about finding a prayer partner for the year in their department or in the GCF fellowship.

Kyra – First year Physical Therapy, really mature student from a strong family. Kyra was involved in Navigators at Colorado State where she did her undergrad. She resonates with the Spiritual Friendship theme and would love to get more connected while in professional school. Pray for me as I help facilitate some discipleship partners among the new students. Our first monthly brunch is next week at our home. I’ll officially kick off our Spiritual Friendship strategy called Syntrek.

Evelyn – is a new Medical Student at Creighton. We haven’t had Med Students get involved yet with GCF. Another GFM staff member knows Evelyn and connected us when she heard she was going to be attending Creighton. Evelyn is coming to our home for lunch tomorrow! Pray for a great time of conversation and hospitality. Med school is such a demanding program we seldom meet students who have the time to get involved in our monthly brunch. Pray that Evelyn will have some margin and be able to join.

Brenden, Patrick, Katherine, Karis and Devin are all returning students at Creighton. Pray for our group to welcome new students. Pray for Devin this year as he will be working in Omaha and taking a break from his program and then re-entering next year.

Thank you so much for your prayers! I hope you have fun plans for Labor Day weekend!

The madness of a new academic year is beginning all over the country as you read this. Our staff are praying and planning, teaming-up with faculty and student leaders to increase our visibility on campus. Here in Omaha that means we’ll be guests at Creighton University’s student activity fair at the orientation for SPAHP. Two hundred and thirty eight new Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy and Pharmacy students have arrived for a week of orientation to their programs. A large fraction of those students will be here Omaha, but a significant number will be in distance programs in places like Arizona. A couple of students, myself and our faculty advisor will be at the InterVarsity table to meet new students. Pray for plentiful conversations and pray that we especially connect with Christians and spiritually open students.

SP4 Evangelism Plank

I currently serve the GFM South-Central region as a sort of cheerleader in Evangelism. SP4 is shorthand for our region’s strategic ministry plan, a four-year life-span development goal for Graduate Faculty Ministry in our 17 states. A working group I got to lead a couple years ago developed two tools we’re using to keep effective evangelism on staff members’ radar. I’m curious what your thoughts about these might be.

One tool is a simple evangelism thermometer – a basic “How important is this to me?” measurement. On a scale of 1 to 5, where would you rate yourself (without over-thinking it)? If you find yourself rarely engaging non-Christian friends in any form of spiritual conversation although you care about them, you might give yourself a 2! If you find yourself regularly helping non-Christians explore Jesus and comfortable with inviting their personal response to him, maybe you’re at a 4!

Here’s a second tool that might help you see why your temperature reading is what you think it is. It’s called the Passion and Skills 2 X 2. Skills are sooooo vital to help others explore faith, but skill isn’t the only factor. Passion, prayer, empathy, engaging the spiritual warfare of witnessing to others – is the obverse side of the coin. You can similarly have all the passion in the world, but your skills and experience might be pretty rusty or underdeveloped. Staff we give the assessment to are divided between being strong in passion and being strong in skills/experience. The assessment helps challenge ourselves to grow.

Evangelism Temperature and The Skills and Passion 2X2

Above is a link to both tools. Give them a look. Kick the tires. If you find it helpful let me know where you land – The Learner, The Lover, The Practicioner, or the Champion! Each year we have all our staff report the results of their self-assessment. We also give staff lots of ideas and support on how to grow their personal evangelism and their evangelistic leadership in their ministries. Pray for us here at the start of another year of ministry. Pray for boldness and warmth in our outreach. Pray for God to send us not only Christian students and faculty members, but open-minded non-Christian skeptics and seekers.

tim.perry@intervarsity.org

Happy Father’s Day, y’all, by the way! I am coming to you this morning from Madison, Wisconsin where I am serving as program staff for ONS (Orientation to New Staff). This year GFM welcomes 11 new staff at ONS. You’ve heard me talk about my staff recruiting needs this year. When a potential staff member winds up saying YES to InterVarsity, it’s often a not so brief on-ramp to actual employment with IV. The first steps are provision appointment and support raising. So the five staff in my small group (the pic where we’re around a table) have been making the trek to paid staff and are enough on-board to be welcomed to this year’s ONS.

So just WHO is joining InterVarsity Graduate Faculty Staff?

See if you can match the descriptions with the picture. One new staff member just finished her Masters of Divinity, she is transitioning out of her work as a medical doctor and will be doing medical faculty work in her town. Another currently works at a library but will be on GFM staff at Northwestern University in Chicago. He has a PhD in Old Testament and has done some adjunct teaching. GFM staff will be his hopefully-full-time-gig once he’s totally funded! One person in that pic (also completed his M-Div) is joining the GFM team at Harvard and will be working with three of the many grad student fellowships there. A fourth person who is currently at the University of Minnesota, teaches at a Christian Studies Center part time and will be working with students and faculty hopefully full time. She received her M-Div at a theological school in Kenya, Africa and has worked in publishing. The final person in my ONS small group is a former Pharmacy professor currently living in Laramie, WY. She’ll be doing faculty and professional student ministry at the Univ of Wyoming.

This has been a very fun week for me to be with these people! It inspires my staff recruiting to be around such incredibly gifted and well-trained people who God has led to be on staff with GFM. I WISH I could just take this small group and transport them to my area, but alas, that would be staff worker theft (pretty sure I’d get in trouble for that). I have another three days before I get back home. Pray for my travels. YES, I was able to bring a bike with me on the trip and have been enjoying some forays out into the countryside. Thanks so much for your prayers!

Three updates to tell you about. One is just a little scary. One is actually terrifying. And one is just pure feel-good joy! Which one do I tell you about first?

Let’s save the “pure feel-good joy” for last and talk about the scary stuff first! A couple posts back I mentioned that we’re nearing InterVarsity’s Fiscal Year End (FYE). Some years this one would go in the terrifying bucket, but not this year! Just a little scary. We’re a month from closing out the fiscal year and I have a pretty good shot at finishing in the black! I had pushed really hard January through March trying to find a significant chunk of new repeating support. Of the $24K I was chasing down, I managed to find $14.5K in new donations from 13 sources. While it didn’t get me all the way to my goal, it does allow me to increase my budget some starting July 1st. If the FYE donations that I’m hoping for arrive in June, I should also be able to end this year without a deficit!

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

I’m so grateful for those 13 donors. I’m so grateful for the rest of my support system who kept on giving and made increases in their giving this past year. Thank you so much for your faithfulness and generosity! What always looks impossible in July turns out to be only a little scary in June! And, my entire team with only a couple of exceptions will make it to June 30 with our budgets coming in full. “Thanks be to God for this indescribable gift.”

Actually terrifying

Cheryl and I had a chance this spring to teach Mark Manuscript to a group at One Hope Church. It had been about a decade since I last taught it but it surprised me all over again how incredible Mark’s Gospel is. Actually the thing that always delights me is the experience people have discovering Jesus and the incredible challenge of being a disciple. If you’ve ever been knee-deep in Mark (most InterVarsity types know exactly what I mean) you’ll know what a gut-check actually following Jesus turns into. Fear and Faith keep coming up again and again in their experiences. Fear and Faith. Nearly drowning in the Sea of Galilee only to wake up a man who orders the wind and waves to cease. It’s not the drowning you’re afraid of anymore! Or encountering a fully loaded demoniac with the power to tear you limb from limb, only to realize its your mild-mannered Sunday School teacher, Jesus, who orders a legion of filthy demons to their collective death! Fear is not only everywhere in Mark’s Gospel, its everywhere in life as we know it today if we’re honest. And especially if we’re honest followers trying to obey Jesus. He is still the untamed Lord of storms yet today!

More babies? What could this mean?

There’s probably nothing more incredible than realizing you are going to be a parent. Except that is… hearing that you’re going to be a grand-parent! Again! And AGAIN! Last weekend we were together with the Tennessee Perrys. We’d just moved Silas and Haleigh from Omaha to Cookeville and were heading back through Nashville to meet up with big brother Aaron and his family. “Why don’t we all get together for dinner and a game before heading back to Omaha?”

We’re all abuzz in the Perry family over our youngest and his wife expecting their first child in October. Silas and Haleigh are adjusting to looming parenthood, and a new job, and a new home-town! Silas graduated May 17th with his bachelors in Computer Engineering. We moved him and Haleigh six days later to start his full time job in Embedded Systems with Whisper Aero (same company Aaron has been employed with).

So within 5 minutes of arriving at Aaron and Savannah’s place, Cheryl opened a belated mother’s day present from Aaron. A tiny family of four little critters announcing that Aaron, Savannah and Poppy will become a family of four this coming November! Haleigh and Silas’ baby in October. Poppy’s little sib a month later!

Thanks so much for your prayers for our growing family! Thankfully we still have Phoebe and Ryan here with us in Omaha (no plans for Tim and Cheryl to move to Tennessee just yet). Please keep Silas and Haleigh in your prayers as they settle into Cookeville. Keep our beautiful daughters-in-law in your prayers as their due dates draw near. And please keep Poppy in your prayers as she welcomes a sibling and a cousin into the family this Fall!

Two weekends ago GFM Central Area staff enjoyed being together for a team retreat in St. Louis. I always forget how helpful it is to be live and together in person! One moment at the retreat captured that sense well. One of our teammates, Mark Hansard, has been on a sabbatical and hasn’t been at ANY staff gatherings since our retreat in April 2023. Mark’s been writing a book while on leave. Star-Trek and Scripture: The Final Frontier and Christian World View was the proposed title (but probably not the published title). At several points throughout the weekend Mark found a way to convey how good it was to be back with his people (the staff team). “I’ve felt so isolated and cut off from the rest of the world while working on this book. You can’t believe how good it feels to be face to face with the team again! I love being on this team!” No kidding! Direct quotes from Mark. And on top of that, it really was fun for the rest of us having Mark back!

So Saturday night we popped bags of Orville Redenbacher, had Mark show us a Star Trek episode and take us through one of the chapters of his book. IF you are super curious about things Trek-worldly, we watched Children of the Comet, season 1, epsode 2 of Strange New Worlds and we talked about predestination and free will! In fact the whole weekend was designed to have our team bring their best gifts and lead something. Tom and Chad (with Josh on viola) lead prayer and worship times modeled after their weekly faculty/student prayer gatherings at Iowa State. Ben and Jake led us in scripture around our theme: Growing Grapes and Tending Vineyards (John 15 and Mark 12). George brought us Wash-U faculty member John Hendrix as a Saturday afternoon guest. We enjoyed hearing his story, talking about his vision for faculty ministry and asking him questions.

Pray for our Vineyard Tending!

We spent about half a day on Saturday in scripture tearing up manuscripts with colored pencils and highlighters. As a team of more seasoned staff we take to even familiar scriptures with tireless joy (no I am not exaggerating). John 15 was very familiar. A deep dive served to tighten our grip on the very basics of spiritual formation. Building a rewarding life of ministry with students and faculty is NEVER less than being a well-nourished, self-feeding Christ follower who influences others to be the same way.

Our Mark 12 study took off from there. If we can grow grapes and lead others to do so, the next thing is making and tending vineyards. The Son of the Vineyard like no other parable takes us to the heart of Jesus’ religious conflict narratives. Jesus drew on the Song of the Vineyard from Isaiah 5 to not only retell Israel’s history, but also foreshadow his coming passion. The Pharisees and teachers of the law knew Jesus told this parable against them! The spiritual leaders of God’s people were the tenants the owner put in charge of his vineyard. When the owner sent his son to collect some of the produce, the tenants rejected him, killed him and cast him out of the vineyard thinking they’d now do what they wanted as if they were the owners!

What do our vineyards look like in GFM?

My job as an Area Director is to lead my team in campus ministry and serve them administratively to help them stay funded and supported. Mark 12 and Isaiah 5 have gotten me thinking and praying with more intensity. If we look at our fellowships as expressions of the kingdom of God on our campuses, how healthy, fruitful and thriving are they? It takes a lot of work to set up a vineyard. Just like it takes a lot of effort to build witnessing communities in our universities. The maddening thing about vineyards is that they can be so vulnerable to countless problems. Isaiah’s Vineyard Song is a very sad song! After so much planning, cultivating, watching, waiting and protecting, the vineyard of the Lord produced abundant crops of BAD TASTING GRAPES!

Pray for the work of InterVarsity GFM on campuses in my area. Pray for my team as they cultivate the life of the kingdom of Jesus in their communities. On many of our campuses our groups are small and struggling (if I could be very honest with you). Not discounting the value of the lives we are reaching, I sense we are reaching far fewer faculty and graduate students than we have potential for. Each year in April and May staff tabulate and evaluate the ministry year we’re now wrapping up. Pray for us to have our vision refreshed. Pray for us to look over our vineyards and spot the places were our work can be more effective and impactful. Pray for God to give us wisdom and patience as we network to find more Christians in graduate and professional programs. Ask God to connect us with more Christian faculty. Pray for our witness on campus which at the moment seems distracted and weak. Pray for my leadership and team-work with staff – that God would use me to encourage and sharpen staff, helping them focus their gifts and strengths for effective group building.

Thank you for your friendship and prayers! Thank you for praying for me and my team. Thank you for your financial support.

“I will sing for the one I love a song about his vineyard: My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it… ” Isaiah 5: 1-2

See anyone you recognize in this picture? Catch the previous post for the details, but Cheryl and I spent a fun weekend on the campus of UT Austin. The celebration dinner was really long…and really good! People had written letters of affirmation, remembrance and blessing for each of the 19 InterVarsity staff members celebrating our work anniversaries. President Tom Lin, the Executive Leadership Team and the Board collected notes and letters, compiled them into a booklet and read some of them to the whole group there. I heard from my first staff member in IV (1982), a classmate from our U of I student days who joined us on staff in the early 90s, a current pastor of one of our supporting churches here in Omaha, and two of our former students from Wesleyan days.

InterVarsity, thank you for the thoughtful gift this is for staff. Thank you for the recognition and affirmation. Thank you for blessing Cheryl and I for 25 years of serving staff, faculty and students (spread out over more than 3 decades). PBR readers and ministry partners – thank you for keeping us refreshed and able do this great work for these many years.