For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the third week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.
In our last post of this series, we talked about the concept of discipleship and what it means to us at Impact Campus Ministries. I told the story about how we came up with the “in-house” definition of imitating a mentor who imitates Jesus. We expected this imitating would require more than just a one-hour-a-week spiritual check-up over coffee. Instead, we would need to be investing our lives into one another, living life together, and mimicking the walks of our mentors.
So what is it, exactly, that we would want them to imitate?
At the end of the post, I suggested that ICM has been, for years, preparing the soil of this work. Our mission statement has been to pursue, model, and teach intimacy with Christ in the context of Christian community on the American university campus. I believe this statement provides a fantastic roadmap to the process of discipleship and the things we would want our disciples to imitate. So I want to take a look at the first of these words: PURSUE.
ICM’s founder, Dean Trune, instilled within our organization decades ago the belief that true success is a supernatural byproduct of our passion for God. If we focus on pursuing Him and loving Him with all of our heart, soul, and might, He will produce the fruit in our lives that He wants to bear in the places and ways He wants to bear it. As Jesus taught us in John 15, “Apart from me, you can do nothing.”
For us, that means discipleship begins with our pursuit of God. We create intentional space to pursue Him, commune with Him, and be changed by Him. This creates the outpouring work to impact other people — particularly college students. While this sounds incredibly subjective and mystical on paper, it’s actually incredibly objective and practical in practice. In 2013, I wrote a blog titled “Creating a Space”:
Which leads me to my reflection: I believe the construction of the Tabernacle models an unspoken promise that God has made to His people. If you will create a space in your life for God, He will fill it. The question is, will you create a space?
What would have happened if the Israelites never created the Tabernacle? The fascinating thing is that we run around like chickens with our heads cut off, filling our lives with busyness, and then we are flabbergasted that God doesn’t interrupt our days with His undeniable presence.
If we won’t create a space, why should we expect God to fill it?
But if you do create the space, God will fill it.
He may not fill it the way you want or expect, but if you will create a space in your life — a discipline, an hour of listening, a sabbath rest, a location of retreat — I believe God will fill it.
Yes, it is entirely possible that our pursuit of God can become mechanical, lifeless, legalistic, and dispassioned. But so can everything else we do. The heart of ICM is to be people who intentionally and passionately create a space for God where we are pursuing Him and wanting to know His heart so we can give that, in wisdom, to our students.
And so we read the Bible; we don’t just read it to learn, but we listen for God’s heart and His voice speaking to us. We journal in order to have an objective way to hear from Him. We study the Bible to learn more about its context and be able to interpret it better each day. We memorize Text each week, believing that if we put God’s Word in us, it will not return void.
We fast and pray. We strive to become better and better at praying. We want to intercede on behalf of others and look inwardly, offering prayers of humility, confession, and repentance. We create space for personal worship. We pursue spaces of sabbath, solitude, and silence. For most of us, these pursuits started small and grew over time — as with our passion for God.
But this is our craft at ICM. We want to be experts in spiritual formation. We want to be well aquatinted with the faithful pursuit of knowing God. We want to understand and experience true Bible study and meditation. If anyone has questions about fasting or prayer journaling, we want the world of campus ministry to be able to point toward us (among many others). For us, the daily pursuit of God is not something we do so we can get on to the “important work” of ministry; for us, it is the important work of ministry.
It’s important because it is the most foundational part of discipleship and the foremost thing that we would want imitated. Of course, it can only be imitated if it can be observed. So if we simply pursue God by ourselves, on our own, very little discipleship is going to happen.
This is where the idea of MODEL shows up.
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