2012-2013 has been kicked off!

It's true.

The year has begun.

The students are back.  They are back to school for another great year of big enrollments.  They are back in church, leaving us with 'standing-room-only' situations.  They are back to their relationships and friendships.  They are back in the bible studies and CARE Groups around the Palouse.  They are back and it is great to have them.

Two weeks ago, we moved in more freshmen who are beginning their first year at both universities.  The days were full of fun conversations, great introductions, (a few awkward moments) and lots of boxes carried up lots of stairs.  Last week, classes started and many of these students are now panicking as they get use to the new expectations and schedules.  Pray for them -- many are cracking under the stress; they will recover (they always do), but its tough for them to be in the moment.

We also had our typical kickoff events.  We set up our annual booths and handed out more Ramen Noodles in order to promote our organization.  We seem to be getting better at what we do and most of the adjustments we made from last year feel like they have paid off for us.  We invited students to our annual cookouts and had even better turnouts this year.  We had a great time eating food, playing volleyball, challenging others to "cornhole" and just talking around the picnic tables.

We also had a great baptism service where we saw 22 people get baptized from Real Life on the Palouse.  Some of those people were college students and it was a great night of celebration and story-telling.

Just last week we had our official College CARE Group Kick-Off at Real Life and invited as many college students as possible to sign up for CARE Groups and make community a priority for the upcoming year.  We had more than 100 sign up for new groups over the last two weeks.  We bless God for that.  

All in all, we've had a great start to the year and we're looking forward to the fruit that God wants to bear with all of these opportunities.  Pray that the students would follow through on their initial promptings to take part in Christian community -- this will be the engine that God will use in a big way to bless and shape their year!

Still coming!

I always feel bad when I don't update my blog at least once every other week.  This transition into the school is always an absolutely CRAZY one.  So much goes on in such a short time, let alone that this year we had a lot of family transition as well.  It compounded the craziness!

But not to fear, there are updates coming.  I hope to get a family update up next week and then soon you should see an update on the following items:

KICKOFF EVENTS - Move-Ins, organizational fairs, CARE Groups, Cookouts...
OPENING OF THE BEMA HOUSE - this has been nuts...
RETURN OF BEMA GROUPS - Our studies started this week!
INTERNSHIPS - How's the experience with extra staff?

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  When I hit that light, I will start writing, that's my promise to you.  :)

Summer Update coming soon... but for now...

I know, I know.  He's such a controversial figure.  We can discuss false teaching, good scholarship, and exegesis later.  I still think Rob is one of the greatest thinkers and communicators of our day.  I find his words inspiring and God continues to use them to give life to my own thoughts.  

I thought this interview was fantastic:

Watch live streaming video from robbell at livestream.com

Mid-Summer Update

Well, we are halfway through the summer and I thought it would be incredibly timely to update you on how our summer is going.  We left the Palouse up north with two goals in mind for this summer season of 2012.  First, we wanted to make sure that we took time to say thank you to all of our supporters this last year.  Second, we needed to raise funds for the team ministry and all that God is doing for next year.  I’ve been calling the two goals the “THANK YOU” and the “PLEASE”.

THE THANK YOU.   This has been – by far – the favorite part of our summer.  We have loved getting back “home” and seeing all of the faces that we know and love.  It is very fulfilling to let them all know how much they mean to us and what God is doing through their generosity in our ministry.

THE PLEASE.  This part of our plan has been struggling this year.  Part of that struggle is that it is a whole lot easier for me to schedule “thank you’s” than it is to schedule “please’s”.  The other reasons come down to just a barrage of economical realities, summer schedules, and unexpected responses.  We currently are sitting around 20% of our summer goal and need to hit it hard in the coming weeks.  If you’ve ever thought about supporting our ministry, now is a perfect time to consider doing so.  We could use your help as a financial partner and God is doing some BIG stuff in our ministry.  Just contact me if you’d like to talk about the possibility of helping us out.

There will be some other really big things to celebrate at the end of the summer.  For now, I’m hoping to let some of the details settle and have a good sense of where we are at coming out of the summer before I share some of that, but I will say this: IT IS EXICITING!!  God is doing some awesome stuff with the future of BEMA Discipleship and I can’t wait to tell you more!

If you would, be praying for our support-raising this summer, for our house, and for God’s continued direction, guidance and blessing.  And again, thank you to all of you who interact with our ministry on so many levels!

Is Your Campus Ministry a Parasite?

Well, we just finished our week-long, end-of-the-year team retreat to look back over the year, evaluate what was done, and celebrate what God did in our ministry before we head off to fundraise for next year.  It was a great time of planning as well for the year that lies ahead and between the trip to a hot springs, enjoying the local cuisine, and dreaming really big about the years to come, I had an interesting thought that is still bugging me a few days later.

One of the things that we talked about and celebrated was the partnership that our team enjoys with a local church on the Palouse.  It’s a relationship that truly benefits both parties in incredible ways and without exaggerating or ignoring the inherent flaws, I can say that the partnership embodies everything that I could imagine in a “para-church / local church” partnership.  It’s a brilliant relationship.

There are many reasons why we enjoy the successful partnership that we do as a team here.  One of those reasons is because our team leader has partnered with this budding church-plant since day one.  We didn’t have to figure out how to “enter” the relationship without being seen as a threat.  The other reason is because we work hard to help make the local church better and be a great asset to their team, rather than simply maneuver into position to take – without giving. 

The word I’ve always used for this relationship is “symbiotic”.  It immediately conjures up images from high school biology class with the birds that live atop the rhino.  They coexist within the same world, each benefiting from the other.  The birds eat the insects that they find on the rhino and the rhino enjoys the free, cleansing presence of the birds. 

However, I also remember more of the info that I received that day in biology class.  There is mutualistic symbiosis (like the one I described above; both parties benefit from each other).  Then there is commensalistic symbiosis, where the one party lives with and benefits from the presences of the other, while neither hurting nor benefiting the host (sea cucumbers are the typical example).  And, of course, there is the parasite, which harms the host by surviving at the host’s expense.

My mind drifted this last week from the local church partnership to my own team that I work with in campus ministry.  I have, one of those “type-A”, driver-like personalities that plows ahead into the “vision that God gave me for the ministry”.  I work hard to not harm my team in any way, but I became convicted that my relationship with my team is much more commensalistic than it is mutualistic.  I don’t want it to be like that. 

Now, my team leader did a great job trying to convince me that I add more to the team than I give myself credit for, which may be true, but I was still convicted that I wanted to be a more beneficial presence to those around me.

What about you?  What kind of partnerships – if any – do you have with your ministry?

One of the hard truths I’ve noticed about those who raise their own support to be in the ministry (both as a full-time staff member of a church and as a support-based missionary myself), is that many of us get into the ministry we’re in because we’re just fed up with “working in the church”.  We pronounce the church broken and march off into the sunset to restore the Kingdom of God.

God will use this willingness to prophetically pursue His Project in the world.  He will.  And it will be good.

But while that’s happening, I fear that many times we may lose a golden opportunity to help bring healing and “rightness” back to the church we left – wounded, broken, and in need of repair.  If we’re not careful, we can easily become a commensalistic partner at best – or a parasite at worst.

I’m not here to suggest that the church is the hope of the world.  It most certainly is not.  God, as seen through Jesus, always has been and always will be that great Hope.

But something tells me He’s probably not planning on working through a spiritual tapeworm.

Surprises, Lessons & Blessings

Not too long ago, Impact’s president, Bill Westfall, asked me to write up a little reflection on the last year.  What were some of the things that I learned after I looked back over my time in 2011-2012?  I thought I would share some of those reflections with you.

·      There are a lot more students out there that care about Jesus than I anticipated.

·      God is doing something with the world and the world of campus ministry; yet, God is also doing something unique on each and every campus.  Two campuses in the exact same region, less then 7 miles apart – completely different.

·      Partnerships with the local church are WAY more valuable than I anticipated.

·      The more personal and intimate you can be with student interaction, the more depth and meaning there will be in your ministry; inversely, the more organizational and “flashy” you are, the more shallow and disrespected your ministry will be.

·      Fundraising is not the greatest part of my job – but it’s also not nearly as bad as I thought it would be; God uses it as a blessing in so many ways.

·      Impact Campus Ministries has the greatest vision statement.

o   “To pursue, model, and teach intimacy with God within Christian community on the university campus.”

·      Impact Campus Ministries is at our best when we pursue that vision statement.

·      I still have a lot in learn in the realm of teamwork and relational investment.

·      God has done some incredible things in my life over the last decade – praise Him.

·      When I function as God designed me to function, I am fulfilled, others around me are blessed, and God bears fruit in ministry.

·      I can be easily distracted AWAY FROM my reckless pursuit of intimacy with God with the BUSYNESS of pursuing God through my ministry.

·      Students bring me great joy – not just college students, but those students that allow me to invest in their lives.  They are my fuel.

Year-at-a-Glance

If you received our latest newsletter, than this blog post will be a tad redundant, but it just felt like I needed to post a summary of our first year on campus on our blog.  I will be posting the second half of our newsletter next week.
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It’s over.  Our first school year on the University of Idaho and Washington State went by like a blur and we’re still trying to catch our breath.  While we do so, we wanted to capture the experience in a nutshell and look ahead to the fall…

As you’ve read in our earlier publications and blog posts, God has truly blessed the ministry of Impact here on the Palouse.  From the partnership with the local church to the steady involvement of college students, things have gone really, really well.

Probably the toughest thing about this last year has been our family’s’ living situation.  After we could not sell our house, we were forced to live apart for this school year.  Becky and the kids lived in Montana with her family while Marty lived with a WSU student in Pullman.  At the time, we just didn’t feel like God was leading us to put the home up for rent.   Well, the house still hasn’t sold, but our time living apart is over.  We will be together throughout the summer in Twin Falls and we have signed a lease on a duplex for next school year.  We pray for our home to sell or rent in the next couple months in order to keep us out the danger of foreclosure.  We rejoice in a God that gave us everything we needed to do what we needed to do to follow His call and remain close as a family.

 

We have approved two interns who are spending their summer fundraising for their full-time salaries next year with Impact.  Megan Palmer and Nathan Lanting are two WSU graduates that love the Lord deeply and we are excited to work with them.  God also opened doors to sign a lease on another unit in the same complex as our family’s duplex.  We already have four students who will be living in the new “BEMA House” and pursuing intentional discipleship.  All of these open doors will require some additional funding – but we’re excited to watch God provide for what He’s doing in our ministry!