Jesus tells us in Matthew 28 to make disciples. We practice that well through church and ministry activity but often times we forget the one embedded assumption in the text. That assumption by Jesus is that we are to make disciples of non-Christ followers. We are to follow Christ as He sought to “seek and to save the lost.” So how are you doing with our Lord’s Great Commission?
By this time in the semester your students are busy…very busy with papers, quizzes, tests, and work. In addition, you are probably feeling the demands of coordinating Bible study groups, preparing weekly talks, giving tons of personal council, meeting with leadership teams, and doing just about everything except regular engagement of students with the gospel. Think about that. The life-changing gospel of Christ is what we are about. So, can I encourage you to revisit your work in light of the Great Commission? If so, like a syllabus to keep you on track, here are five key ways to keep the Great Commission “GREAT” in your ministry.
Plan to evangelize.
- Schedule times for students to share their faith and chase the details. Lay out specific methods of engagement. Plan to lead them in it as you create open forums, Soularium encounters, prayer corners, etc.
- You will need to do some training. Whether it’s spiritual laws or through personal story, students need training in the elements of the gospel and how to present it relationally. Don’t assume they know…they don’t.
- Seek out specific people to help and hold you and your ministry accountable to the Great Commission on your campus. Ask a pastor to help in the training and to coach students. (As a sidebar, getting a pastor involved will really help in your church relationships).
- Hold weekly meetings about how you are fulfilling your evangelism plan.
- Seek to make the gospel part of your ministry DNA. Work at it so that you “feel” the lostness on your campus. You need to let this sink into you as a leader, so ride the campus shuttle for an hour each week and just sit and think about the riders who need Jesus.
- Blog, talk, and highlight it in your meetings and don’t forget using good PR. You cannot overdo this. Make signs and posters about the gospel, put a BIG 0 on a wall until someone trusts in Christ and have students give open testimonies about their relationship to the gospel.
- Plan to use an evangelistic testimony site like www.whycard.net to keep conversations going. Ask non-Christians to view the site and meet up to discuss it. Too many good spiritual discussions end after one encounter.
- Shift your remaining budget to make your plan work. You spend tens of thousands of dollars on overseas missions so why wouldn’t you do the same for the thousands of lost students on your campus?
Plan for times of prayer.
- Have a weekly time of prayer with your students to reach their friends and campus for Christ. Ask them to pray daily for specific students and groups of students.
- Make sure your students know YOU are praying for the opportunity to lead a student to Christ. YOU set the pace, after all, you’re the leader.
- Secure a prayer board where students can post about their prayers.
Plan to leverage your evangelistic activity.
- Use it to advance your projects, events, and church relationships. It’s exciting to hear stories about gospel presentations.
- Look to develop your students. Many, and perhaps most, cannot articulate the gospel well so use this to strengthen their faith. Teach them about the Trinity, holiness, integrity of the Scriptures, etc.
- Be certain to specify how you will do follow-up and make disciples.
- With those who are or have fallen away.
- With those who are willing to continue the conversation.
- With those who want another look at Christ later in the semester.
- With those who convert and need to secure their faith.
Plan to review, redo, and reset your methods, activity, and plans.
- Establish a regular review process asking for feedback and insight. Evaluating the process is as important as physical results. Gauging your ministry process is a much more effective means of measurement than decisions, baptisms, meeting attendance, etc.
- Keep records of your experiences. This includes stories and testimonials. It’s important for the next leaders to be reminded of the importance of keeping track of their activity on reaching students for Christ.
- Track your process and numbers. As mentioned, process is important but numbers can be used to evaluate activity too. If non-Christian students don’t show up at certain events or activity, you need to acknowledge it and change the plan. If God does not seem to have his hand on an activity, then acknowledge it and stop doing it.
Celebrate your evangelistic efforts.
- Every effort has value and you need to rejoice that it took place. Cleaning up from an activity is tiring but not when you are celebrating.
- Make sure everyone knows when you have seen gospel decisions or positive responses to your efforts. Record it in some manner. Change the 0 on the wall to 1.
- Here is a weird but good idea—celebrate failure. Following Google’s admission that the Wave was a failure, they celebrated their efforts. Attempting great things for God is worth celebrating. Get some cake!
Some of the 5 points discussed above may help you in your collegiate outreach. Because most college ministries have much in common, you may want to help others by commenting about 2-3 outreach matters that stand out to you? What would you like to add?
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Mark Lydecker is a former pastor, missionary, and campus minister and is now a Collegiate Evangelism Coordinator with the North American Mission Board in Alpharetta, GA. You can reach Mark at mlydecker@namb.net
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25 thoughts on “Revisiting The Great Commission On Campus”
I think the follow-up is so important. Often, we just brush off students that didn’t make a decision that day. However, we have seen students continue the conversation even the next year when they were dealing with tough times in their lives.
Brooks, you nailed one major issue in your comment. We think to ‘immediate’. A post-modern world needs to journey, think, process, and dream about what it means to be a Christian. Perhaps they have already engaged and you are the final person they converse with before making a decision for Christ but that does not happen too often. The key issue is to keep engaging and anticipate what God might do in a persons life.
Great post, Mark. I need to print this out as a reminder and share it with my students. This week our meeting is a worship night focusing on lostness, we will be starting with unreached people groups in the world and narrowing the focus to our campus. You said to shift budget money to evangelistic endeavors. What have you seen as some of the best bang for your buck money usage that focused on evangelism?
Ty, I think the key in budgeting would be to keep expenses focused on people. I may be wrong but I think we put too much money toward events/programming rather than what is effective for longterm life-change. If evangelism is part of our DNA then budget will stay probably balanced.
Mark, What a great post! you have laid out a reproducible strategy that any campus minister could implement and see God work through that. Keep it coming!
so true that students don’t ‘just know’ the gospel well enough to share it effectively. good point. amazing what a little bit of training will do for their confidence and effectivness in sharing with friends as well as in spontaneous conversations.
Mark, I want to first say that this blog was so helpful and challenging. You are a role model of mine and I thank you for your desire to see lost college students come to the faith and training collegiate ministers like myself in doing so also.
I was leading my weekly men’s small group 2 weeks ago and we were all discussing the last chapter of a book that we were going through and towards the end of the discussion I asked the group of 15 guys the question… “Why do you believe…? Why do you call yourself a Christian?” I was overwhelmed by the lack of responses that I got. Silence. No one was confident in why they believe. I knew that it is because I haven’t been intentionally training them on the basic virtues of faith, how to share that with a non believer, and the urgency of doing so.
The collegiate ministry that I have been leading for 4 years, I have been very successful at creating a sense of community with a brotherly love. I have been successful at serving the community with projects. I have been successful with throwing epic gatherings with 1000 people. I have been successful with having a weekly gathering of 50+ people attending. I have been successful with raising up great worship bands. I have been successful with preaching sermons that are Gospel based and calling for repentance…
I have failed to equip my leaders in a way for making disciples.
I have failed to train everyone how to share their faith.
I have failed to prompt the urgency of sharing their faith.
Im done loving people to hell.
Evangelism. Discipleship. Community. Service. Is now our identity.
I got back from a conference where I sat under your classes for a couple days, Mark, and I even got the opportunity to evangelize at the beach with you. This experience, where you shared a lot with what this blog speaks of, challenged me, trained me, and sent me equipped to make changes.
I personally have lead 3 people to the Lord since and began discipleship meetings with students almost instantly. We got to be serious about Evangelism and Discipleship on college campuses especially because these young adults are in a season of their life where they are open to making huge life directing changes. Let us be guiding and training them in the most import decision of their life and that is to being a disciple of Christ.
Be blessed to be a blessing,
http://www.facebook.com/phillip.sanchez
Bornagain88ska@gmail.com
Christian Challenge Collegiate Minister at EMCC Avondale Arizona
Phillip, did you ever think about how many angels are jumping up and down because of you and your ministry:) Keep us informed of how the Lord continues to open hearts there in AZ!
Mark,
Thanks for your continued focus on Evangelism. To many ministries today forget that discipleship starts with evangelism. I appreciate your thoughts on celebrating the process, not just the results. Google’s celebrations of the multi -million dollar failure is exactly what we need to do when it comes to training our students in evangelism. We must celebrate both the process and the results.
I have kicked off a specific time each week that our students join together to share the Gospel. Coming together and celebrating this time will be beneficial for our students to begin the process of being life long true disciple makers.
Good thought Josh, let me know the next time you go out and I will order you a pizza delivery! I am serious. Deal?
Mark, good to be with you today! And great thoughts here. I especially like that you started with the reminder to plan to evangelize. We plan so many other things: worship gatherings, small group bible studies, retreats, parties, mission trips. Yet, we don’t plan to evangelize…
Mark thanks for the insight. Primarily I am struck with a remembrance of my past. In the past I failed to plan. In doing so opportunities flew by. Intentionality is key for me.
The second aspect I take from this is to be intentional about things that have Eternity at stake. I have known and been a part of several intentional ministries. Intentionality must be Gospel driven.
I like to keep it fresh. The 0 on the wall is a cool idea.
It’s all about where your priorities are in campus ministry. Especially this time of year, it is so easy to get caught up in all the “fellowship” activities that we start to depreciate the evangelism activities (without even realizing it). I agree with you Mark that we need to place evangelism within our DNA so it becomes impossible to devalue the importance of evangelism throughout a hectic semester. Thanks for the encouragement!
I like how you point out that you have to train students to do Evangelism. Some of us who have been doing Evangelism for years forget how intimidating it is for some to do. The idea of doing evangelism is also so against what our culture tells us to do(at least in San Francisco). We also can’t expect to see instant results and we need to share that with our students.
Great article Mark!. During the days at the BCM, u taught us how to do evangelism. Planning, Preparing & Praying are very important for evangelism. Today i carry a sheet of 90 names(international students) with me, out of the 90, by the LORD’s mercy, i was able to share Christ to 80 of them and some in the 80 have become Christians. Every month i make sure i connect with these 90 either through phone, email or facebook. God is opening their hearts, even last month God opened the heart of an international student after 3 years.
Sharing the Gospel & making disciples should be part of our ministry DNA & daily life.
Silbi, carrying a prayer list is fantastic. What compassion you have to see God move in lives! Thanks for sharing that and I think I too may begin carrying a list. Great insight.
Wow Mark, this is an amazing post. It is so easy to become engulfed in the day to day workings of campus ministry. Thank you for the reminder of what’s most important. The plan you laid out here is spot on!! It is simple, efficient, and focused. Thanks for the challenge!! You’ve been a blessing to campus ministries all over the country and I want you to know how much we appreciate you!!
I like how you lay out a plan, it looks to be very helpful. I wanted to add that todays student are not responding to yesterdays methods of evangelism. Their view of “truth” is different, and absolute truth they question. They don’t want to be preached at, or told what they must believe. The type of evangelism that works today is more relational. Making friends, excepting them right where they are, and having conversations in a non-threatening way are the methods of today. Conversational Evangelism
Mark,
Great article. We need to tell people about Jesus. Plain and simple. How we get it done (short of sin) doesn’t matter. However, just like you said we need to plan it, 99% of the students I know will not do it if there is not a plan to do it. This is a great resource.
Great post!!! It’s true that you get what you plan and celebrate. This semester we have seen alot of fruit with 45 people deciding to make Jesus savior and Lord! One tool we have used that has been revolutionary for us is the gospel appointment. It is simply a one-on-one meeting we try and intentionally set up with everyone who comes to our ministry events. One student has personally lead 3 others to Christ and is meeting with each one! It works! The harvest is plentiful. This tool liberates people to be bold but in a caring relational way. For more info on how to do gospel appointments email me at Paul@ChallengeCSUC.com Thanks for the great post!
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