Do You Encourage Students to Wrestle With God & Scripture?
It may seem like a dumb question, but I wonder… Do we really encourage our students to wrestle with their understanding […]
Tag: struggle
College Years as Desert Experience [?]
With all of the transition, struggle, change and formation that takes place during the college years, I wonder how our approach to […]
Spiritual Mentoring | A Resource for Equipping the Saints
Have you ever wondered how you might multiply the efforts of your ministry on campus? I have.
And after 6 years of hard work on the same campus I heard a colleague express something that unlocked a part of the mystery for me in this area…
His statement was something to the effects of:
Student after student, when asked “what made your experience at BU so significant?,” shared a rendition of the same answer: it was the meaningful relationships that they formed.
And almost to a person, they would identify a faculty or staff person who had taken some intentional time to be with them — to be a listener, someone who asked good questions, an encourager, someone who challenged or pushed them, a shoulder to cry on, a mentor, a teacher of life — a friend.
Avoiding the Epic #FAIL in Ministry
Failure.
It’s probably one of the things we fear the most as ministry leaders.
But from where I stand, I think there are few things that would constitute true failure in ministry…
The abuse of leadership — most certainly.
Not tending to our own spiritual needs, and letting our cup run dry, such that we render ourselves ineffective would be another.
But I think much of what we do, and are called to be about, will include little failures here and there.
Consider Something Just for Sophomores
As we dive into a new year of ministry, and attempt to draw in the large class of incoming first-year students, […]
Claim Your Baggage
Ready or not… a new year of ministry has begun (or will soon begin).
And the reality is that some of us… are not ready.
Many more of us find ourselves much less ready than we’d like to be.
Some of us find ourselves in a place of spiritual, emotional or mental distress.
We don’t feel ready for a new year.
Not for the return of students, the start of classes or the work of serving as pastor to a rapidly moving community.
The Invisible Pastor
Do people ever ask you about what you do? And you can tell from the way they ask the question, or […]
The Demise of (College) Guys?
A former female student of mine recently shared this TED talk on Facebook with the comment, “this sucks!”
I agree.
I’m just becoming familiar with TED talks, so this video may have already “made the rounds,” but if you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to watch it (it’s under 5 minutes in length) and then share your thoughts about how we might better assist the guys on our campus.
Campus Mapping || A More Strategic Approach to Ministry on Campus
While at a conference last summer I had the chance to sit in on a session led by Creighton Alexander, Campus Pastor at the University of Alabama Wesley Foundation, where he talked about coming up with a strategy for ministry on campus.
He shared a lot of good stuff, but there was one idea in particular that seemed to jump out at me — and has stuck with me ever since — and it’s the idea of “mapping our campus.”
There’s a good chance that many of you already do this — in fact, we all do to a certain extent because we all have “strategic relationships” across campus (and if we don’t, we should!) — but Creighton’s idea, while simple, was profound to me.
The Messianic Virus
Is it just me, or does it often feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all of the things that we want (or need) to do?
As pastors we can find ourselves sought out for a variety of reasons.
And we can give ourselves to a lot of different ministry-related tasks and to-do’s.
Some of this happens for good reasons, some for the wrong reasons and some due to no decision of our own.
But I find myself wondering how frequently many of us get sidetracked, or even sidelined, by giving too much of our time and attention to the wrong things.