Student Ministry Must Change or Die! (PART 2)

Continuing from my last blog, I want to finish speaking on the process of “Moving from an ATTRACTIONAL driven student ministry to a MISSIONAL driven student ministry”. Since this is a topic very dear to my heart, as well as a touchy subject, I’ll try my best to be to the point in my explanation. Feel free to email or FaceBook me for personal dialogue. There was an overwhelming response to PART 1.


chriswhite@mobilizingstudents.com

I have broken this part into 3 sections which describe the process a person goes through when they come to faith in Christ and are discipled correctly. The Call, the Command, and the Commission. I want to use this process to help us in structuring a Missional Student Ministry.

1. THE CALL (Mt. 4:19, NIV)
“Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.”

JESUS IS ALWAYS THE INITIATOR IN SALVATION - He always seeks us. We don’t seek him. He came to earth to reach us, we didn’t beg him to come down & help us. Jesus said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit.” (John 15:16) We too should follow His example and go after the lost, rather than begging them to come to our stuff. That’s like going fishing and begging the fish to jump into the boat. Ridiculous! You just put the bait where the fish are...in the water. Pretty simple when you think about it. So we too must take the Gospel into dark places by training our students to share their faith with their friends...”where their friends are”. That leads us to the school campus.

As a student pastor, you can’t say you’re serious about reaching students unless you are heavily invested on your local area campuses, training your students how to reach their friends through clubs, personal evangelism, etc......BECAUSE THAT’S WHERE THE STUDENTS ARE!! Not all students will go to church, but all students go to school. So, the real question for us student pastors is...will you continue to be a keeper of the aquarium, or transition to a fisher of men? Because ultimately we teach by what we do, not what we say.

If we don’t teach students how to fish where they are, then not only are we not discipling them to become more like Christ (who said He would make them fishers of men), but we are crippling them spiritually by training them to become event junkies. This is unbiblical, unsustainable, and not reproducible by students. It should be no surprise to us that when our students graduate high school and leave our ministries for college, they tend to gravitate to the best event planners on their new campus...the Frat/Sorority House! (Free Pizza & Beer, Loud music, crazy games, and even co-ed lock-ins with JELL-O skits.....sound familiar? Except for the beer)

Points to Consider on the Call:
a. The “call is personal. Every believer is called to follow Christ. Our jobs, roles, tasks or careers may change over our lifetime, but our call never does. We are always called to follow, and that call is to a person....JESUS.

b. It’s the role of the Holy Spirit to draw the lost (John 6:44), not our events or free stuff. Let’s just take the Gospel to the lost, and let the Holy Spirit do the drawing through the gospel. We’ll be amazed at the results.

c. If the end result of following Jesus is that He will make us fishers of men, then why aren’t our ministries structured to train students how to fish? It’s time to change.


2. THE COMMAND (Mt. 22:36-40)
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

You’ve heard my heart on this for years. When we come to faith in Christ, we are called to deny ourselves daily and follow Him. The Great Commandment tells us HOW to follow. Loving God with all our heart is what we call worship. It’s our vertical pursuit of Him. Loving others as ourselves comes from the overflow of the first command of worship, resulting in loving our neighbor as ourselves. This is missions. When we follow Christ (our worship), we love others (our missions). Our worship fuels our missions. This commandment summed up the original Ten Commandments because the first 4 are vertical (love God/worship), and the last 6 are horizontal (love others/missions). This was the bomb God dropped on me as a student pastor that led me to begin Mobilizing Students and to begin leading worship in 2001. I am forever changed.

Points to Consider on the Command:
a. If effective evangelism or missions is lacking in our ministries, it’s evidence that our worship is not vertical but has turned horizontal, which becomes idolatry. When worship is vertical, we are fueled toward missions.

b. Missions is the heart of God. Christ was the greatest missionary ever. He left heaven, came to a foreign land, took on flesh, walked among a people who despised & rejected him, shared Truth, and they persecuted Him by nailing Him to a cross. He has modeled missions for us, and says that if we are following him, we will do the same...fish for the lost!

c. Loving others is not a duty. It becomes a love when it’s out of the overflow of our Christ worship. It becomes spiritually natural to give our lives away...just like Jesus did.

3. THE COMMISSION (Mt. 28:18-20, NIV)
"Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

At the end of discipling His 12 chosen followers, Jesus gave them this commission. Although the language of the Great Commission is very familiar to us, revisiting the true meaning of the commission is helpful ...

ALL AUTHORITY
He possesses ALL authority, and if He lives in us, His authority is in us. Therefore, we are empowered with Kingdom authority to penetrate dark places with the Gospel.

THEREFORE GO
The action verb is to “GO”, not come and hear. We’ve reversed the great commission over the last 100 years in our evangelism efforts without even knowing it in our current models. We are to GO! We should train OUR disciples (students) the same way...to GO. Remember, a football coach never steps on the field, he just runs practice and then sends the team out on the field to play the game. Student pastors are head coaches who are to equip the players for works of service.

MAKE DISCIPLES
He says MAKE disciples, not converts. Our mode of stadium/event evangelism may produce converts, but not disciples. Disciples are harder to make in our current ministry structures because we’re built for events. Discipleship can’t happen in an hour on Sunday. It just doesn’t. It requires life on life investment, but once it starts reproducing, it’s exponential.

ALL NATIONS
That’s international missions. The best way to jump-start your students to live missionally in your local area is to expose them to global missions encounters worldwide. Mission trips creates a controlled crisis where students are out of their comfort zones, requiring them to depend on Christ for everything. Our 6-12th graders went overseas constantly and were never the same. Neither was I. If you’re not engaging your students in global missions but want to, let me know. We can make that a no-brainer process for you. If you have no desire to engage them overseas, then pray for discernment as to whether you truly know Christ. Furthermore, the reasoning that says “we don’t deserve to go over there until we’re doing it in our own backyard” is not valid. The Great Commission is a both and, not an either or, nor a successive pattern. We must go to our Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost....ALL at the same time. Going international will jumpstart the desire to do missions locally & create vision for what can be done back home.

TEACH THEM EVERYTHING
This is the discipleship part of reaching the world. It requires engaging new believers in the process of reaching the lost. The best way to train someone to fish is to take them fishing. The best way to teach someone to shoot free-throws is to shoot free-throws with them. The best way to disciple a new believer is to take them fishing and help them do what you did with them. They will simply do what was done to them. That’s why our model must be to worship & fish, worship & fish, worship & fish. (Love God/Love Others).

I AM WITH YOU
This is Jesus’ promise to be engaged in the process with us, working in peoples’ lives, encouraging us when we grow weary. We must never give up. We are not alone! It is He who draws, He who saves, and He who keeps. He is Immanuel.

Points to Consider on the Commission:
a. The Commission is not a suggestion or even a great idea. It’s Christ’s final words, and is a command. Yet it is what we naturally want to do when our worship is vertical. If loving the world feels like a duty to you or your students, then there’s a worship problem, because true worship will naturally fuel a heart for the world.

b. We can’t follow Christ sitting still. He’s always moving, working, drawing, convicting, saving, sharing, blessing, and He wants to use each of our students in that process. The joy of knowing Christ is in the journey watching Him do His thing....transforming lives. If you’re truly following - you’re fishing.

c. We are commanded to GO. Stop begging the world to come to church. Train your students to GO to the world!


PRACTICAL ACTION STEPS FOR CREATING A MISSIONAL DRIVEN STUDENT MINISTRY:

1. IT BEGINS WITH YOU!
You must model missional living in your personal life. You have no credibility as a fitness trainer if you’re 50 pounds overweight because of the contradiction in lifestyle. It begins with us. Get alone with God and your student staff and pray for God to renew your passion for abiding in Him, and for the lost world. Ask Him to give you wisdom to restructure your ministry in a way that is biblical, simple, practical, and reproducible. All true growth takes place from the inside out, not outside in. (Worship/inside - Missions/outside)

2. CREATE PURE STUDENT ENVIRONMENTS
Don’t pollute your weekly time with your students by piling several purposes into one gathering.

- Create a WORSHIP environment for believers to go deep in the Word, where they
can be fueled by the Holy Spirit. (side note)...In our world of over-polished entertainment driven student ministry, let this time be a raw, un-produced time of authentic worship where Bible study, scripture memorization, personal testimonies, and celebrating friends who’ve come to Christ are enjoyed. It should feel like a family reunion.

- Then Create a MISSIONS TRAINING/DISCIPLING mechanism for students to be equipped & encouraged to live for Christ. Be strategic in helping them reach their campus. Map out their schools, identify the school population, place students in groups based on their school, make a list of all students at school & pray over them, help students find ways to serve the school, train them to run a campus club that shares the Gospel with students regularly. It’s really pretty easy.

3. EMBRACE THE SCHOOL CAMPUS
Regardless of your past experiences or current barriers, the campus should be your ministry focus if your serious about truly affecting and reaching students with the Gospel. I personally believe there is simply no better, more effective campus strategy in the world than First Priority. It is the only campus ministry in existence that doesn’t bypass the local church to get to students. It starts with the local churches, trains the student pastors, who then train their students to reach their campus. At one of my first churches as student pastor, several other student pastors and I started FP on 6 campuses in a small town in South Carolina. Each campus averaged over 30 students/month coming to Christ. That’s 180 students per month being saved x 9 months of the school year. We witnessed over 1600 students saved that year, all by students we trained to share on their campuses. It’s amazing what happens when you fish where the fish are.

4. THOUGH OUR MINDS MUST CHANGE IMMEDIATELY, BE PATIENT WHEN TRANSITIONING YOUR MINISTRY.

5. GOD IS SOVEREIGN AND WORKS IN SPITE OF OUR MODELS OF MINISTRY BECAUSE HE HONORS HIS WORD &
HIS SERVANTS.

6. I DON'T EXPECT ALL OF YOU TO AGREE WITH ME, BUT I LOVE YOU ANYWAY. :)

If you’re really interested in moving toward a missional-driven student ministry and just need to flesh it out or talk it through, please feel free to contact me via email or FaceBook. I would love to help any way possible.

chriswhite@mobilizingstudents.com
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Thank you so much for all your help and prayers as we move forward to Launch the Next Generation Missionary.

Until Every Nation Knows! (Hab. 1:5)

Chris White
President/Founder
Mobilizing Students


LET US KNOW HOW WE CAN SERVE YOU AND YOUR STUDENTS IN 2011.


MISSION TRIPS: 7 LOCATIONS ON 5 CONTINENTS
(Puerto Rico, Haiti, Guatemala, Brazil, Romania, Kenya, Philippines)

SHARING CHRIST - the only answer for the human condition
PLANTING CHURCHES - gathering converts around the Word of God to begin weekly Bible Studies
SERVING THE POOR - meeting physical needs

* All-inclusive, fully-staffed, you serve with your students & we handle all logistics,
pre & post trip devos/training, daily pics/blogs uploaded for trip reports, etc.

REGISTER FOR A MISSION TRIP TODAY at www.mobilizingstudents.com


TREK-X: A 4-YEAR JOURNEY FOR THE MISSIONAL STUDENT (18-25 year olds)

COLLEGE - completing bachelors/masters/seminary at the online university of your choice
DISCIPLESHIP - foundations, bible/theology, missions/worldview, personal evangelism/servant
leadership & spiritual disciplines
MISSIONS - travel the world on mission as a team. (2 years in Nashville / 2 years international)

* Give your students a launching pad to change the world as they leave your ministry - - - TREK-X.
* Scholarships are available to students from ministries that are formally partnered with Trek-X.

APPLY FOR TREK-X 2011 (Apply early, but you must be 18-25 years old upon entry)
www.trek-x.com


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