An Excerpt from The Fuel and the Flame
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Years had passed (and several ministry teams later) and now on a different campus, I had the opportunity of starting from scratch again. It’s a delicious experience not to build on another man’s foundation, but instead to go where Christ has not been named (1 Corinthians 15:20). This time it was a small, liberal, liberal arts college that had a reputation for shunning any outside influence─especially the kind I wanted to inject! It started with just meeting students on campus, in the dorms, at the cafeteria, and even a few in my church and community. The investigative Bible studies finally whittled the groups down to five guys, two of whom came to Christ and the other three made re-dedications of their lives to Christ. We kept upping the commitment level, studying the Word, having quiet times together and praying for the salvation of the guys in their dorms. We were on our way….

Charlie, one of the five, had grown up in a Christian home but came to college to flirt and play. At first he was more or less humoring me, thinking it would be good to write home, able to tell Mom and Dad he was in a Bible study. During his freshman year, I remember inviting him to come to the Christmas Conference we were sponsoring, and you’d have thought I was asking him to pluck his eyeballs out by the look on his face! No one had ever really challenged or required anything of his version of comfortable Christianity, and as I took Charlie on evangelism appointments, God started to reveal to him that he had a lot of knowledge, but almost no application. He became more serious about his faith and wanted to search the Word for answers, learn how to share the gospel, and even turn his dating life over to the Lord. (Some of that may have been due to my wife leading his girlfriend─and wife to be─to Christ and beginning to disciple her!)

Miraculously, I got Charlie to one of our ten-week summer training projects where he really flourished and came back wanting to co-labor with me to reach the campus for Christ. I would spend hours with Charlie each week in prayer, ministry strategy sessions, evangelism, follow up, and, of course, the most spiritual activity of all─eating at our dinner table on a regular basis! I helped him start his own Bible study, and we worked on how to prepare questions and lead it. We started sponsoring campus-wide meetings and weekend retreats, and many times I would put Charlie in charge. I would give him these major responsibilities with only one condition: he was not allowed to do anything at the event. He would have to plan and delegate every detail out in advance, so that he would not lift one single finger to make that meeting or retreat happen.

After a year of placing those cruel restrictions on Charlie, he became one of the most proficient planners, developers, and managers I have ever seen! Like me, he didn’t view giving out responsibilities to others as dumping them on others, nor did he even see it as delegating to them. No, he and I saw giving away every single job and task as an opportunity to develop someone’s character and leadership ability.

By the end of his junior year, not only did Charlie have a whole dorm he was responsible for (with his key guys spread out on each floor), but he was determined to join our staff and become the ministry’s Campus Director at that college. I had been evangelizing, establishing, and equipping a number of students on that campus, but it was obvious to all that Charlie was my key man.

We spent his senior year preparing him to take over the leadership of that campus, get married, raise his support, and deepen and expand the work that had begun there. Charlie and Heidi stayed in the saddle there for six years, raising up reams of laborers in the process and finally replacing himself with one of his disciples, before heading off to seminary and then the pastorate. Today Charlie and his family are living and ministering in a major U.S. city using the knowledge, skills, character, and vision he gained while in college, to reach laymen for Christ.

Please don’t think that every skeptical freshman I’ve ever laid my hands on is now a prominent pastor in a huge church! The majority of the students I’ve worked with (and you too) will not go into vocational Christian ministry, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have an incredible world-wide impact as they consistently make world-wide choices that further the gospel. It’s not more spiritual to go into vocational ministry than the secular work force. God is not up there ringing His hands, worrying about what location or vocation we will choose. He is much more interested in whether we are being obedient to the commands He has given us, which, of course, includes the Great Commission.  Regardless of who pays our salary or what employer’s name is on our business card, the important thing is whether we are about the Father’s business.