An Excerpt from The Fuel and the Flame
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It may have taken you a year or two of very challenging grass roots ministry to get this far, and most never do, but the formation of ministry teams can have an explosive effect in reaching your campus. The funnel continues to narrow as you take students through the investigative group stage, select the most responsive and faithful ones and form discipleship groups and finally, invite the student leaders who have shown the most F-A-I-T-H to form a ministry team. Regardless of the names you give your small groups, these are the three basic stages:
A. Investigative group - strictly
inward focus, trying to help each student make Jesus Savior and Lord.
B. Discipleship group - combination of
inward and outward focus, trying to help each student grow in Christ and begin laboring for Christ.
C. Ministry team - primarily
outward focus, trying to help each student leader develop
their own personal evangelism and discipleship ministries.
You want to select students to your ministry team very carefully. These can’t just be the most popular or most involved or even the ones that want in the most. These must be the 2 Timothy 2:2 student leaders who are faithful, yes, but are also “able to teach others also.” They need to be spiritually, socially, and emotionally able to go beyond themselves to create the funnel and go through the same process you just spent one to two years going through with them. You are inviting them to step up and stand shoulder to shoulder with you to take on the challenge of reaching the campus and the world for Christ. You are asking them to become partners, and the shift has taken place where they are no longer part of your ministry, you are simply part of theirs!
My First Ministry Team
God granted me the privilege to put together my first ever ministry team the year after I graduated from college. I decided to stick around a couple of years after I finished my bachelors to get more training and to finish up the work I had started with these six men: John, Dennis, Ted, Lewis, Dave, and Terry. To finally get to these six men took two years and thousands of hours of prayer, relationship building, evangelism, one-on-one establishing appointments, Bible studies, conferences, and who knows what else! The initial funnel had included hundreds of men, but most had taken exit ramps as the months wore on and the commitment level rose. I still loved all of them, and they knew it, but I had literally poured myself out for these six because they had endured and poured themselves out in return. Now, as the lone survivors, we were banding together to impact the campus for Christ. The best word I could find to describe it:
Synergy: the interaction of individuals such that the total effect is greater than the sum of the individual effects.
I will never forget the first time we gathered in my little one-room apartment near the campus to pray and make battle plans. As the hours rolled by that night, and with only a small lamp for light, we huddled in a circle, all leaning forward and listening. You could feel the power and sense of destiny in that tiny room as each man knew the incredible price he had paid to be sitting in that room. Four of the men I got to lead to Christ through an investigative Bible study and one-on-one evangelism appointments. The other two I “adopted” because of their faithfulness to a Bible study I had started and because of their passion to share the gospel with others. Since college, two of the men have spent their lives ministering in China, one in Germany, and two are lay leaders in their stateside churches. I do not believe the sixth man stuck with his spiritual commitment.
Think Big, Start Small, Go Deep
All six picked out a dorm or campus “people group” that they were going to pray for, meet everyone they could, share the gospel multiple times each week, start small groups, and begin to see who rises to the top. My job was to pray for them, encourage them, gather them weekly for inductive Bible study, meet with each one individually to strategize, and spend time in their target, helping them to establish their ministry. I was teaching each man how to start from scratch, and as Campus Outreach staff teach their student laborers, to “think big, start small, go deep.”
When Dave or John or Terry met guys in their target area and built a friendship, we would say he had a “toe hold” in that group. If one of those friendships blossomed into a discipling relationship we would then say he had a “foot hold” in his target group. If one of the ministry team guys was able to establish and equip a student such that they were now themselves evangelizing and discipling in their own living group, we would then tally it up as a “strong hold.” Here’s the progression:
A. Toe hold - you have a friend in your target group.
B. Foot hold - you are discipling someone in your target group.
C. Strong hold - you are equipping someone in your target group who is now taking responsibility to reach them. You can start over in another target if you choose.
Our goal was to develop a strong hold in every affinity group on campus. By the time I left for seminary two years later, we had not reached our goal, but we did have a depth chart made up of 268 students who were all plugged into small groups and were either discipling or being discipled by someone involved in our ministry. Our banding together radically impacted each of our lives, and the sum total of our joint efforts created a campus-wide movement of penetration, concentration, and a growing saturation of laborers being trained and placed in all kinds of groups.
One excellent strategy we implemented was the idea of a ministry house near the campus, where the leader would recruit several of their disciples to live with them for a year and focus on reaching a particular ministry target together. I have included an appendix item on how to begin and develop a ministry house concept. It’s not for everyone, but it’s worked for us the last twenty years!