College Ministry

One of the areas I oversee at our church is our college ministry. I wanted to walk you through some of how we work on connecting new students to the ministry.

When it comes to connecting new students in the fall, we’ve got a pretty detailed plan. First, you need to know a little about our church and city. Our church is literally across the street from a great Christian school, California Baptist University. We’re about 10 minutes down the street from Riverside Community College with thousands of students. We’re about 15-20 minutes across town from UC Riverside which has over 17,000 students. We focus a lot of our connection efforts on CBU as they’re super-close, but have seen a major increase in RCC and UCR students in the last year.

What we do at CBU:

• We have a large banner that we put up on the corner of our church property advertising our college ministry. It looks REALLY good and it’s amazing how many students we talk to that reference the banner.
• Table at involvement fair for new students. We had fall calendars as well as an invite card for our tuesday night gathering.
• First big Sunday back we do a free lunch for college students…..we had 18 feet of burrito this year…and we ran out.
• First Tuesday when school’s back in session we called it “Sundae Tuesday.” Kicked off the year with worship/teaching and then had an ice cream sundae bar afterwards.
• All of the students who attend on Sunday mornings get a phone call from a student within two days thanking them for coming and letting them know about other stuff going on.

What we’re doing with RCC and UCR (still a major work in progress):

• Our evangelism pastor is basically the campus pastor for Campus Crusade for Christ at RCC and is on campus weekly.
• We will be doing some sort of BBQ/welcome event for UCR students (they’re on the quarter system and move in this Sunday). We’ve also begun partnering some with the Asian-American Christian Fellowship there.

Where we need to head:

• We need some sort of on-campus presence at both of these public schools at the beginning of the school year – maybe a table handing out free blue books, coffee, or something else.
• We need some sort of on-going Bible study/small group presence happening on the UCR campus that’s led by students in our church.
• We need to continue building on the natural friendship networks that exist. This has been what’s moved us forward with UCR students…..students connecting those other students they know.

Exploring College Ministry

Met today with Benson Hines who is on a several-month journey across the country checking out different college ministries. It’s a pretty cool concept. One of his goals is to highlight the importance of ministering to college students. I enjoyed my time with him. Check out his blog for all the details.

New College Pastor

We have a new college pastor starting on February 24th. His name’s Aaron Friesen and is coming from an intern role at Christ First Baptist Church in Covina. Cool coincidence – he’s dating this girl, Rose, that we knew in college. She’s super cool and fun. Aaron will be heading up the team ministering to college-age young adults in this part-time role. He doesn’t blog that I know about, but I’ll try and get him started if he doesn’t.

There is some really cool stuff happening in our college ministry that I’ll have to blog about soon. I’m excited that Aaron’s on our team.

Getting the Word Out

Generating buzz for a ministry is sometimes a tough thing. In reality, the best kind of buzz is when something is happening, God is changing lives, and people just have to tell their friends about it. At the same time, we’ve been going at this college ministry thing for a few months now and have some decent momentum in some ways, but still need to get moving in others.

We made and ordered some promo cards for our series we’re starting tomorrow night. Problem was, I underestimated the shipping time and we didn’t get them in time to get to any of our students on Sunday.

Then today I was on campus at CBU and went to give some to Deanna, one of our college students. I asked how many she wanted and she’s on duty in the dorms tonight so as I’m typing this just about every one of the 100-something rooms in Simmons Hall should have a promo card for our new series. I’m stoked that she’s getting the word out!

Next step – let the guys in our area know we may be having a female invasion tomorrow night. The odds are now in their favor.

College Week 2

We’re two weeks into Thursday nights now. The first week we had 15 and this week we had 29 (including 4 leaders). 30 students was the goal I was hoping for this week, but 29’s cool. On the fourth Thursday of each month it’s going to be a hang-out, coffeehouse style feel. This week we basically just threw decks of cards on some round tables, put some music on the sound system, and had some food and stuff. People seemed to really like it. Chris Davis was going to play some acoustic stuff, but we ended up not doing that….it was going fine without it. Next week we launch a series called “What Matters Most”. More to come…

Thursday Night Launch

We launched our Thursday night gatherings last week. Here’s my basic rundown: the room looked very cool. I bought a bunch of floor lamps at Target and killed all the flourescents. So that was cool. Worship was good, message felt pretty good. Downsides: there were only about 15 of us there which was a little bit of a bummer. There was a big CBU event that night so that may have hurt us. During my talk there were two times where a guy raised his hand and asked a question….which isn’t completely the format. I guess that could be the format (although I’m not leaning that way), but they were the kind of things that could have waited until after.

I have a meeting today at 4 to talk about how we’re going to incorporate a coffee bar each week and turn it into full coffeehouse once a month. That should be cool. My hope is to see 30 students there this week.

Last, but not least, we have the most amazing volunteers involved in college ministry! They’re making it fun and much easier for me.

Launching Tonight

Well, in just under two hours we’ll be launching our first Thursday night college gathering. I’m excited about it, but have no idea what the turnout will be. It starts at 9pm which will either be awesome for us or hurt us. The format’s pretty simple – 20-25 minutes of worship through singing and 25-30 minutes of teaching. I bought some lamps and we’re turning out all the flourescents in our meeting room to have a little more informal feel. Jon’s helping us out with leading worship until we really put that team together. We’re competing against the barn dance of CBU’s TWIRP (The Woman is Required to Pay) Week. That was Nicole and I’s first “official” date back in the day. Maybe some future married couples are learning to do-si-do together tonight.

College Conversations

Met with Brad Baker, pastor of Crave at Saddleback Church, for a bit yesterday to talk through some college ministry stuff. He came on staff there maybe a month before I left so we barely crossed paths before I headed out to Riverside. He’s a sharp, laid-back, and humble guy. We talked about several things, but here’s some that stood out.

• Think in terms of three seasons – summer, fall, spring
• One retreat in each season – this will propel growth ahead both spiritually and numerically
• Teaching in each season divided into series of Topical, Philosophical/Theological, and Exegetical (this is a good thought process for planning out teaching series)
• Core or ministry team consists of: Ministry Team Members (varying, but potentially low commitment), Ministry Team Leaders, Core Lead Team (I don’t have my notes with me and may have that wording wrong). That Core Lead Team is the “go-to” people that pour into the ministry team leaders who then pour into the ministry team members.
• Relationships, relationships, relationships – this permeated through everything we talked about and has permeated our discussion at our church regarding college ministry
• Brad estimated they have about 85% of their Thursday night service attendance plugged into small groups. That’s a pretty impressive percentage.

All in all some good conversation. Brad’s only been there a year so I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with young adults in the future.

Last, but not least – I also got to run into Allison Hibbard, Jason Pogue, John Snyder, and Katie “I need to start blogging” Edwards. Always good to see old friends. I miss seeing you guys every day.