This week’s post is a guest blog from Justin Christopher. He is the director of Campus Renewal Ministries and author of Campus Renewal: A Practical Plan for Uniting Campus Ministries in Prayer and Mission. Justin also writes regularly for the Reaching Campus blog.
Until recently, most college pastor’s experiences with attempts at “unity” has looked something like this:
One campus ministry wants to bring in a band, a speaker, or some evangelistic outreach. Suddenly they realize they cannot afford it. Then they think to themselves, “We should invite other ministries to participate with us.” A few ministries agree to chip in the needed time and money to pull off the event. Leaders from these fellowships form a small committee to plan and prepare. After the event they shake hands and say, “Let’s do this again.” The next time a ministry has something they cannot afford, they pull the team back together again.
Of course I am being a little sarcastic, but I have indeed found that this has been the nature of campus ministry partnerships. They are events-based. The purpose for working together is the event. When the event is over, there is no need to continue meeting.
Over the last 20 years at the University of Texas we, Campus Renewal Ministries, have tried to build more meaningful long-term partnerships that really impact our campus. We’re building a united missional community movement by sharing training, resources, databases, and students. We have active missional communities in more than 200 unique people groups on our campus (dorms, departments, ethnic groups, clubs, sports teams, fraternities, etc).
We’re undergirding the missional community movement with prayer. Student leaders and college pastors pray together every week and we now have a Campus House of Prayer (CHOP), where students from 30 different churches and ministries are praying every Monday through Friday from 6:00am to midnight.
God still calls us to partner on events, but now the events are not the purpose for our meeting. Events spring up from our times of prayer together, our growing relationships, and our shared vision for God to be made great at the University of Texas.
Prayer-Based Partnerships
The most important thing we can do is begin to pray together. We can’t start by planning events. We start by asking God to do something that is beyond what any of our individual ministries is capable of doing. We cry out to God for transformation on our campus.
At the University of Texas, student leaders from the many ministries meet together every Monday evening. Pastors meet together for prayer on Wednesday mornings. We worship together, share brief testimonies of what God has been doing in our ministries, and then pray for our campus and for each other. Prayer is where we begin to get to know one another and where God can give us His vision for our campus.
Relationship-Based Partnerships
The key to strategic partnership is trust. We have to trust one another before we can move forward in meaningful ways. This only comes from knowing one another, and we can’t know one another unless we make time to be with each other. This is where the rubber meets the road.
The entry point to relationships is our weekly time of prayer together. There we pray for each others’ ministries and families. As people get to know one other at prayer each week, we’ve seen people make more time to be together outside of prayer. Older ministers meet with the younger ones to encourage them. Leaders with common interests such as international students or athletes get together to share thoughts and experiences. Relationships become the lifeblood of the movement.
Vision-Based Partnerships
This is the difference between event-based unity and vision-based unity. We’re not trying to plan an event. Instead, we’re seeking God for a long-term plan to reach the campus together. Our aim is to reach every student with the gospel, to raise up future missionaries (both in the marketplace and overseas), and for God to bring revival to our campus. The vision is bigger than any of our individual ministries, which makes us need one another.
We’re always asking God what’s next. We pray together weekly and meet once a month to consider where God may be leading us. Sometimes God leads 10 ministries to partner in some specific way and 10 different ministries to partner in another way. Sometimes we all agree to move forward in something together, and sometimes we have no direction and just agree to keep praying and asking God for more of Himself.
Humility
We once collaborated to bring Jackson Senyonga, a pastor from Uganda, to the University of Texas. He had experienced immense revival as the Body of Christ partnered in prayer and mission in his hometown of Kampala. He spoke to us about what it might take to see such transformation on our campus and it was encompassed in one word – humility.
Jackson defined humility this way: “Recognition of our need for one another. “ When we begin to recognize that we need one another and can accomplish more for God’s Kingdom by working together than we can as individual ministries, then we have crossed an important threshold. We then have Biblical humility, which is the biggest key to changing the spiritual climate of our campuses. And the catalyst to bring transformation.
Justin Christopher is the director of Campus Renewal Ministries at the University of Texas and author of Campus Renewal: A Practical Plan for Uniting Campus Ministries in Prayer and Mission. He gives leadership to the Campus House of Prayer and the missional community movement at the University of Texas.