For this week’s edition of the blog I wanted to highlight a section of Steve Shadrach’s book, The Fuel and the Flame, that I found to be incredibly helpful when looking at how to best build a movement on campus. In his book (which I highly recommend as a practical guide to campus ministry) Steve talks about the 3 types of college students and which ones we should be looking to recruit to our ministries.
The three kinds of students are:
The influencers – These are the “mainstream” students who are usually very social and outgoing. They typically look for ways to get involved in various clubs and organizations from day one at college. They are naturally able to connect with and attract other people to them.
The interested – These are students who were never standouts in high school, but are interested in being involved and making friends at college. These students can be trained to influence and lead others if someone takes the time to befriend and believe in them.
The isolated – This type of person does not enjoy socializing in large groups and probably has trouble developing many friendships. They are usually willing to be influenced, but may be turned off by popular or outgoing types. They can be very lonely and usually are observers until someone encourages them to get involved.
Steve goes on to say that our college ministries typically draw students who are interested or isolated. These students are usually looking for a way to get involved or much more likely to be open to getting involved, but the influencers are really the students that we should be trying to recruit. This tends to go against our natural way of thinking. We think, “That student looks lonely and in need of a friend, so we should go out of our way to befriend them and get them involved in BASIC.” While this is a good thing to do and we should certainly reach out to those students, this may not always be the most strategic way to see our ministry grow. Remember, it’s not about numbers, but it IS about reaching as many students as possible with the Gospel.
The reason Steve Shadrach advocates for working to recruit influencer students is because he sees the potential to use them in order to attract other interested and isolated students. He writes about how normally about 10% of students at a campus are influencers. When you are able to get an influencer involved they already have a level of social and emotional maturity that enables them to be natural leaders in the group once their spiritual maturity has been developed. The way he puts it is, “The greater their social and emotional maturity, the greater their capacity to shepherd others and to teach others also.” Essentially, if we can get these students involved and develop their spiritual growth to a point where they can be leaders and shepherd others we will see more interested and isolated students being involved and also discipled. We will begin to see a true movement on our campus. Steve is basically going along with the old saying, “win the chief, win the tribe,” and he points out that Jesus’ prayer was for more laborers (shepherds), not more followers (Matt. 9:36-38).
So, why don’t we recruit influencers? There are two main reasons that I can see. The first is that we weren’t the influencers when we were in high school or college and so we tend to gravitate towards students who are more like us. Just because a student has a very different personality than ours doesn’t mean that we should ignore them or think that they are so popular that they will never want to be involved in our BASIC group. Influencer students will draw in interested and isolated students.
The second reason that I see for not recruiting influencers is that it takes more time and effort. Usually these students are being pulled many different directions and have to make decisions about where they will spend their time. Because they are so busy it will take more time to get them involved. You may have to work harder to develop a relationship with them by taking them out to lunch or spending more time with them. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it just means that it will take more work to get them involved. In the end they will be someone who is intentional with their time and looks to be an influence to those around them.
Let me conclude by saying that I have seen this principle play out as Cheryl and I have worked in college ministry. When we started working to get a BASIC group going at SUNY Geneseo we set out to get the students who came across our path involved. There were two in particular who seemed like they would be great students to get involved. Without realizing that they were influencers we began recruiting them. We took them out to lunch, made sure to have extra conversation with them, and stayed on top of them encouraging them to come to our meetings. Eventually they both got involved and became our first two student leaders.
During my time in college at Oswego I saw the same thing. Our BASIC group had about 15 students when I got involved my freshman year, but as influencers joined that year the group began to grow at a rapid rate and the campus took notice of the group’s greater presence on campus. Both the group at Geneseo and Oswego reached over 50 students and are examples of how we can reach a campus when we get influencers involved. I would encourage you to begin praying for some influencers to cross your path whose lives you can begin sowing into.