The Organ of Meaning

There is a major website that my employer has as an outreach to college students around the country that also powers subsidary sites that can be customized for individual campus use. In past years it has been very effective at opening the door for students to interact with the Gospel in a safe environment and on a level that  is accessable to someone who doesn’t necessarily come from a faith background.

There’s an issue though, the design of the site is about 9 years old. The reality is that web-users are fickle and picky (I’m going to coing a new word – pickle), and if we’re really trying to get the message to students effectively we need to be removing roadblocks from the way. The New Testament says that the Gospel is “a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense,” it’s gong to piss people off and make them angry – we need to make sure that they are wrestling with the Gospel and not the things we attach to it or attach it to.

At one point the website was reporting approximately a 1% rate of people indicating a decision to follow Jesus Christ which is great, but as I’ve run some of the campus-specific subsidiary sites I’ve noticed that the number of “indicated decisions” are not very correlational with the total number of visitors. (When we have 10 hits in a month we have 3 indicated decisions, when we have 100 hits in a month, we have 4… those numbers are generalizations, but they are faithful to the reality; not exaggerations.)

Also, some of the articles themselves (one that I can think of specifically, but there are others) connect the faith to secondary or tertiary doctrinal  stances that are not endemic to our organization and definitely to the faith as a whole.

So, there are numbers issues, some aesthetic issues and some content issues.

The question is – how do I address these issues when the sites have been effective in the past, I don’t really know the people running the sites and I’ve been assigned to take a break from tech stuff for now?

The organization that I minister with is, relatively speaking, huge… we’re active in 191 countries (I’m still amazed that there are that many countries at all) and have 25,000 staff members. I am always impressed at how honest our leadership is with our shortcomings. Just this month the Vice-President of the Americas wrote up a response to a question about our organizational strengths and weaknesses; I was far less interested in what he had to say about our strengths as I was in the weaknesses. This is what he summed it up with:

I’d say we need to have a humble attitude, knowing that we’re just a part of God’s overall plan. And, also, we need to be willing to push the outer-limits of what He’s called us to do.

This is interesting because this is pretty much what my answers would have been. I’m thankful that the leadership of our organization is actually aware of it and addressing those issues.

If I would have answered that question, I would have gone into more specifics about where we’re not “pushing the envelope”, but it would have just been where that is true where I am working. Also, most of the field staff (myself included) are painfully aware of the damage that those who have gone before us have caused with the overdone pride in our organization and our methods – because we’re constantly working to repair damaged relationships with other organizations.

Thank you leaders, you’re doing a good job!

This weekend is another conference for me. I’m running PowerPoint and video yet again and I’m having a pretty good time doing it too. The conference is a regional conference for Impact – an “ethnic student ministry” associated with the organization that I work with. Impact primarily focuses on reaching out to and building up African American students on college campuses.

I am learning a lot about where our ministry is falling short on being more effective on campus… for example, partnerships with local churches are something that Impact does a great job with; and something we do not. I’m hoping to have some opportunity to work more in partnership with Impact locally here in the DC area (did I say that we’ve pretty much decided to stay in the Washington area for at least another year) – even if it’s just helping to train and disciple some of the students on their campuses.

One of the things about Impact is the fact that they don’t have staff on campuses, they depend on the students they work with to be the ones doing the ministry on their campuses and coach them over the phone. Yet, it’s has been very effective… students can do ministry! But, one of the shortcomings of this strategy is the lack of people who can interact one-on-one and face-to-face (I like hyphens (and parethesis)) – we’re hoping that we’ll be able to help out and fill some of that void.