The Organ of Meaning

As I processed a little today with my in-laws’ pastor he asked a question that struck at the heart of what I’ve been wrestling with. It’s a question that doesn’t seem to be all that crazy or out of the realm of possibility and even seems that it would be a next logical step in where God is calling me in ministry.

In the past year I have moved to a part-time position filling one of the IT roles for Campus Crusade for Christ in this region. I am still also working on campus in the DC area (also part-time now). I like both, but I love working on campus. The question that I need to come to grips with is this:

Would I be okay and would I trust God if he called me to fill the IT position full time?

Right now, I am not sure. But I know what the answer needs to be; not because I think God might (or might not), but because I know that I need to have complete trust in His goodness and His trustworthiness.

All of you who are reading this and are the praying type, please keep doing so for my personal retreat this week.

Tonight I read “A New Departure” which is a keynote speech that Charles Spurgeon gave at an annual meeting of the pastors’ college that he founded. He must have just destroyed some of these guys as he did me tonight.

A respectable ministry, devoid of spiritual life, is little better than respectable damnation, from which may God deliver us!

When men drift into this condition, they generally adopt some expedient to hide it. Conscience suggests that there is something or other wrong, and the deceitful heart labours to conceal or palliate this fact. Some do this by amusing themselves with hobbies instead of preaching the gospel. They cannot do the Lord’s work, so they try to do their own. They have not honesty enough to confess that they have lost gospel power, so they ride a hobby; and it is a very mild form of evil when they raise some side issue, which has no other fault about it than that it diverts them from the main point. Many are these playthings…

Seriously, if any of you are in any sort of ministry position, take the half-hour to read this.

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.