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You can buy all kinds of expensive toys for young children, but where do the kids usually end up? Playing in large boxes. We’re older, but we like boxes too. They’re fun to play in and pretend in. Boxes are a great place in which to hide, but they can be constraining, and you can’t see out very well. I find myself ending up in boxes sometimes, especially when it comes to my walk with Christ. One of the boxes I’m trying to get out of is in the area of campus evangelism. And in some ways, our whole movement struggles with how to get out of that box. God began to open my eyes to this a few years ago when I went to chapter camp with eleven students from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. It was my last year on staff there. We were fired up, we had a lot of vision, and our chapter had grown from 65 to 75 that year. We spent the week planning, praying and dreaming about what God wanted to do. We felt pretty good about ourselves. We set out a good vision, planned new student outreach and began to assign jobs. We had two small-group coordinators, two large-group coordinators, an administrator, a prayer person, an evangelism person and a publicity person. We were ready!

Then we made a fatal mistake—fatal, at least, to our own self-satisfaction. We asked a friend of mine from the Navigators to come in and consult with us. He joined us, and started to ask us a bunch of questions: “What’s your job?” . . . “What are you doing?” . . . “And you?” About ten minutes into it, he stopped. He got really quiet, and then he said, “Now, let me get this straight. You’ve got a chapter of 75 students?”

“Yeah, we’ve really been growing!”

“And you’ve got eleven good student leaders here, right?”

“Yeah, and we’re lookin’ good for this next year.”

“And all eleven of you good student leaders are going to run a chapter of 75. Is that what I’m hearing? Now, I heard you’re hoping to collect a few non-Christians; I heard that. But mostly, these eleven people are running this chapter of 75? I’m just trying to make sure I’m hearing you right.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

And he said, “Look, two or three of you could run this chapter with no sweat. The other eight of you could go do something for God!”

We were floored. “What do you mean, ‘go do something for God?’ We’re reaching out to new students, we’ve got large groups going, a bunch of small groups, we’re working at integrating our faith and our practice, and we’re doing something for God! What do you mean, ‘Go do something for God?’”

He responded, “Yeah, yeah, all that stuff is great, it’s in the Bible and all. Fine. But if you aren’t extending the Kingdom to reach the lost, bringing in more people to become followers of Jesus, why not just fold your tent and go home?”

Whoa! I was ticked! So were the student leaders. We spent the night mad. The next morning we were still ticked! But that afternoon we started to get convicted. And that evening we found ourselves confessing, repenting and letting God lead us out of the box.

New stirrings at Bear Trap Ranch

Fast forward to the present. Last summer, we brought 40 staff and 80 student leaders together at Bear Trap Ranch in Colorado for a national consultation on evangelism. It was the beginning of something fabulous! Becky Manley Pippert, author of Out of the Salt Shaker (IVP®), brought an anointed and powerful speaking ministry to us. One night, the students encouraged her to speak for an hour and forty minutes. They wouldn’t let her stop! Lon Allison, director of the Billy Graham Center, challenged us to see evangelism simply as helping people take the next step toward Jesus. Mid-week, the Holy Spirit took charge, and many students streamed forward during a several-hour-long prayer time to be filled with the Holy Spirit and boldness.

For much of the second half of the week, we worked in different groups on key evangelism strategies and resources. Many of these are being tested or pioneered on campuses around the country this year. (Stay tuned on the I-V Web site and to Student Leadership journal for more on these excellent strategies and resources.)

On the last day of the consultation, I shared with the group a struggle I have: while we in InterVarsity® have grown in our temperature for evangelism, and even in our efforts for evangelism, we haven’t yet grown in our fruitfulness for evangelism. We are seeing success in individual cases, and in individual chapters, but we’re not here just to grow in our zeal or our programs. We want to see people come to know Jesus! We’re not going to be satisfied until God’s hand is stretched out and we see that fruitfulness.

During the consultation, I was at a dinner discussion with all the staff from my region, asking “What’s the biggest obstacle we face?” One of the people at the table said, “You know, it’s really hard for us to get out of the box. Our passion is going up, but we have a way we do things that’s really hard for us to change. I feel like we’re in a box.”

So what’s the box? Look where we spend most of our energy and time. We reach Christians during new student outreach because we’re in competition to get those young freshmen into our groups. After all, they’re the future of our chapters. And we want to offer good Bible exposition for them in our large groups. Good prayer meetings and quality small groups are important for them, too. As an afterthought, we think, maybe we ought to have one or two investigative Bible discussions along the way for some non-Christians. Maybe a couple of evangelistic large-group meetings, too. We could even devote a week to evangelism next winter, and call it “Jesus Week.”

I don’t want to sound critical, but look at the situation. Evangelism is tacked on. Again and again I’ve seen students and staff get passionate for witness, wanting to share God’s heart, wanting to reach the lost, but when I see their plans, it’s the same plan I’ve seen a thousand times! At the Bear Trap consultation, staff and students had a week to wait on God and listen for how he might lead them out of the box. And it’s beginning to happen on campuses that are willing to look hard at their priorities.

Trying something different

Now rewind with me to the UW students I was with at chapter camp. We took three student leaders and said, “Okay, you three are going to do something for God. You’re going to lead our chapter of 75.” We then turned to the other eight of us, and said, “We eight are going to do something for God, too. We’re going to reach this dorm complex over here that we’ve never touched, where all the party freshmen live. We don’t relate to them that well, but we’re going to learn, and we’re going to begin to reach them for Jesus.”

These eight didn’t do any administration for the chapter of 75. We became an evangelism team to reach the freshman dorm complex. The first three days of school we were devoted to serving freshmen. We explored their spiritual interest and asked people if they were interested in Bible study. We got 40 interested freshmen involved in eight groups, mostly non-Christians. We studied about Jesus for six weeks, did training on how we could lead people in our groups to Christ. A few came to Christ.

That was stepping out of the box, but we went even further: we took the whole bunch on a retreat. We’d always had chapter retreats with about twenty people, all Christians, and they were fuzzy, warm and wonderful. That year we had 75 students, forty of them non-believers, and they showed it! They were smoking, swearing, playing poker, hanging out and generally being themselves—and they were being accepted. Now, the Catholic nuns at the retreat center weren’t quite so happy with us. Every time I saw them coming I would duck behind someone. But in the end, it was powerful. We trusted God for a work of the Holy Spirit to invite a lot of these students into the kingdom, and at least thirty responded. Our three administrative leaders handled the chapter of 75 just fine, and the chapter grew to about 120 in that year. I was so glad my friend had ticked us off and pushed us out of the box!

We make our own boxes

What is your box? Think of your current chapter structures and priorities. As one management person put it, your system is perfectly designed to yield the results you are getting. Unless our systems reflect the priority we have for the lost, we’re not going to make much progress. If you’re not seeing students come to know Jesus, you probably don’t have the strategies and structures in place that will best help students come to know Jesus on your particular campus.

Step one to getting out of the box is to make witness a priority. Not just on paper or typed into a five year strategy, but the kind of priority that actually changes our calendars and our structures. God wants to bring conversion. The problem with the lack of conversions in our chapters is not a problem with God’s desire or power. The problem is us in the box.

The second step is to allocate resources to meet that priority. Evangelism requires far more energy and people power than other parts of chapter life. Willow Creek Church in Illinois has discovered that out of their five purposes—grace, growth, groups, gifts and good stewardship—they need to give about 40 percent of their effort, energy, vision, resources and people to growth (evangelism), just to have it come out on par with the others. They give about 15 percent to each of the other areas.

Devoting 40 percent of your resources to evangelism would be stepping out of the box, wouldn’t it? What would it look like if you took two of your five executive members and said, “You leaders are an initial evangelism team”? What if you took four out of ten small-group leaders and said, “We want you to start Bible studies that are open to non-Christians”? What if every “regular” InterVarsity small group in the nation was challenged to sponsor and nurture an investigative Bible discussion? Imagine the impact!

Third, we need to give students on campus what they need. What process do students on your campus tend to go through as they come to Jesus? What simple but effective strategy or plan would facilitate that process? John Wesley, a great evangelist of the 18th century, understood the process that the people of his day had to go through to come to know Jesus. His strategy fit their process. Wesley’s strategy actually has a lot in common with what I’ve found to be effective for many post-modern students of our day. The strategy has five simple steps.

1. Build friendships and pray. Nothing is more important. But this cannot stand alone. People will need something to bring their friends to, a natural next step. Collaborate with God, being filled the Holy Spirit, seeing God’s power in healing prayer. Get radical! One person I met at the Bear Trap consultation takes prayer walks around campus. He knocks on doors and asks if people have prayer requests. When they give him a prayer request, he says, “Can I pray for you now?”

2. Hold awakening events, not just seeker events. This step may be the biggest missing link in our traditional evangelism strategy. Awakening events are contexts for the Holy Spirit to awaken people to their spiritual longings and to help them begin to see Jesus as a possible satisfier of those longings. Not just for seekers, these are for the mildly curious or even turned off people. The Edge (UCLA), The Pulse (UC–Berkeley), HEAT (USC) and Potter’s Wheel (UW–Madison) are all exciting, fairly new efforts to provide awakening meetings for skeptics. These events focus on experiential truth rather than propositional truth to communicate Biblical faith. Speakers focus first on what makes sense to people and quote the authorities that they look up to in order to lead them toward openness to Christ. Using movies is a good way to start communicating experiential truth.

The Alcoholics Anonymous model functions as an awakening event for many people. What would be an equivalent type of support group that would meet a felt need in your setting? If you are meeting people’s needs, like Jesus did in his healing, teaching and touching ministry, attendance will never be a problem!

3. Draw curious students into community. This generation of students is looking for a community to belong to before a message to believe in. At the University of Illinois, for example, the goal is to have every small group start and nurture an investigative Bible discussion, not just to have a few isolated IBDs pop up at random.

Campus Crusade at the UW–Madison had 600 students, including more than 100 freshmen, at their first large-group meeting last year. They held several outstanding parties to start the year. The large-group meetings that followed were full of humor and great stuff from the student culture. They provided a powerful shared experience of community. Students were trained to invite groups of friends from their dorm floors and Greek houses, and they followed up large-group meetings with Bible studies and conferences designed with seekers in mind.

Worship evangelism is yet another great way to help draw students into an experience of vibrant spiritual community. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? A group of freshmen I worked with simply started inviting their non-Christian friends to a vibrant, weekly prayer meeting! What better place to meet God? One guy gave his life to Christ, then another. By the end of the year, 25 students had come to Christ, mostly through that prayer meeting.

Some great guidelines for using worship with pre-Christians can be found in Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Church. Warren provides help with such things as keeping the energy and pace high, using words the average person can understand, playing the kind of music people actually listen to day to day and making people comfortable in a new setting.

4. Challenge students to conversion. Do you ask God daily to allow you to lead someone to Christ? That’s certainly out of the box. As individuals and as a chapter, decide how you will call the question of conversion. Will you use the bridge diagram? Will you use the new gospel outline “Restoring the Center”? Will you schedule evangelistic large groups that call people to a decision? Week-long seeker-friendly tracks at some of our year-end summer camps have been doorways for students to come to know Jesus.

5. Help new Christians into transformation. Changed lives are our greatest apologetic for the gospel. Fellowships that experience changed lives regularly draw Christians and non-Christians in. The Blue Ridge region has seen significant evangelistic impact from some of their prayer and healing conferences.

The Pacific region established “adding to their number daily” as their banner vision statement, and circulated conversion and transformation stories via e-mail throughout the region every time they happened. They have seen an increases in fruitfulness for the past few years.

Please ask!

Here’s the bottom line: we often have not because we ask not. God would be delighted if we would refuse to rest or stop praying until we have the chance to lead somebody to Christ. People frequently undermine their faith that God will use them in this way—“I don’t have that gift” or “I stumble over my words.” God has to give you the faith to pray for conversions; you can’t just work it up. But nothing would affect you or your chapter more than first letting God lead you personally out of the box. Let God fill you and use you to lead a friend to Christ, and you’ll never want to crawl back into that box again!