InterVarsity's StudentSoul.org

We were ready for change in our chapter at UNH. Recognizing that our group had become a monument, we now desired becoming a movement, dynamic, responsive, advancing and alive. We describe our growing “holy dissatisfaction” in part 1. In part 2, we describe what we did to start the change process.

This is part 2 of the story of how God did a major makeover on our group, moving us toward becoming a genuine witnessing community. Our story has four parts; you might want to read part 1 before going further.

Chapter makeover part 2: Moving to The Edge

A week after my conversation with Abby and Becky, our regional staff team gathered to learn more about InterVarsity’s new chapter planting strategy. Across the country, InterVarsity had been seen exponential growth in starting new chapters. Yet, at the same time, our overall attempts at building existing chapters had stagnated. What if we applied planting strategies to building situations? Perhaps this could create an environment in which the Lord would grow our mustard seed chapters.

As we looked at the model for starting new groups, we saw that its beauty is in its simplicity. It contains four stages of progression as a chapter grows from 0 to 80 students. Each stage has thresholds and action steps. A fellowship does not move forward through the stages until those thresholds are met and those actions steps are taken.

Notice the geometry here. Instead of a pyramid that needed to be picked up and moved forward, we now had a ray, a line segment that begins at some defined starting point and goes on to infinity. We had movement instead of a monument.

Note: This is not to say that the pyramid isn’t a valuable depiction of important components for strong chapters, but rather that we found a more dynamic way of looking at how we wanted to move forward.

Moving forward with missional Christians 

To build momentum for this movement, though, the student leaders at UNH decided we needed to gather movement-oriented students together. We called them missional Christians (MCs). Missional Christians are students who want to see their campus reached with the gospel. They are motivated by their relationship with Jesus to take risks and make sacrifices to see that happen. [See a further definition below.]

When the leaders and I analyzed our chapter, we noticed a couple things about MCs:

• We had a solid eight to ten MCs but they were isolated in the fellowship structure, unable to work together due to their various responsibilities.
• Nearly all of them had a defined leadership position so they spent nearly all of their available time and energy maintaining the monument of the InterVarsity group, rather than engaging in God’s mission to transform the campus.
• All of our large-group team members were MCs. Few of our small-group leaders were.
• We needed more MCs.

In response to these observations, the leadership team and I made a radical decision to restructure our fellowship.

At The Edge: meeting with the core 

First, we morphed our existing leadership (exec) meetings into open meetings for our core missional students. Instead of just inviting selected leaders into the inner workings of the fellowship, we invited anyone and everyone to come and be a part of our mission. We called this meeting “The Edge” because of its two-pronged purpose:

• to encourage each other to take individual risks for the gospel (moving to “the edge” of ourselves).
• to look for ways to move our fellowship out of its holy huddle to a place where it could engage “the edge” of our secular campus.

In these meetings, we studied scripture about God’s heart for the lost. We prayed for our friends to become Christians. We trained for evangelism through proxe stations and GIGs. Above all, we spent time every week celebrating ways we had seen God move on the secular edges of our campus. We rejoiced in the spiritual conversations we had with non-Christians, the reports from GIGs and, eventually, seeing people undergo personal conversion as they become followers of Jesus. Our goal was to energize our missional Christians and develop potential missional Christians into becoming missional Christians.

Hiatus for small groups

Our second action step was to eliminate small groups for a season, a decision that was difficult for those who welcomed the friendships and spiritual growth the groups provided. But we had begun to see that the small groups had become the chief cornerstone of our monument to Christianity, places where Christians gathered to hang out with one another and hide from “the big, bad secular university.” Hosting these weekly meetings took a lot of our energy and resources away from actively engaging the campus. In short, small groups were a place in which we did not move.

“I think the decision to divest our chapter of small groups for a season was a big momentum builder, even though it was subtle and might not have seemed so,” said Jim Browne, a senior leadership team member. “It sent everyone the message that we were serious about pursuing God’s mission at UNH.”

In a post-semester evaluation, Jim commented that often groups or organizations who want to move toward a common purpose will overlook the need to break off the old things before putting on the new. Even though replacing the old with the new is a very natural and scriptural principle, Jim believes it is often neglected due to our cultural aversion to the possibility that changes will make others uncomfortable. Jim and the other leaders took a bold risk in eliminating small groups and changing the leadership model.

These two decisions were sledgehammers to our Christian monument, as our fellowship structure took on a whole new look. We had been transformed from the leadership meeting/small-group/large-group structure into an Edge/large-group movement with evangelistic activity flowing out of these two structures (proxes, GIGs [Groups Investigating God] and public calls to faith).

We began to see our monument to Christianity shatter. A sleek, vibrant, loving movement started to emerge from the broken granite shell.

Our new structures

Here, in chart form, are depictions of the structural and strategic changes we made:

Old structure, May 2008:

New structure, moving into September 2008:

We now had structures in place that could free us up to move out of our huddle and toward the edges of our campus. Next: Part 3: Building momentum.

—Ben Humphries

Read more about how these students changed their chapter structure and took risks in their mission to the campus:
Chapter Makeover at UNH:

• Part 1: From monument to movement
• You are here: >> Part 2: Moving to The Edge
• Part 3: Building momentum
• Part 4: Dreaming big

 
Missional Christian: In the InterVarsity planting context, a missional Christian is defined as a student or faculty member who is motivated by their relationship with Jesus to advance the gospel on their campus, someone who is willing to devote time, resources and take risks for Jesus’ sake, to engage with cynics and seekers in order that they might be moved to belief. Go back up to continue reading.