One of the areas I oversee at our church is our college ministry. I wanted to walk you through some of how we work on connecting new students to the ministry.

When it comes to connecting new students in the fall, we've got a pretty detailed plan. First, you need to know a little about our church and city. Our church is literally across the street from a great Christian school, California Baptist University. We're about 10 minutes down the street from Riverside Community College with thousands of students. We're about 15-20 minutes across town from UC Riverside which has over 17,000 students. We focus a lot of our connection efforts on CBU as they're super-close, but have seen a major increase in RCC and UCR students in the last year.

What we do at CBU:

• We have a large banner that we put up on the corner of our church property advertising our college ministry. It looks REALLY good and it's amazing how many students we talk to that reference the banner.
  
• Table at involvement fair for new students. We had fall calendars as well as an invite card for our tuesday night gathering.
• First big Sunday back we do a free lunch for college students.....we had 18 feet of burrito this year...and we ran out.
• First Tuesday when school's back in session we called it "Sundae Tuesday." Kicked off the year with worship/teaching and then had an ice cream sundae bar afterwards.
• All of the students who attend on Sunday mornings get a phone call from a student within two days thanking them for coming and letting them know about other stuff going on.

What we're doing with RCC and UCR (still a major work in progress):

• Our evangelism pastor is basically the campus pastor for Campus Crusade for Christ at RCC and is on campus weekly.
  
• We will be doing some sort of BBQ/welcome event for UCR students (they're on the quarter system and move in this Sunday). We've also begun partnering some with the Asian-American Christian Fellowship there.

Where we need to head:

• We need some sort of on-campus presence at both of these public schools at the beginning of the school year - maybe a table handing out free blue books, coffee, or something else.
• We need some sort of on-going Bible study/small group presence happening on the UCR campus that's led by students in our church.
• We need to continue building on the natural friendship networks that exist. This has been what's moved us forward with UCR students.....students connecting those other students they know.
  

Labels: college ministry

Met today with Benson Hines who is on a several-month journey across the country checking out different college ministries. It's a pretty cool concept. One of his goals is to highlight the importance of ministering to college students. I enjoyed my time with him. Check out his blog for all the details.

Labels: college ministry

We have a new college pastor starting on February 24th. His name's Aaron Friesen and is coming from an intern role at Christ First Baptist Church in Covina. Cool coincidence - he's dating this girl, Rose, that we knew in college. She's super cool and fun. Aaron will be heading up the team ministering to college-age young adults in this part-time role. He doesn't blog that I know about, but I'll try and get him started if he doesn't.

There is some really cool stuff happening in our college ministry that I'll have to blog about soon. I'm excited that Aaron's on our team.

Labels: college ministry

I've been thinking a little bit since we've been back from our London mission trip. There's something very fulfilling about time on a mission trip. We just would get up every day and head out to see what God had for us. Yes, there were plans and projects, but each day felt very different. It was a cool sense of "doing what you're supposed to be doing."

Then I get back home and have to deal with e-mails and budgets and unhappy parents and ministry decisions and conflict.....and it's draining. I somehow yearn for being back in that mode of just getting up each day ready to tackle the new adventure. Yet I know that God is working through even the frustrations of this week.

God is showing up through:

• A student named Ryan who is showing more interest in getting connected
• An energy and enthusiasm in our 11:00 service
• A great message by my senior pastor today that was both challenging and encouraging at the same time
• The feel of a fresh start in our college ministry
• Leaders (Lucas, Jon, Ben, Chris) who are stepping up, growing, and moving us forward together

Labels: college ministry, missions, youth ministry

Generating buzz for a ministry is sometimes a tough thing. In reality, the best kind of buzz is when something is happening, God is changing lives, and people just have to tell their friends about it. At the same time, we've been going at this college ministry thing for a few months now and have some decent momentum in some ways, but still need to get moving in others.

We made and ordered some promo cards for our series we're starting tomorrow night. Problem was, I underestimated the shipping time and we didn't get them in time to get to any of our students on Sunday.

Then today I was on campus at CBU and went to give some to Deanna, one of our college students. I asked how many she wanted and she's on duty in the dorms tonight so as I'm typing this just about every one of the 100-something rooms in Simmons Hall should have a promo card for our new series. I'm stoked that she's getting the word out!

Next step - let the guys in our area know we may be having a female invasion tomorrow night. The odds are now in their favor.

Labels: college ministry

Kind of a crazy night tonight. We had night of HALO with high school guys tonight. Had about 25 guys show up, about half of those were guests. Very cool.

Also had our college Christmas party tonight. Both these events were happening at the same time so I went to the first part of the college party to have dinner and then headed over for about 3 more hours of HALO. We had about 15 or so at the college party. After I left, they headed out to a Christmas Tree Lane type deal in Rancho Cucamonga. Haven't heard back on how that was yet, but hopefully they had a good time.

Labels: college ministry, youth ministry

We're two weeks into Thursday nights now. The first week we had 15 and this week we had 29 (including 4 leaders). 30 students was the goal I was hoping for this week, but 29's cool. On the fourth Thursday of each month it's going to be a hang-out, coffeehouse style feel. This week we basically just threw decks of cards on some round tables, put some music on the sound system, and had some food and stuff. People seemed to really like it. Chris Davis was going to play some acoustic stuff, but we ended up not doing that....it was going fine without it. Next week we launch a series called "What Matters Most". More to come...

Labels: college ministry

We launched our Thursday night gatherings last week. Here's my basic rundown: the room looked very cool. I bought a bunch of floor lamps at Target and killed all the flourescents. So that was cool. Worship was good, message felt pretty good. Downsides: there were only about 15 of us there which was a little bit of a bummer. There was a big CBU event that night so that may have hurt us. During my talk there were two times where a guy raised his hand and asked a question....which isn't completely the format. I guess that could be the format (although I'm not leaning that way), but they were the kind of things that could have waited until after.

I have a meeting today at 4 to talk about how we're going to incorporate a coffee bar each week and turn it into full coffeehouse once a month. That should be cool. My hope is to see 30 students there this week.

Last, but not least, we have the most amazing volunteers involved in college ministry! They're making it fun and much easier for me.

Labels: college ministry

Well, in just under two hours we'll be launching our first Thursday night college gathering. I'm excited about it, but have no idea what the turnout will be. It starts at 9pm which will either be awesome for us or hurt us. The format's pretty simple - 20-25 minutes of worship through singing and 25-30 minutes of teaching. I bought some lamps and we're turning out all the flourescents in our meeting room to have a little more informal feel. Jon's helping us out with leading worship until we really put that team together. We're competing against the barn dance of CBU's TWIRP (The Woman is Required to Pay) Week. That was Nicole and I's first "official" date back in the day. Maybe some future married couples are learning to do-si-do together tonight.

Labels: college ministry

Met with Brad Baker, pastor of Crave at Saddleback Church, for a bit yesterday to talk through some college ministry stuff. He came on staff there maybe a month before I left so we barely crossed paths before I headed out to Riverside. He's a sharp, laid-back, and humble guy. We talked about several things, but here's some that stood out.

• Think in terms of three seasons - summer, fall, spring
• One retreat in each season - this will propel growth ahead both spiritually and numerically
  
• Teaching in each season divided into series of Topical, Philosophical/Theological, and Exegetical (this is a good thought process for planning out teaching series)
• Core or ministry team consists of: Ministry Team Members (varying, but potentially low commitment), Ministry Team Leaders, Core Lead Team (I don't have my notes with me and may have that wording wrong). That Core Lead Team is the "go-to" people that pour into the ministry team leaders who then pour into the ministry team members.
• Relationships, relationships, relationships - this permeated through everything we talked about and has permeated our discussion at our church regarding college ministry
• Brad estimated they have about 85% of their Thursday night service attendance plugged into small groups. That's a pretty impressive percentage.

All in all some good conversation. Brad's only been there a year so I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with young adults in the future.

Last, but not least - I also got to run into Allison Hibbard, Jason Pogue, John Snyder, and Katie "I need to start blogging" Edwards. Always good to see old friends. I miss seeing you guys every day.

Labels: college ministry

So today was CBU's involvement fair. They had the In-n-Out truck there serving food and a ton of different churches, banks, companies, military branches, etc. with displays. Here's how the day went.

I set my alarm for 7 hoping to be out the door between 8 and 8:30. At 9:06 Nicole got out of bed and I freaked out realizing I was running late. Got ready quick, took care of a bunch of stuff, and made it down to the church office. We were supposed to have a banner ready to go by 10am. I called the sign place at 11 or so and he said it would be ready at 2. That would be great if the event didn't end at 1:30. So he says he'll start printing it. I get over there at about 11:30 and he says something keeps crashing....ok, now it's working, but will be a bit....send somebody over at noon. I get a call a few minutes later as I'm almost at CBU that something still keeps crashing and we're not going to have it. So, we have no signage. That's ok.

Long story short, we set up and were good to go. It was BLAZING hot. Everyone was melting. But we had quite a few students come by and were able to get them some info. Also was able to re-connect with some of the students who had visited Sunday. Met a Saddleback guy named Kyle which was kinda cool to have that in common. All in all, worth the time and running around. Hopefully some students will check our church and college ministry out as a result of it.

Labels: college ministry

Today was our first Sunday with new CBU students on campus. We had about 50 (including leaders) at our welcome lunch today. Probably 30ish new students there. I was pleased with the way it went. Format was pretty simple:

Hang Out
Table Talk
Food
Quick Ministry Overview from Me
More Hanging Out and Food

All in all, pretty successful. We got info from most, if not all, of the new students. We included options on the card for wanting to plug into different ministries and had a lot of people check stuff there.

This week in college ministry...
Follow up on guests from Sunday
CBU Involvement Fair on Tuesday
Begin promo for BBQ on the 14th
Get ready for another big Sunday

Labels: college ministry

Our new college website is up and running. It's a little bare-bones at the moment, but we had to get it online quick because I put it on our promo posters and flyers. Putting something in print will make you get the job done fast! You can check it out here.

Labels: college ministry

I apologize for not keeping as up to date with my blogging as I'd like to. I think summer's thrown me off, but hopefully with fall pretty much here I can get back into blogging at least once every weekday. Here's some of what's going on in my world:

• School starts back today for our high school students in Riverside. I'm going to send a quick text message to all the students I have in my cell phone wishing them a good first day.
• On that same note, school starting up seems to have multiplied the amount of traffic on the road. Alessandro (for any Riverside readers) was a parking lot from about Trautwein till almost Arlington. Took forever.
• On that same note, it feels like every major street in Riverside is under construction. It will be good when it's done, but there's a lot of orange cones everywhere right now.
• This afternoon I'm having dinner at BJ's with Stephen Perry who will be speaking at our fall retreat in a few weeks. We have 18 students currently signed up and will probably take about 40 after the deadline this Sunday.
• College stuff - working on getting the website up, getting flyers for our welcome lunch out today, trying to find a workable room situation for our thursday night gathering
  

Labels: college ministry, random, youth ministry