Thank you for 8 years in ministry
Ryan| November 14th, 2011How do we Go on Summer Project?
Ryan| November 8th, 2011 |
Summer projects are 2-10 week hotbeds of ministry all over the world that take place between May and Aug every year. These short chunks of time every year are probably the most impactful thing that we do in the campus ministry.
Not only are staff and students going to strategic locations for ministry every summer but they are taking giant leaps in their walks with the Lord and reaching other college students for Christ.
This last year 3500 students went on summer projects across the globe. That is 3500 students that now have changed lives and a closer walk with the Lord because of their summer. More than 100,000 people heard the gospel presented to them and together they saw 8000+ men and women enter into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
These are staggering results of what the Lord chooses to do in and through Campus Ministry Summer Projects around the world every year.
Let me step back a moment. What does it take to get there? How do these 3500 students decide how to spend their summer? Once they have decided to go on a summer project with Cru, how do they know where they should go?
Before a student maybe even knows what SP they want to go on or if they want to go at all, they need to know what a summer project is and what opportunities that are available to them for the summer.
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gosummerproject.com is live now. Check out the website and read some stories from students who went on summer projects last year. |
There is a long and thoughtful process that goes into the promotion of Summer Projects each year. We actually have a team at our national office in Orlando who is dedicated to evaluating, promoting and accelerating what we do on SP each year.
This past year the SP team in Orlando asked the Zero Canvas team (our design team in the Great Lakes) to take ownership of this process for SP 2012. Kristin Madeja, our team leader has a great post about the full process on her blog.
As we were finishing up the promotional materials and getting ready for the application process for SP 2012 to start this fall, they had no one to develop the website http://gosummerproject.com. I was asked to step in and finish what was started. I am thrilled that last week we were able to finish the site and students have already started applying for Summer 2012 through the website. In one week the gosummerproject website has had over 6000 unique visitors.
In a unique way you have helped fuel over 3500 students this next year who will give a summer of their lives to follow the Lord and see what He will do. Many of them are scared and will take leaps of faith this summer but will see the Lord do amazing things and forever change their lives.
Because of my unique combination of giftings in graphic design AND web development, and because I can devote my full attention to these projects, this vital tool can exist and be done the way the designers originally intended. Thank you for the part you have played in literally reaching the world for Christ this next summer.
Fall Staff Conference 2011
Ryan| November 8th, 2011 |
What if I asked “What if____?” and filled in my blank any old way I wanted? AND what IF God responded to me specifically with something new? What if He surprised me as I give Him free reign in my life? What if He wants to do something new in my heart and my mind?
Can you answer that question? Rachel and I will be headed to Cinncinatti for our Regional Fall Staff Conference in a few short weeks to see how the Lord would have us answer that question.
Besides going to the conference, Rachel and I both have significant responsabilities during the conference.
As always, Ryan is in a tech role helping make the main meeting run well as well as leading the video team to stream our conference to our 150 International staff that are part of our region.
Rachel had taken on more responsability to help lead our Internship process in our region (yes, while she is pregnant) and will be helping to lead a training time during the weekend for our staff who will be evaluating Internship applications this coming spring for 2012.
How do you Centralize the Mission?
Ryan| September 19th, 2011
September signifies the start of the fall and cooler temperatures. It is also right in the middle of a strategic time on campus we like to call the first 6 weeks. In the first 6 weeks of ministry on campus, each one of our ministries is ramping up and trying to get things off the ground.
As the Juniors, Sophomores and Freshmen from last year step up into leadership roles within the ministry, there is a brand new group of students who are making their way on campus. Most of them are Freshmen. These students are the key group that we try to introduce to the cru ministry during these first 6 weeks.
One of the main ways we try to connect with this group of students during the first 6 weeks on campus is through a short questionnaire. We ask questions like: How important is your spiritual life? Would you be interested in a small group bible study? Would you like to hear more about cru? Would you like to know more about a personal relationship with Jesus?
We use these questionnaires throughout the school year to connect with students on campus and engage in spiritual conversations with them.
Can you imagine trying to connect with 5000 freshman college students with a team of 10 or maybe 15 staff and a group of student leaders? This task feels insurmountable and often some of these contacts fall through the cracks. How can we make this questionnaire/contact card generation easier? And how do we make sure that we connect with each one of these students after we have their information? These are questions I love asking.
You may remember a project I was working on last year called Bonfire. Bonfire has been added to a nationwide cru software project called missionhub. Missionhub is a web application that helps to connect students with the ministry on their campus.
Beyond the campus ministry, the goal of missionhub is to connect students, ministries, churches, and local business professionals and others in the great commission. Missionhub will include many of the features that Bonfire possessed in the near future but the strength of missionhub right now is helping our ministries connect with students on campus.
Missionhub allows our staff to connect with students and retain their contacts in a streamlined way that is easier to manage. Instead of using contact cards (pen and paper), missionhub harnesses the power of facebook and social media to put students who volunteer their information into a database that our teams can access and even sort and assign to other members of the team.
Imagine if you were a staff member on campus and you could log into missionhub and see everyone on your campus who has filled out a survey. Not only that but you might be sitting in the lobby of a dorm on campus right now and you can see who lives in that dorm and pull up their phone number (which they have provided) and give them a call.
“Hey Matt, this is Ryan on staff with cru. I just pulled up the questionnaire you filled out last week in the quad and you mentioned you might be interested in hearing more about Bible study opportunities on campus. I lead a Bible study in your dorm and I am in the lobby right now. Do you have some time to get together?”
And you can do all this without carrying around a stack of contact cards or spending hours typing all the information into an excel file. Missionhub is completely mobile. You can access it anywhere on the go using a smart phone or iPad. The staff around the country are using this program as you read this. This is a great example of how I want to continue using my skills to help make ministry on campus more efficient so that more time can be spent engaging students with the Gospel.
Using Thesis to Build and Network
Ryan| August 19th, 2011Early this spring I was working on a way to streamline the development and maintenance of our web infrastructure in the region. I utilized a few web platforms known as Thesis and WordPress. This was not only for our regional websites but also to provide the ease of use and inherent operational capacity for our local ministry teams across the region.
As the semester began, I was bombarded with requests from our local teams around the region for updated websites for their ministries. It used to take me weeks worth of work to accomplish this for them.
Now, with our new network of websites set up on the regional server it takes no time at all. I am able to provide a high quality website for our local teams that they can edit and maintain.
I have also helped several of our other regions in the US utilize this same strategy for their campuses. Hundreds of campuses across the US have had effective websites and connection with students happen through the infastructure I was able to build out this last spring.
Curently, I am hosting half of our ministry teams local websites on the regional network with more to come.