I loved every minute of my time with the teams I was privileged to spend time with this past year. Each one of you have become very dear to me!!!
I observed so many great things on each of the teams and I want to pass onto you just a few of the things I saw throughout the area:
- You love God and recognize that you are helpless unless He is the Source of your wisdom and power! You love the Lord and want to be about His purposes!
- You are all highly motivated and committed to the idea of ‘movements everywhere’. I was glad to see that a couple of the teams are asking God to use them to reach beyond their countries to take the gospel to the world!
- You all have a strong, sound vision for the mission.
- You are teachable.
I learned some good lessons as well – the main thing I learned is that we all are struggling with the same difficulties of ministry. Overall what I learned about catalytic through my travels this year:
- It’s really hard to step out of the ‘staffed/base/classic campus’ mode of ministry! It will take some concentrated effort and perseverance to focus on learning how to think differently, especially in a catalytic-metro context where the part of ministry that is visible looks very similar to what we did in a base-campus strategy!
- We tend to do what we know what we already know how to do (and it is really hard to try to do things that are new to us, so we go back to the things that are easier). Let’s encourage one another to move out into that scary area of the unknown or un-understood and trust God to show us what to do!
- We need much more exposure, knowledge/understanding and experience in order to how to do the ‘next thing’ in catalytic ministry (whatever is the ‘next thing’ is that is beyond what we already know how to do). So look around the region or to catalytic teams in other areas who are seeing success in the areas that we are struggling in and find out from them what they have learned and why they are seeing some success. Be creative in finding ways to get what you need.
- We gravitate toward methods without determining whether or not they will work in our context or whether we need to adapt the methods before we use them. Work to avoid the tendency to simply adopt methods in the form that they were used successfully in another context.
On the whole, I was very encouraged at your desire to bring the gospel to every single student in your scope! You are all on the right track – keep asking God to show you how to move each of your locations to the next stage and believe Him to work in your midst! He is at work and we will weep when we see what He has done through our dependence on Him as we see people around the throne of God because God worked through you to do something beyond what you are capable of doing!