Changing Evangelism in Campus Ministry

Big idea: Although most affirmation, training, and measuring with the Campus Ministry is around initiative evangelism and good news, students today are coming to faith through relationships and good deeds.

In 2009, the Mid-South Region of Campus Crusade for Christ began a research project on evangelism effectiveness. On the research team was Howard Levin, Dan Flynn, Joey Payne, Roy Baker, Scott Blom, and Tim Henderson. Their challenge was stated as follows:

How can we increase the evangelistic satisfaction and effectiveness of Campus Crusade for Christ staff so that more lost students are presented with the gospel in culturally appropriate, positive ways and more students decide to place their trust in Christ?

This problem of course presumes some measure of evangelistic dissatisfaction and ineffectiveness among our staff. In attempting to better understand the causes of this, and to discover solutions, we conducted six streams of research. We:

• Surveyed Campus Crusade Staff to learn about their experiences in evangelism.
• Conducted focus groups with Unbelievers to learn how they perceive Christians and our message.
• Interviewed New Believers to learn what helped them come to faith.
• Interviewed External Leaders to learn how organizations other than Crusade are conducting evangelism
• Read several books on Culture and Evangelism to learn from those with expertise outside our predominant skill set.
• Read several books on combining Good Words with Good Deeds to learn about a topic in which we are particularly inexperienced.

Here is my executive summary of the 75-page report entitled Changing Evangelism: Mid-Atlantic SLI, May 13, 2009.

Staff 

Our staff are requesting explicit permission to spend their time in pre-evangelistic activities. They would also like better training and resourcing so they can help non-Christians reconsider their gospel-incompatible worldviews in a relationally safe manner.

As one staff member put it:

“Even though sowing is something that people say is good and acceptable, much of everything else in our ministry screams that it’s not. Our stats are reaping only! Almost all of our training is for ‘randoms’ which end up equipping our students to do something that has almost no relevancy to them after college.”

Unbelievers

Unbelievers are telling us that there is a disconnect between our efforts to convey the good

news about Jesus and their willingness to listen to us tell that message. Consider the three main findings of these interviews:

• The method of the messenger has become the message. Our audience wants a respectful, non-confrontational approach, but when the messenger is perceived to be disrespectful or hypocritical, the message is considered irrelevant. This has implications for training believers and for creating new tools/approaches to reach this generation. As one unbeliever commented, “They listen to Christian music, have fish on their cars, then tell everyone they are going to hell.”
• They are convinced they’ve already heard. Regardless of how we adapt our evangelistic approaches, it is significant to know that our audience thinks they’ve already heard the message of Jesus (even if, in fact, they haven’t). We found that 31 of 34 unbelievers we interviewed felt that they’d already heard the message of Jesus.
• Their conversational autonomy trumps our initiating compassion. For many, the power to decide when and with whom they will have a discussion about Jesus is a higher concern than the notion that believers feel compassion toward them in initiating a conversation about Jesus. Therefore, didactic or presentational approaches (as opposed to questioning and conversational approaches) may not get as much traction as in the past. We need new tools, of the right kind. “I’d prefer they didn’t (talk to me about Jesus). I’m an adult capable of making my own decisions.” We found in a world where savvy collegians filter most incoming information, our presentational approaches have become the unwanted “pop-up ads” on the computer screen of their lives.

Dr. Bright said, “The majority of non-believers throughout the world are ready to receive Christ when properly approached with a clear and simple presentation of the gospel by a Spirit-filled witness.” What if this is no longer true in our context? 

New Believers

Students are still coming to Christ, though perhaps not by the same means that they did 30 years ago. We suggest that not only have the times changed, but so have the avenues into a New Believer’s heart. Today more than ever, that road is navigated via the vehicle of a trusted friend.

We interviewed 30 college students between the ages of 18-23 from different ethnicities and geographical locations who have come to faith in Christ within the past 12 months. The goal was to identify obstacles that kept them from coming to faith earlier, identify the ministry mode that most assisted them to receive Christ, and understand their personal reasons for placing their faith in Christ.

Consider the three main findings of these interviews:

• Relationships are key. Our research shows that each person is unique, with different obstacles to faith in Christ. What was consistent, however, is that nearly every student we interviewed came to Christ via a friend.
• New Believers needed someone to take the initiative with them before they were willing to place their faith in Christ. Typically someone else took the initiative to reach out to the student. Approximately 5% trusted Christ by themselves. Though a few students identified a ministry-mode approach, the vast majority of New Believers most clearly connected to Christ via a natural-mode of evangelism, sometimes supplemented by the body-mode of a Cru weekly large group.
• New Believers needed someone to correct misconceptions they had about God. Many New Believers expressed having had misconceptions and a lack of understanding about what it meant to be a Christian. Often the Christians they knew while growing up exacerbated their misconceptions. In fact, though many New Believers grew up around Christianity, they would say that they’d never really heard a clear presentation of the gospel before college. 

Of the believers we interviewed, 95% made a decision for Christ through the direct influence of a trusted friend. Natural mode evangelism was by far the single biggest contributing factor.

External Leaders

Experts outside of Campus Crusade (Navigators, InterVarsity, leading churches) are experiencing the same obstacles to evangelistic effectiveness that we are currently facing. Campus Crusade’s strength in creating transferable tools and approaches can be a gift to the body of Christ, if developed to overcome current obstacles. Consider these four findings:

• There is value in rethinking our metrics for the Campus Ministry. Each of the ministries interviewed chose metrics based on their ministry’s mission— some included numbers for evangelism exposures and conversions. But surprisingly, others attempted to measure other values. For example, Ralph Ennis of the Navigators shared, “…we don’t count numbers [of decisions now], but instead count how many are walking with God later.”
• It would be wise to set an organizational goal for conversion growth, along with an intentional plan to reach that goal. There is an ongoing (but vague) disappointment in our conversion rate. It may be valuable to us to have a rule of thumb that we can shoot for and celebrate.
• Those who have embraced cultural changes earlier than Campus Crusade have valuable lessons to teach us. In many ways, Crusade has held on to our methodology longer than our peer organizations. In this regard, we may no longer deserve our reputation for being as “evangelistically innovative” as in the past. We may need to humble ourselves and be more willing to learn from those who are ahead of us in adapting to cultural change.
• The world needs us to apply our expertise in transferability to create a transferable “worldview-challenging” mode of evangelism. Campus Crusade can serve the Body of Christ by making a sophisticated approach transferable. David Bisgrove of Redeemer Presbyterian Church explained that they could use Campus Crusade’s help with worldview training: “One main reason people do not invite friends to [Redeemer Presbyterian] events is their fear that after the meeting they will be asked questions they cannot answer.”

Culture and Evangelism

Many of our evangelistic strategies are based on the assumption that most people are ready to respond in faith. However, there is evidence that this is no longer wholly true. In light of this, we should continue to simply and clearly communicate the gospel to the minority who are ready, while developing new expertise in helping the majority move toward readiness.

In developing this expertise, we can benefit from those who have studied, experimented with, and written about new solutions. From our readings on Culture and Evangelism, consider these three main lessons:

• We must learn to respectfully deconstruct students’ worldviews, in such a way that they come to question their own beliefs. “If people are currently comfortable with their non-Christian worldview, we need to know how to help them become uncomfortable with it, so that they may become interested in looking at Jesus.”

–Nick Pollard in Evangelism Made Slightly Less Difficult

• We must learn to carefully deconstruct students’ views of Christians, changing their perceptions through humble, loving interactions in which we carefully steward God’s reputation and the gospel message. “Most people I meet assume that ‘Christian’ means very conservative, entrenched in their thinking, anti-gay, anti-choice, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders; they want to convert everyone, and they generally cannot live peacefully with anyone who doesn’t believe what they believe.”

An outsider quoted by David Kinnaman in unChristian

• We must value the role of the sower, champion sowing activities, and develop sowing skills despite the lack of immediate fruit they will produce. “Those of us in harvesting positions must rethink our concept of ‘true ministry.’ We have come to believe that there are only two kinds of Christians: the harvesters and the disobedient. We must begin to teach that every Christian everywhere is a laborer. We must tell them that every laborer should learn to reap, and that God will call some to exclusively exercise this role–but everyone can learn to sow right now, right where they are. In short, we must revalue the role of the sower. . . so that one day the sower and the harvester can be glad together.”

Tim Downs in Finding Common Ground

Good News and Good Deeds

Historically Campus Crusade has focused exclusively on the good words of the gospel, while leaving the good deeds to others. A movement in the church at large, and in particular among this generation of students, has helped us to see there is value in embracing a more holistic approach. We should learn to incorporate both Good Words and Good Deeds into our normal ministry activities.

Some have expressed the fear that in embracing Good Deeds, we may find ourselves losing our focus on sharing the Good Words. Others worry that doing Good Deeds merely as a means to the end of Good Words is a bait-and-switch technique unworthy of ministers of the gospel. Both objections are answered when we understand that sharing Christ is always our ultimate motive, but never our ulterior motive. Indeed love compels us to meet basic immediate needs, but it forbids us from stopping there. We must love the whole person, body and soul. Being persuaded from our reading and interviews of the value of adding good deeds to our normal ministry activity, consider these three main lessons:

• Compassionate acts are tangible ways to serve those we are called to love. The world is dying. Every day we see and hear about the ravaging effects of sin in the world. The brokenness takes a thousand forms: poverty, pornography, the sex trade, starvation, illiteracy, oppression. We are the salt and light to bring solutions to a broken world that God loves.
• Compassionate acts serve as a corrective for the negative perception many non-Christians have of Christians. As described in our report “Unbelievers,” Christianity has an image problem. Radical acts of generosity and love can help reverse this. “Through witnessing these selfless demonstrations of love and helpful acts of service, observers believed that the church just might have something worth listeningto.” Rick Rusaw and Eric Swanson in The Externally Focused Church
• Compassionate acts create opportunities to communicate the gospel message to those we serve and serve alongside. “It takes between 12 and 20 positive bumps [refreshing encounters with the church] before people come to Christ. Our presence in the public square through service gives us opportunities to provide these refreshing encounters.” Dave Workman, Vineyard Community Church

“I have to admit that my own view of evangelism was about saving as many people from hell as possible—for the next life. It minimized my concern for those same people in this life. It wasn’t as important that they were poor or hungry or persecuted, or perhaps rich, greedy and arrogant; we just had to get them to pray the ‘sinners prayer’ and then move on to the next potential convert.”

–Richard Stearns, The Hole in Our Gospel

Our Analysis and Proposal

Throughout our research, a picture emerged that explains why our staff feel ineffective and dissatisfied in evangelism. In brief, there is incongruence between the behavior they feel trained for and expected to perform, and the behavior they feel would be most helpful to the majority of the lost on their campuses. The college campus has changed. As it has, the skills that an effective evangelist must possess have also changed. However, our staff have not kept up with these changes, nor have they felt the freedom to do so. Our rich culture and great historical success in evangelism have caused us to see particular modes and methods of evangelism as primary for our staff and students. However, our staff, unbelievers, new believers, outside experts, and the books we read are all telling us one thing: more comprehensive skill-sets and approaches in evangelism are required. Consider the following chart, which represents three different continuums of evangelistic skills:

Along the X-axis (horizontal) are dialogic skills. To the left (End-Game Evangelism) are skills helpful in explaining the essence of the gospel to someone who is potentially ready to believe. To the right (Pre-Evangelism) are skills an evangelist would need to explain the gospel to someone whose worldview is incompatible with belief in the gospel. We have historically been a harvesting organization and our staff are well equipped to explain substitutionary atonement to people with a worldview to accept it. We are much less skilled at graciously deconstructing worldviews of those who are not ready.

The Y-axis (vertical) represents the skills useful in ministry mode and natural mode evangelism.

Our evangelism model embraces both, but in our training and skills we lean heavily toward ministry mode. The Z-axis suggests the skills useful in proclaiming and demonstrating the gospel, or as we termed it elsewhere in this report, Good Words and Good Deeds. Good Words are to the fore, and Good Deeds, to the back. As we all know, we have focused primarily on proclamation (Good Words) and our skills reside there. All the skills represented at every point along each axis are valuable, but some skills will find greater usefulness based on the needs of the culture. Indeed, it’s likely that we developed our current expertise in the lower, left, front quadrant specifically because of the needs of the culture at the time of our founding (and through our early years). However, as the culture has changed, the skills needed to effectively reach it have changed as well. Over the years the number of students ready to believe the gospel has shrunk. Some still exist, and our traditional skills will be very helpful to them. However, since we are tasked to reach every student, we need skills to reach every student, including the green majority who are not yet ready to respond in faith to Christ.

“Although our training, affirmation, and measurement are in the RED ZONE, 95% of the 30 students who came to Christ in our studty, came to Christ in the context of the GREEN ZONE.” Howard Levin.

This means we must broaden our capacities to play (and win) at both sides of all three axes. We need to continue to excel in proclaiming the essence of the gospel in ministry mode contexts to those ready to believe. But we also need to learn a whole new set of skills that will help us move Unbelievers toward readiness. We need to learn how to combine Good Deeds with our Good

Words, address incompatible worldviews, and function comfortably in natural mode contexts.

Fortunately, the seeds for what we are proposing already exist within our organization. These seeds need to be watered and fertilized so they can come to maturity in the form of improved skill sets and a new balance in our approaches to evangelism. With great respect to our heritage and hope for our future, we recommend the following steps be taken:

1. Affirm Permission to Sow

From the highest levels of our Mid-Atlantic Leadership (and hopefully in conjunction with our

National Leadership), we must repeatedly articulate authentic permission to be involved in pre-evangelistic/ sowing activities. From speaking with our leadership, we believe staff do have this permission, but they aren’t experiencing it. Our rich heritage, the stories we tell, the metrics we count, and the experiences of Big Break and Summer Projects all speak more loudly than the permission that has been expressed. Our staff need to be persuaded that sowing activities will be regarded as meaningful and valid by their leadership.

2. Adjust the Paradigms

While our evangelism model values ministry, natural, and body modes of evangelism, our default posture tends toward ministry mode. For instance, though CoJourners demonstrates organizational approval of natural mode, many staff and students continue to experience evangelism as an activity performed with strangers. We need to champion new paradigms of reaching the collegians of the Mid-Atlantic (and US) by helping Christians reach those closest to them: their friends and classmates. We know that CCC is famous for crossing barriers into new places, but the truth is that few of our students are even reaching those who sit next to them in class. Given that people who come to Christ do so overwhelmingly in the context of relationships, we need to emphasize reaching those with whom we have the greatest opportunities for influence as we move toward reaching every collegian in our Mid-Atlantic (and US) scope.

3. Assist with Compassion

We should require some type of compassionate activity among our movements at their local address. We are encouraged by the energy being given to this already (e.g. GAiN & one million meals for Haiti at Big Break), but we have a way to go to touch our local movements. For the health of our own hearts, for our perceived image on our campuses, and for the simple fact that Jesus did this, we need to develop expertise in this non-traditional focus. As we grow in demonstrating the love of God, we expect more opportunities to express the love of God.

4. Accelerate Transferability

Part of the genius of Campus Crusade for Christ is our focus on transferability. We must apply that expertise in developing approaches, tools, and training to help our staff and student leaders develop the skills needed to sow and deconstruct/reconstruct worldviews. We have some tools for this, but we need more and better resources to equip students in these complex tasks.

5. Align the Metrics

Metrics must be amended to value pre-evangelistic and sowing activities described above. We believe there is value in motivating, celebrating, and monitoring evangelistic activity that takes place throughout a movement. We must count what both staff and students do across the full range of desirable evangelistic behavior. This measuring can help us to emphasize and value what will most help the lost.

6. Aspire to Dependence

Finally, our intuition says that even if we do all of these things successfully, we are destined for failure apart from an outpouring of God’s Spirit on our campuses. Therefore, we ought to afford ourselves every opportunity to raise up a presence of prayer to the Living God, to thaw the hearts of this generation of collegians and depend on him daily. Unless the Lord builds this house, we labor in vain.

For a full report of Changing Evangelism: Mid-Atlantic SLI, May 13, 2009 see http://changingevangelism.org/changingevangelism.pdf