I am currently reading Movements that Change the World by Steve Addison. Last night I read Chapter 3 which is entitled Contagious Relationships and it highlighted some thoughts that I have been having about how we can best build movements on university campuses around the world.
A key point that underlies a lot of what is said in this chapter is that “Like a virus, the gospel travels along these lines of preexisting communication.” He points out that the norm in conversion is for someone to come to faith through the influence of a close relationship. People coming to faith without these relationships do happen (I’m one of them!) but they are not the norm, and the relationships are a key factor in building movements.
He points out that when Christianity began in the 1st Century, it initially spread through the Jewish diaspora, particularly through the Hellenistic Jews (those who had adopted a lot of the Greek ways of life). In other words it spread through the family and social networks of the initial converts.
What is more, whenever missionary activity went to an new town or city, “their ministry focused on making initial contacts with members of a social group. Once some insiders were converted, they became the key to the gospel spreading throughout the rest of the social network, while the missionary played a more supportive role.”
So in the early church, the missionary’s role was to get something started in a new place, and then to help the first new converts to themselves do the work of reaching their social group. Also, as this is taking place, it creates opportunities to spread into adjacent social networks.
The chapter then further emphasises the importance of relationships:
“There are many factors that influence the decision to adopt a new faith, but the most important factor is a close and positive relationship with a committed participant. From a human point of view, conversion is accepting the opinion of your friends. Mass meetings and dynamic leaders are not enough for effective recruitment, unless they play a role in motivating existing members to win over their social networks. The key to the spread of any movement is face-to-face recruitment by committed participants.”
This is an important lesson for campus ministry. Unless we can motivate our students to share the gospel with their friends and classmates, we will never build movements. We can raise up a group that has a strong weekly meeting, or a Bible study or training program, but unless our students are sharing their faith with their friends and classmates, it will never turn into a movement.
But you may be wondering whether relational evangelism is really so necessary. Couldn’t we build a movement based on mass outreaches or random evangelism?
The chapter gives three key factors that contribute to how contagious a movement becomes. The second is Tight but open social networks. There is a balance that needs to be made between keeping a movement “tight”, having strong enough internal attachments to build energy, commitment and focus, and also “open”, keeping social networks and connections with those outside the group.
One of the dangers of a group being too tight is that it will tend to recruit “isolated individuals without strong social networks”. One of the observations of random evangelism is that it tends to target exactly those type of people. Now it is wonderful that people like that can hear the gospel and respond, but a ministry that focuses on this type of evangelism over evangelism along relational networks will never be able to become a growing movement.
Large scale outreaches have another problem. Often many will respond initially but it is very difficult to integrate them into the movement. Some become part of the movement against all odds, but the resistance to joining is much greater than those who respond to the gospel along a relational network. Now my suggestion is not that we discard our large scale outreaches, but that we tailor them in such a way that they make the best use of the relational networks that our students already have.
Two years ago in analysing our follow-up statistics we saw a huge difference in the percentage of students who started follow-up based on whether the person who led them to Christ was the person responsible for their follow-up or not. It seemed that even having met someone once and had a meaningful conversation with them created a bond that aided the follow-up process, if and only if, it was that person doing the follow-up.
So what should we do? I believe we need to rethink how we use target areas in our ministry. We need to think of a target area as a social group. If you think of a social group as a group where everyone knows at least half of the people in the group by name. We need to send ourselves and our students as missionaries into these social groups. Perhaps our students are already part of some of these social groups – in that case the hardest step has already been done, now they need to share the gospel with the people in this group, starting with the people they know, and eventually this social group can be saturated with the gospel, and can start sending people out to reach adjacent target areas (ideally someone who is a member of two target areas). Although the book says that face-to-face recruitment in key, in today’s world of social networks on the web, tools like facebook and twitter are equally as useful, and in fact the principles from this chapter are key to using facebook and other social networking websites effectively.
This may mean less of a focus on some of the structures that we have set up on campus. Maybe it means that the weekly campus meeting becomes monthly and more meetings happen in target areas instead. Maybe it means tweaking our outreaches so that they are more targeted to where we can harvest the results, as opposed to a scatter-gun approach.
What do you think? How big a difference would this make to how you do campus ministry on your campus?