Last month I participated in a discussion in response to a post on Brian Barela’s blog looking at the role that ministry mode evangelism plays in our movements on campus.
I think that ministry mode evangelism is an important element in our movements on campus but I do not think that we are ever going to fulfill our mission unless we can move beyond ministry mode evangelism into the two other modes (natural mode and body mode).
My concerns rest largely on two points. The first is that while ministry mode evangelism is essential in starting a movement, it is extremely difficult to have true spiritual multiplication in a campus setting without natural and/or body mode evangelism. The second is that unless our students learn natural mode evangelism (through us or others) they will be frustrated in their evangelism efforts beyond campus. I want to focus on the first of these points in this post.
Many of you will also be familiar that once a campus ministry gets to a certain size it becomes extremely difficult to grow beyond that point. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the law of 150, where once a group gets larger than 150 it begins to lose effectiveness. He cites many examples such as military unit sizes, Hutterite communities, etc which will divide or split up instead of exceeding this number in a group. The reason given for this is that beyond this number it becomes difficult for a person in the group to know everyone else and their relationship to each other.
Why is this important? Because the gospel travels faster along existing relationships. Evangelism where there are already existing relationships is also more likely to result in disciples. And one of the keys to building momentum in a movement is that momentum being visible. In a group of 150 a dozen disciples will be noticed and can have an impact. In a group of 15,000 much less so.
Bob Hopkins, from Anglican Church Planting Initiatives talks about a strategy they have been running called Clusters, where they aim to form mid-sized missional communities, who reach a group who share a common bond. (You can listen to him talk about it here.) One of the key things about this group is that it is mid-sized – not a small group and not a large group, and the key reason for that is so that everyone can still know each other. He also suggests instead of starting up a group, to find a group that already has a common bond, whether it be geographical (eg people living in the same apartment block) or interests. Those of you who have received CCC training should now have the key words “target area” and “affinity grouping” lighting up in your brain.
In fact, this was one of the key strategies used in the early days of CCC. The very first outreach that Bill and Vonette Bright did was to a sorority group at UCLA. Moreover, this was Paul’s strategy, he would go to different towns and start a church in each town. One of the difficulties we have faced in the last 20 or 30 years on campus has been that the campus has grown so much. In the 1950s the UCLA campus had about 15,000 students. Now it is close to 40,000. Even so, Bill Bright understood that if CCC was going to grow, what was needed was more movements, not bigger movements, and so CCC expanded into universities across the country, and eventually around the world.
The point being that if we are going to reach campuses of thousands of students, we need more movements, not bigger movements. We need to be identifying and locating “target areas” on our campus where we can start a movement. Ideally, if we can identify target areas that are in the “150″ range then we can minister in these settings and allow the gospel to spread along natural pathways within the group.
Perhaps one way we can overcome the resistance that we find to going past the “150″ size in our movement would be to split the movement on campus. To have separate movements for each faculty or hall of residence.
In all of this, ministry mode evangelism is still important. Each target area needs to begin with intentional missional activity ie ministry mode evangelism. However, once we have a critical mass, the key to starting the movement is natural mode evangelism, where we utilize the existing relationships within the target area for the gospel.
So what do you think? Can more movements on a single campus help us to better reach the campus?
