Tweaks

My staff partners Ben and Jeff went to training for new staff on campus strategy last week. I haven't been able to hear from Jeff on what he's learned and changes he hopes to make - he's in Chicago. But I got to talk to Ben, and I'm excited by the "tweaks" we're thinking about for Aggie IV.

We're looking at making our Core Team meetings open to any student who wants to be a part of God's mission on campus. This could also help our Large Group and Outreach meetings. We need to help students, leaders and members alike, to take ownership of the mission, and planning and putting on those meetings should do that, theoretically.

We've also merged our co-ed Small Groups, and they met for the first time together last week. It went great! Please continue to pray that they "set the table" together, and invite their friends, classmates, and roommates to join them.

We're cutting our focus. I've been spending a lot of my energy trying to keep up with things that aren't moving us forward. And I've spent a lot of emotional energy on guilt over not being able to keep up with everything. I'm stepping back from putting on the Veritas Forum. I hope other staff, volunteers, and students will lead. We've also decided to hold off on launching a Small Group at Blinn until the spring at least. In the meantime, Brice and I are meeting to pray and ask God to lead us and prepare us, and we're trying to gather more support. With the Divine Experiment done, and the Greek and South Asian American Small Groups not needing too much help, I feel a lot more freedom to spend my energy on LaFe, our Latino American outreach.

Finally, we're focusing on "catalytic drivers," a term InterVarsity is using to describe events that will help propel the fellowship forward and keep vision at the forefront. Our next catalytic driver is Nov. 11-12 at Word in the Woods, a Scripture study camping retreat. So we're doing everything we can to invite students, and at the retreat we're going to call students to greater ownership of the mission - will they share the good news with the campus?