// Where were all the leaders?

by Aaron Clayton on August 10, 2010

Last weekend, August 6-8, most of our college leadership went away for the weekend. If you were at tenthirty that Sunday you saw Rick and Angela, and that was it. So where was everyone else?

We set aside this weekend a while back to get away as leaders and rethink and evaluate how we are doing ministry in the Hillcrest College Ministry. We were talking and reminiscing while we were gone and realized that we have been at this thing somewhere around 10 years. Leaders have come and gone and many, many students have come and graduated and moved on. In all the ministry and life, it’s good to set aside time to evaluate and make sure we are still on the right path.

This was a great weekend. We spent most of our time talking about big picture things, not calendars and planning. We talked about Home Groups and serving opportunities, and you will be hearing about some new and exciting changes to those areas real soon.

But the biggest thing we did this weekend was to re-clarify for ourselves an answer to this question: What is a win for us?

As we do ministry among college students and young adults, what would we consider, through prayer and listening to God through his Word, to be a win for us? We looked at the end goal of what a student should look like if the ministry has been effective in really impacting their life. Then we started talking steps.

We talked about what it would take to get students to that end goal, and we all realize that somewhere along the way things will come up, good things that people like, and we will have to say “no” to them, not because they are bad, but because they do not move us closer to the goal.

After a quote we pulled from an Andy Stanley book, we began using a baseball metaphor. To sum up the book’s comments, Stanley basically said that the goal of baseball is to get around the bases and across home plate. That’s how you win. To simply hit the ball is a good thing in itself, but it alone does not get you to your goal of home plate. Yet this is how many churches think. Many churches are not focused on, or even aware of the steps to get their people across home plate. They are just simply trying to hit the ball. It doesn’t even really matter where it goes. They just want to get hits.

As we thought, prayed, studied, and talked this weekend, we thought this way: what are the steps that will get our people to home plate? What we came up with as our metaphorical bases were three things: tenthirty, Home Groups, and serving in the body. Those are the three major places to plug into within our ministry as you move around the “bases.”

You’ll hear more about all this real soon, but for now, ask yourself this question: what am I doing to get across home plate? Am I moving in the right direction, working toward the goal? Or am I just trying to hit the ball?

Thoughts?

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