A Community of Transformation - Ministry Exchange (MX)

InterVarsity Christian Fellowship
Address given at the IVCF National Staff Conference 08
Chris Nichols – Regional Director, New England Region

My name is Chris Nichols and this is the story of my transformation.

I came on staff in the summer of 1979 and planned to stay for three years. It’s 28 and ½ years later. I’ve lived in 4 different cities in two
different states separated by over 3,000 miles. I’ve worked directly on 6
very different campuses and have been responsible for the ministry on
dozens more. I’ve made my share of mistakes, experienced defeats and
successes. Over the years, I’ve given myself to our ministry priorities,
whether I was to spend time developing indigenous, autonomous, evangelizing
fellowships, building groups focused on evangelism, discipleship and
missions, or establishing and advancing witnessing communities, teaching
commitment to our core values, or helping students engage with world
mission, racial reconciliation, or justice, championing scripture study,
training in Bible and Life II and teaching Mark Manuscripts, or focusing on
students and faculty transformed, campuses renewed and world changers
developed. All these I’ve pursued eagerly with full enthusiasm. But after
all theses generations of students and the variety of language we’ve used
to express our calling, I’ve come finally to the conclusion that out all of
all of this, the one thing, the one experience that makes all this change
possible is conversion, lifelong conversion to Jesus. I’ve come to believe
that our primary call on campus is to seek out the lost and bring them to
the feet of Jesus, that he might save them, to implore those without Christ
in their lives, “be reconciled to God.” (2 Cor 5:20b) that they might begin
their eternal journey to transformation in Him (Rom 12:1-2).

I believe we are called first and foremost to a ministry of conversion.

It’s not that I’ve come to think of those other things as any less
important. No, if anything, my dedication to those core commitments has
grown.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that without that radical conversion of
faith none of the rest is possible. That engaging secular students with the
gospel and calling them to belief fuels the transformation of our entire
work. And if it doesn’t come first in our vision and in our priorities,
we’re apt to put it last or cause it to be the problematic extra we wrestle
to add to our already overly busy lives and ministry priorities and
schedules.

I doubt any of us in this room would disagree in principle. If I had been
sitting out there over a decade ago, and heard that statement, I wouldn’t
have disagreed either. We are all committed to evangelism and believe
passionately in the necessity of being made alive in Christ. But when it
came to shaping a ministry that took that truth to heart, I was a long ways
from living out what I said I believed.

25 years ago Ellen and I moved to Bakersfield, CA to re-establish
Intervarsity there. We’d spent three years on the central coast of
California, learning how to be IV staff at Hancock Community College and
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Re-planting ministry in Bakersfield was a great
opportunity starting at the ground level, watching it grow, bringing recent
graduates onto staff, seeing InterVarsity grow to over 100 on both campuses
we were committed to serving. We started with small seeds of ministry and
developed a strong Intervarsity presence with our IV priorities in place,
small groups, missions, racial reconciliation, and leadership development.
We were also committed to evangelism but it was either the culmination of a
semester’s efforts – our grand finale – or it was what we called in
specialists to do whom we supported in the background.

It wasn’t bad – it was often quite good. We saw students come to faith but
in no significant numbers. While the results weren’t spectacular, I was
fine with what happened. I knew were trying to be faithful to what we were
called to do. But each year we were there I was bothered by the lack of
sustainability in our evangelistic efforts and the nearly constant battle
to keep our groups from being overwhelmed with all our ministry priorities
and turning inward and becoming Christian enclaves, a refuge from the world
of the secular campus. When students did come to faith, I would often here
others say, “new Christians are always the best evangelists because it is
so fresh to them and they are so excited about their faith. You need to
take advantage of that eagerness before it wears off.” That seemed wrong
but it appeared from experience to be at some level true. They were the
best evangelists. Their stories of change were the most alive and dynamic.
But did it have to be that way? Why was it that our maturing Christian
students and we as staff couldn’t bring the same energy and fervor to our
evangelistic efforts and have the same impact?

– Was it because we’d reached a higher level of maturity in our faith and were a little bored with it? – Or did we think we knew just what God would do and there were no surprises left? – Or had we settled into a routine that brought us comfort and a reliable lifestyle and had a relationship with God that excluded other discomforting possibilities?

When we left Bakersfield those questions came with me. I’d had a
wonderful time and learned more than I could have ever imagined about
ministry but still didn’t understand where evangelism fit in our complex
mission on campus and resulting complicated job descriptions. I didn’t
know how to break through the barriers that kept the ministry I led from
having such limited evangelistic impact and drifting toward becoming a
committed Christian community functioning at the margins of the campus.
It was in San Diego that I was forced to begin to look at our work in a
different way.

Ellen and I moved to San Diego nearly 20 years ago. I had served as the
Area Director there for about 8 years when we as a staff team began to ask
those questions that had followed me from Bakersfield. As we looked at our
biggest chapter at University of California, our Area staff team asked why
there weren’t more conversions? It was a group of well over 200. In a good
year we saw 10-12 conversions a year but in an average year there were one
to two. And why did the group never seem able to grow larger? At other
schools like San Diego State University, we saw little or no overall
growth, and few or no conversions each year. We decided that it was time
to figure out why, to discover what the barriers were. We began to ask
what would it take to see a growth in conversions in this ministry that
didn’t sacrifice depth. And the discussions led us not to simply think
about what we would need to add, like more evangelism talks or outreach
events, but what would we need to change? That simple question eventually
led us to, “Were we willing to do anything, to change anything we were
doing in order to see more conversions and greater growth?”

That is a tough one. It sounds good – it’s passionate, meaty – but in
actuality, when we as a staff team began to really get into it, I realized
that I was much more ready to talk about making changes in them than in me.

But is was ultimately that question, and the eventual, “yes” that was our
answer, that led us, that led me, on a journey on the long road to change;
change in how I understood ministry, strategized about ministry and
functioned in ministry. At the point there was planted in me a mustard seed
sized vision of a new way of thinking about our work on campus. We began to
think and talk and pray about our work as a ministry of conversion.

I began to dream about ministry focused on building communities of faith,
where conversion was not restricted to the new Christians, making
conversion, not a unique experience but the norm. A commitment to
conversion seemed to me to mean that everyone in the community would be in
a dynamic process to be changed by the power of God. No longer would we be
calling new Christians to commit to Christ then acculturate them into a
soul numbing fellowship where they would learn the cues of Christian
culture rather than experience radical transformation. Where they would
mature in Christian knowledge, but find they were damping down the fires
that new faith had ignited. I wanted to build communities where those who
made initial commitments to Christ would enter a world where the kind of
transformational change happening in them would be mirrored in the lives of
all around them. Metamorphosis would be the norm not the exception.

It was in that process that our team began to think about calling students
to moving along a conversion continuum from Cynic to Seeker to Follower to
Leader to World Changer. Conversion communities could be places where new
Christians would see that what had begun in them would continue for the
rest of their lives.

It’s the image that Paul gives us from 2 Cor 3:18.”we are being transformed
into his image with ever increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who
is the Spirit.”

But these things are easy to say and we in general agree with them. It’s
in the DNA of Intervarsity to believe and desire to live out life as a
transforming community. None of these things are new. And in fact,
InterVarsity has I think led the way in engaging in vital discussions
between Christianity and the secular culture. But what became more of a
challenge to me was what it meant to lead ministry that took this more
seriously. Because to seek to have greater numbers of conversions in a
sustainable way while at the same time pressing the community of faith more
deeply into transforming change in the gospel had practical implications.
If I was to be true to what God was forming in me I had to be willing to
change how I functioned in the work I did. As I and those I led
experimented with those implications, God pressed me into three realities
that have transformed me.

The First is this: I learned that if I was serious about seeing more come
to faith and have a ministry that focused on conversion I would need to
lead a ministry that actively engaged the secular edge of the campuses we
served. We’d need to begin to take note of and be willing to talk about
those things which that the campus cares about and begin to engage in a
serious way with the issues of brokenness that plague our culture. We’d
need to be willing to be in conversations that the secular campus wanted to
have.

I realized too often that I was leading ministry that operated at the
margins of campus. Intervarsity Press books helped me understand the
important, “hot” current issues in the world and see how faith impacted
those issues, but I wasn’t sure how to lead ministry that helped us have
“live” conversations with that secular world at the center of campus. We
might use those “hot topics” as a way of enticing secular students to come
to us, but once there they’d discover we weren’t ready to discuss those
issues but rather had an agenda for what we thought they should be
interested in. And when we did venture from the margins into the secular
heart of the campus, it was like a series of hit and run missions; swift,
explosive and unfortunately limited in its effectiveness. Our outreach
focused on intensive training in evangelism which was helping us get our
answers right, but did little to help us engage with others in a
significant way.

Too often in our evangelical culture we’ve engaged in evangelism training
that has helped us know our story but has numbed us to that which non-
believers want to discuss. And when those we want to come to faith express
a lack of interest in our story we get irritated with them, thinking them
shallow, or too limited, or too blind, when it is often we who can’t see or
hear. As a result evangelism is too often Christians talking to one another
about evangelism rather than with non-Christians about Christ.

Conversion ministry has meant I have to want to engage in the give and take
of honest discussion with secular students and faculty not simply argue.

. What about war and the politics of war? o What about homosexuality and sexual identity? o And the environment. o And abortion and premarital sex, and well sex in general. o And injustice, and the economic forces that shape those issues?

When we wrestle with the issues on the minds and hearts of the secular
world around us, we’re forced to think about God’s perspectives. We know
that as we search the scriptures we discover God’s heart, for justice and
righteousness and for the poor and the defamed and the persecuted and there
grows in us a yearning to serve the people God loves in his name. The more
conversations I have with those who don’t know God the more I wake up to
God’s perspective and then can speak from my heart. The more I engage, the
greater my conversion and I move along the conversion continuum.

In New England, The Katrina Urban Renewal project has been an example of
what it means to bring our hope into the context of the world. Christian
students invite their non believing friends to join them on this urban
project in New Orleans – last year over 400 students attended, over 200 of
them not followers of Jesus. Christian and non Christian students working
side by side in bringing relief and hope to those who need help and being
able to discuss their different motivations for coming and having honest
conversations about faith and God and Jesus. Christian students learn how
to bring their faith in Jesus into a world of justice and service, and
learn how to love and live with their non Christian friends in a world
where open conversations about faith are possible and productive and non
Christian students get an inside glimpse at the hearts and minds and
motivations of those who love Jesus are eager to follow him.

At Yale, Liz was strongly self identified non-Christian who got involved
with the IV groups because she liked the people. And she got very
involved. Participating at nearly every level of the fellowship even as
she refused to believe. She went with the group to the Dominican Republic,
and she went on Katrina. Be still refused to take a step of faith. And
then this past Dec, IV was not having a meeting during reading period until
the core leaders and the staff got an email to from Liz inviting them to
come to one she was organizing. She arranged for worship and then she stood
up and in a 20 minute talk where she described her spiritual journey,
noting the impact of the love of the believers she knew for others and then
declared, “there are only two choices Atheism and Christianity – and I’ve
decided to become a Christian and now I want to pray for the first time.”

Cynics become seekers, seekers becoming followers, followers becoming
leaders and learn what it would mean to be world changers.

Last year I received a four-page letter from a nonChristian student at
Wheaton College in So Massachusetts – the other Wheaton and definitely not
a Christian school. It was about the impact our Staff worker Sarah Cowan
Johnson was having on him and the campus. Sarah and her husband Greg have
worked to help the IV students there engage with the non-Christian student
population on that campus. Because she was so willing to have open
conversations with non believers there, last year she was invited to a
meeting of the Progressive Alliance, a group committed to, expos(ing) the
effects of corporate globalization and to make people aware of the terrible
wealth inequalities that exist within and between countries. At that
meeting, the group had decided last Christmas to do “anti-sweat shop
caroling” at the local mall to remind shoppers that, holiday season should
not simply be about consumerism (or that, at least, consumerism should be
pursued “with a conscience”). To the astonishment of the letter’s author,
Jared, one of the leaders of the Alliance and not a follower of Jesus,
Sarah suggested that the IV group would like to collaborate as a reminder
to Christians that the Christmas season should be, first and foremost,
about Christ and acting in accordance with his teachings. That was a
turning point for Jared and the secular community at Wheaton. By being
willing to partner in that way, Sarah and the IV group began to break the
stereotypes the non-Christian students had of the Christians community.
Jared wrote, that through Sarah and the IV group’s participation, they provided a powerful counter-example to the oft-cited popular view of
Christianity as a divisive religion focused on demonizing others. by not
confining herself to a comfort zone (fellow Christians) and by not simply
“preaching to the converted” at Wheaton, Sarah has managed to breakdown
such . although it was not her intention to “spread the gospel,” at that
Progressive Alliance meeting, (Jared writes) that is in fact what she ended
up doing. it was her open and sincere approach that I first witnessed then
that eventually made me receptive to hearing her views on faith..
Previously I had been loathe to consider Christianity very seriously
because of the (in my opinion) divisive, negative, and hypocritical
examples set by prominent Christian conservatives. However, by being a
powerful, alternate example to them Sarah has helped me get past that
initial stumbling block. In fact she has challenged me not to use their
poor examples as excuses that would allow me to ignore Christian teachings
that actually have the power to nourish and develop my moral inclinations
for social justice, however seemingly divergent those inclinations may
appear when compared to conservative Christians. (Sarah) has not only focused on nurturing the established Christian
community at Wheaton .but she has also focused on making other, non-
fellowship members like me feel comfortable discussing issues of faith and
learning more about Christianity. I just can’t express how much I have
learned about myself and about my relationship with God through my
interactions with Sarah. A cynic becoming a seeker and followers discovering the impact the
gospel can have.
These conversations and relationships with nonbelievers have been forcing
us to move from the margins of the campus to the center, to be willing to
be exposed as believers even when we don’t have answers then pray like
crazy for the answers we need and the love that is required to make an
impact.
Conversion ministry is causing me to see students on campus in a new way.
As a leader I am learning to look for the cynics and seekers, notice them,
yearn for them to be changed, and find ways to engage them so that they
might be transformed in Christ with me.

Secondly, God has pressed me to face the reality that when I commit to a
ministry of conversion it means that I must be willing to do whatever is
necessary to become effective at it. Putting evangelism, conversion
ministry first reframes everything I do as a leader and we do as a ministry
team.

My experience over the past 13 years has caused me to realize that in the
effort to lead a ministry focused on conversion I would need, we as a staff
team would need to be willing to change structures, staff assignments and
the way we organize our work on campus. We need to work to make our
structures reflect our mission and not our mission adhere to our
structures. It means we continue to rethink, as we have been in so many
places around the country, the role of gifts in staff assignments.

When we pressed into this reality in San Diego, over 10 years ago we had to
ask if staff were in the right positions and on the right campuses. As the
Area Director and eventual Divisional Director, the question I had to
answer was not how do I fill the supervision structure the was in place but
rather what would be the best placement of staff to achieve our goals?
That meant changing my expectations about who would be TL or who was going
to be a new AD. We’d need to think and pray together about how best to
advance the work to see conversion take priority. Together we reassigned
some staff to new campuses and released others to new jobs that allowed
them to focus on helping us move forward into sustainable conversion
ministry.

Ryan Pfeiffer, now TL of the ministry at UCSD was a fifth year staff who
was in line to take more responsibility for chapter leadership, to train
the exec and take his place in the normal chain of development. But Ryan
was one of our most gifted evangelists. As we pursued questions of change,
it became clear that Ryan needed a different role if we were to move
forward. And even though it disrupted my expectations of how to lead and
develop the ministry, the staff team released him to do evangelism and in
partnership with students helped lead the way to more conversions and
greater impact on campus. Our commitment to conversion ministry had the
unexpected effect of releasing the gifts of our staff that dramatically
reshaped our work. Because it wasn’t only Ryan who changed their role but
Joon, and Martha, and Karen and eventually many more who would have
enormous influence on the direction of the ministry, causing me to have to
let go of my expectations and give others more authority and control.
Those choices sent us down a road to experimenting and creatively exploring
what it would mean to design and lead fellowships where reaching non-
believers would be the shaping paradigm.

Change came not only in the way I worked with staff but in how I worked on
campus.

At the time I was staffing the University of San Diego, it became clear
that in order to change our ministry culture to one where conversion had
priority we would need to learn how to be more responsive to the work of
the spirit among us. So, I told the student leadership team that at the
end of any large group, no matter who was speaking or the topic, if they
believed the Lord was asking us to call students in the group to faith, I
would go up and make an invitation. So, wouldn’t you know they’d take me
seriously. So on a very regular basis, after we’d listened to a talk on
Quiet Tim, or prayer, or Time Management, a student leader who had been
praying at the back of the room would approach me during the last worship
time and say to me, “I believe God wants us to make a call to faith.” So,
whether I believed it was the right time or not, and whether I felt like it
or not, whether the topic of the night was, no matter whether I thought it
was a good one to set up a call to faith, I would dutifully go forward and
make the call – sometimes there was a response – sometimes not – but
commitment to a conversion ministry meant we were seeing the groups culture
change to one where invitation to faith became a normal part of what we
did. And I learned a new level of partnership with students and discovered
in a new way what it meant to trust God, conversions increased. My eyes
were opened to the raw evangelistic gifts of students that God wanted to
use to draw others to himself, especially their preaching gifts. When we
opened the door for them to learn to preach and gave them opportunity we
saw even more commitments – Kristina, Matt, Scott, Charlie and others began
to preach to hundreds of students on a regular basis and make effective
calls to faith, leaving a legacy of transformation on campus.

Being willing to do whatever it takes has also meant becoming aware of not
only who is in our groups but who is not. As my passion for seeing
students come to faith has increased, I’ve begun to think about students
who might not have a chance to hear about Jesus. I’ve become more and more
aware of how diverse the campus community is. As we begin to care about
students who are a different ethnicity and or culture I think about how to
gather all the resources we can muster to reach that community of students:

GREEK ministry, La Fe, Black Campus Ministry, Asian American Ministry,
Ministry to Athletes, International Student Ministry, Grad ministry, Work
with Faculty, all these, along with our Multi Ethnic fellowships are
essential pieces of the puzzle to conversion ministry. And while that
certainly increases the complexity of what we do or think about, I want to
do all I can to ensure that the somehow we bring the gospel to all the
students on the campuses where we serve.

When the focus is on conversion ministry, I have to be willing to do
whatever it takes, to go wherever God might lead to see it happen; to
change jobs, reconfigure ministry structures, empower students in a new
way..and yes, especially at this stage of ministry, even raise more money.

Seekers becoming followers, followers becoming new kinds of leaders,
leaders learn what it might mean to change the world.

Thirdly, God’s call to a commitment to conversion pressed me, drove us as a
staff team, to face the reality of the limits of our own energy and own
ability and we discovered the need for something more from God.

As I led ministry that was filled with strategies and plans for growth in
conversion and charged with energy for reaching to unreached students,
staff became frustrated by the pace, tired and worn out and at times angry
about what it was we were trying so hard to do. As we pressed harder into
seeing conversion happen and sought growth as a by product, we all began to
feel the strain. I can remember one staff (Martha) talented, gifted in
evangelism, driven to perform, who began to raise questions about what it
meant to live a balanced life and where ministry fit in that kind of life.
We began to have more and more conversations about avoiding burnout. We
were edging into caring more about our boundaries than what it was we were
trying to achieve. For some, the ministry became an uncontrollable tyrant
who demanded all from them and gave little back. I wasn’t sure how to
proceed. I knew what we were trying to do was right I just had no idea how
to help us move forward without simply using people up and replacing the
old worn out people with new blood and then burning them out and looking
for new fodder to feed the ministry beast.

It was at that point that Mark Kelley (my assoc director) and I had what
was to be a series of conversations with Doug and Marilyn Stewart about
what it meant to experience renewal in the face of a ministry of conversion
and outreach. They pressed us to consider what it meant to engage in
Spiritual Formation with our staff. I’d always envisioned SF as a way of
withdrawing from work and was afraid that the SF experience would simply
fuel the divisive sense that our work was the biggest barrier to a
relationship to God. But as we began to experiment with taking our whole
team on spiritual formation retreats, over time we experienced the opposite
to be true. When I required that all staff withdraw from campus and that
as a team take time to pursue God:

– It gave new life to ministry and new life to staff. Spiritual Formation
became time for personal reflection and re-energizing hope in the work of
the Holy Spirit – It gave us new perspective on the ministry we were called to do. Time
away helped each staff to consider what it was God was actively doing in
them and in the work they were doing – Spiritual Formation helped us to pause and ask we how were doing. We
were able to catch harmful behaviors before they damaged us. We had the
space to recognize sin and time to repent and had help to seek healing.
Broken relationships were given the opportunity to heal and new
appreciation of one another grew. – Spiritual formation reminded us and continues to remind us of our need to
pray, to intercede for the students we know and have yet to meet. Time
with God not surprisingly caused us to look to him and not ourselves for
the power to do the thing he’d called us to do.

And instead of causing us to be self-involved and with less energy for what
we were called to, we discovered we had, have more energy and drive and
greater joy.
Our Spiritual Formation experiences give us current stories of God’s
activity in our lives. We have a new story to tell not just a distant
memory to recount.

It was the help of the Stewarts and Steve Stuckey that I learned that we
can only preach that which is alive to us. When we take time away from that
which is important to wrestle with and worship and listen to the one who is
essential our evangelistic zeal is set ablaze.

I’ve had some say to me “I hate to disappointment you, but staff you’ve
worked with and who have been involved in all that SF have told me it was
all about their personal lives and not about the ministry.” I can only
smile and say praise God that staff are given time and space to engage with
the Lord Jesus and be embraced by his love. We preach most effectively
that which we live. And private time with God always has the most amazing
effect on our work. I may enter into spiritual formation intending it to be
about only about me, but God has the most disturbing way of ensuring I live
out my changed life in public.

What I learned in San Diego continues to be true for us in New England.
All our staff teams are required to be have time away as teams in Spiritual
Formation. And what has continued to be confirmed is that time away with
the intention of seeking out Jesus and his presence reminds us that this
work is about God and his work in us and through us. My experience is
teaching me that Paul was right, that we “have this treasure in earthen
vessels, that the transcendent power of God might shine through.”

Leaders being changed, from one degree of glory to another into world
changers.

I know that nothing I’ve suggested is new (there is after all, nothing new
under the sun). And most of you have already thought of it. But for me,
it’s been the combination of these thoughts that have begun to change the
culture of the ministry I do, the ministry I lead. Conversion ministry has
continued to push me to my limits. A few months ago, Paula Fuller gave me
this phrase that is describing my experience. “Sometimes you have to jump
off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.”

In New England, the staff team has graciously jumped with me and by the
hand and power of God in the Holy Spirit, wings are being built on us, that
we pray will help us take off in a new direction for our work of seeing
conversion communities become a reality on campus.
On the days when I grow weary of making one more fund raising call, when
I’m tired of the work I do, when I get overwhelmed by all we are trying to
accomplish, I will suddenly remember the light in the eyes of students who
have stood to claim Jesus as their own, or remember students I have met who
have finally understood the commitment they are making to transformation
and I press on.
Out of all of this I hope that one day, when a student enters into an IV
group on any campus in New England, they will walk into a conversion
community, where making a new commitment to Christ isn’t either unusual or
unique but rather where conversion is the norm. I look forward to the day
when every IV group is able to daily rejoice as they participate in the
disciple’s metamorphic journey to eternity.

Conversion Communities. through it all may we see Campuses renewed,
students an faculty transformed and world changers developed –
Thank you –