The Key to Longevity for OIC

One of the hardest parts of working in a college environment, I think, is the quick turnover rate. As soon as you're starting to make some progress people graduate and a whole new group of people uninvolved in the discussion come in and we have to start all over. It's frustrating, and I confess that I haven't really come to terms with this fact of college ministry until just today, when a faithful member pointed out the amount of time we were talking about the "jargon behind our jargon," which he felt left out on. It would be so much easier, he said, if we held up the core vision of what One in Christ is about, in the form of a mission statement for example, as a sort of foundation for the conversation. This would be the main message that we would be bringing to the Westmont community, the vision that we would be discipling our members into.

Thinking about this made me realize the necessity of re-establishing ourselves for the future. In a sense, we have sort of invented the wheel on how to do reconciliation of this kind on a college campus. Sure there are still plenty of rough edges and bumps in our proverbial wheel, but all in all I think we have begun a very successful thing. But for OIC to be successful in the future, we need to provide documentation and resources of the things that we have done to be successful so that our future leaders don't have to reinvent the wheel all over again. It was challenging enough to do it the first time and we made plenty of mistakes along the way, but if we want OIC to continue, it would be foolish to ask our future leaders to do everything all over again.

So what I am suggesting, not just to the leaders but to the whole ministry, is to develop resources that would provide a foundation for future members and leaders. This might include the following:

• Mission Statement
  
• This is crucial
• It would be based on a Trinitarian model and the Church's relationship to it
• It would likely take several drafts and review by many different people
  
• Documentation of Meetings
• Including what we have done, how often we have met, when, where
• This would include our Wednesday night meetings this year, our Breakfast club meetings, the meetings with the leaders, and the meetings of last year too
• In the future this could be documented using a tape recorder or a computer with a microphone. If we're really ambitious, after it's recorded someone can type out a script
• It would be important to talk about lessons that we've learned about doing meetings, what has been successful, what hasn't
• Planned Activities
• Activities that we have done that have been successful
  
• Activities that we have wanted to do but haven't been able to
• Resources
• Books, blogs, podcasts, videos, professors, pastors, etc. that we have have found to be helpful or which we have used in our ministry
• Required reading for future leaders
• Books, other media, and people that we have used in meetings and their descriptions
• ie Professor Rhee, The Princeton Proposal, etc.
• Any other things that you can think of!

This would be something like a handbook or a scientific report that would describe the method, materials, and results in enough detail that someone else could repeat it and get similar results. Not only could this be helpful for future members and leaders of OIC at Westmont, but for other campus' that are interested in doing something similar. The work that we're doing at Westmont could be something that grows even to a global ministry. The world is flat!

We'll be talking more about this as leaders, in our final meetings, and during the summer over the internet and such. Leave a comment with what you think!

In Christ,
Joe