Challenges and Developments

Yesterday was great. around noon i ran into wei-erh (NAV student pres) as i was typing up a proposal, and arranged a meeting with him at 3pm, then ran into Scott Gaskill who's on staff with the Navs and we talked about the project for a while. he brought up some really good concerns about Shannon's (the staff head at UNI) accountability to God and those who volunteer time and money to provide discipleship, but we were able to make the case that through networking these campus ministries and providing a think tank and an avenue for better cooperation, coordination, and prayer we could be more efficient in targeting those we should be discipling (and we could help the other groups be more efficient in bible study, outreach, or service, whatever their target area is).

he said that he liked the idea, although he figured that Shannon would probably need to participate directly and this would be another meeting for an already stretched leadership. because of these concerns i think we'll try to avoid the terminology of "representatives" and go more for "messengers" who are able to brainstorm in the spirit of their organizations but who don't really have authority with them (the member organizations themselves would still be making the decisions). in any case, it's up to each organization to decide who will go to the meetings, as long as there is one from each.

then at 4pm i met with shannon, and tim the staff leader for intervarsity just happened to walk by, so i ran it by him also. shannon expressed a lot of the same concerns as scott, but was a lot more positive about it. tim also seemed pretty enthusiastic about this idea too. shannon recommended looking up a guy who travels around and specializes in this exact thing, which i think i'll do, and he also suggested looking at the BASIC framework and seeing what i can learn from in that. in any case, even if this thing falls through, at least shannon and tim got to meet each other for the first time.

i also learned today that there usually is a monthly or so meeting of area pasters and heads of ministry, but the role of that meeting isn't defined, there really isn't prayer involved, and those involved come from a very wide range of beliefs (even Universalists) so using that group structure for something like this would be impossible.