Thanks for all the prayers and help from all our dear friends and ministry partners. Just a few days ago we rolled into our driveway back in Champaign after being on the road for 1 month. God really provided over this past month, but we’re still hard at work in the support raising process.
The next couple weeks will have us in Champaign meeting with people in the area. We’re really asking God to continue to provide and give us rest as we go into the next season of support raising.
Amy’s job in the local schools starts back up in a few weeks and I’ll begin traveling back and forth between Champaign and the Chicago Suburbs weekly to continue raising support. The details of how that looks week to week are still being figured out, but it will definitely look in some way like us being apart the majority of the time. We’re hoping God provides our needed support quickly!
Within GCM we refer to support raising as ministry team development – MTD. We really see partnership in ministry as the goal, people partner in several ways, finances being one but also in prayer, in getting us connected with others and in donating their time, abilities and resource. I love the idea that it takes a team of folks supporting a missionary for God’s work to be accomplished. What better picture of the Church?
Which explains some of what Amy and I are doing right now. We’re meeting with individuals who are interested in hearing about what God is doing through GCM and it’s missionaries and explaining my role in all of that. I thought it’d be fun to run some stats on all the people I’ve met with or tried to get in touch with over the past 2 months.
231 – the number of times we’ve tried to initiate with people to see if they’d like to meet. That could be anything from an email thread, a text message thread, facebook message thread, phone call or in person.
76 – the number of people committed to praying for us regularly.
46 – the number of appointments we’ve kept. Quite a few of those folks were couples so more specifically it is 71 individuals.
23 – the number of people interested in supporting us financially with a repeating gift. There are 3 additional people that have given special gifts with no commitment to repeat.
8 – the number of homes we’ve stayed in besides ours along this journey.
I can think of few things that force reliance on God more than this process, as an introverted engineer, at times I can feel like I’m in a foreign place watching myself dial the phone another time. Tiredness comes to mind and passes, excitement replaces it.
“Hi! this is Nick Modrzejewski campus missionary at University of Illinois…”
This video has inspired a lot of dialogue between several close friends and colleagues in ministry. We’re asking questions of one another like “How do we change to meet this culture?” “Should we change to meet it?” “Are we called to stretch them out of a short attention span?”
Throughout my years of working with college-aged folks it’s become apparent that in order for me to get someone’s attention I need to be communicating in the medium they do. This is essential for the initial phase of getting to know someone but quickly dissipates as a relationship is formed.
I don’t think college-aged folks are hurting as far as relational interaction anymore today than they were 5 years ago. But the question this video raises for me is how do we get to a relational interaction? How do we move from strangers in the Starbucks to sanctified students of Christ?
I believe we continue adapting the way we communicate at SNG (our Saturday night large group gathering where we teach on topics relevant to college-aged folks), we hold their attention with story and interaction – bringing to life the Gospel in all it’s richness. We adapt the way we interact and exchange small talk and build our friendships. And in Home Fellowship (our community groups focused on sharing our lives together) and discipleship times we work to stretch their patience and teach them to be nourished spiritually apart from fast food and microwave spirituality. We teach them to slow down, we teach them to listen for a God who whispers in the silence.
I’ll end with an example that I think illustrates my point well. Several years ago the Home Fellowship I was apart of didn’t have any students willing or able to lead a dorm based outreach group, so I went back into the dorms to lead at 25 years old – noticeably out of place. As my fellow “old people” and I called through our list of students interested in attending we hardly reached anyone. Noticing that most were cell phones we decided to try texting to reach each person, in many cases we received immediate responses.
We adapted our communication medium and style to that of the natives and it was more fruitful. Several of those text messages resulted in friendships, none of which remained in a discipleing over text message medium, but rather patience-stretching one-on-one times. At our weekly times I watched as the semester progressed and they started to put away their cell phones and not answer text messages while we discussed. Still initiating a meeting or a ride to service was always best done over text message – their native language.
The last thought or question I have would be, do we sacrifice The Gospel, truth about sanctification, etc by adapting the WAY we communicate these truths? IE putting it in movable type for a printing press to be read by individuals instead of handwritten and orated to the people.
I’m sure readers familiar with Marshall McLuhan will have much to say on this topic.
Thanks for all the prayers and help from all our dear friends and ministry partners. Just a few days ago we rolled into our driveway back in Champaign after being on the road for 1 month. God really provided over this past month, but we’re still hard at work in the support raising process.
