campus awakening…
This past weekend I was in Redding, CA at Bethel Church where I attended the very first Campus Awakening Summit. It was very cool. Banning Liebscher is a good friend and I made many more friends at the Summit. Love what is happening at Bethel and love the hearts of Banning and Erica for Campus Awakening.CA is the newly formed missional outreach to the secular university out of Bethel Church. They are targeting 30 strategic campuses in the next few years.
It was so interesting at this Summit to hear them talk about how they sense a new student volunteer movement emerging, but they don’t know what it is going to look like. I heard the same thing at the CPx weekend in Vegas with Campus Church Networks. I along with many others have been feeling a major tectonic shift happening that is going to usher in a new wineskin of university ministry. No one knows what it’s going to look like, but it’s coming. I believe it will be chaordic…immersed in chaos and order at the same time. Or another way of saying it could be “organic order”. The master plan, top-down, controlled approach will wane in this next movement. I believe some organizations will continue, but will have to radically evolve to keep pace with God’s revelatory wave.
While at the Summit a lot of revelation came to me for our campus UCSD. But, something that keeps sticking out to me is a phrase God downloaded to me. “If we steward the wilderness, we can be trusted with an abundance.” Many people never enter into an abundance because they steward the wilderness poorly. This can be through complaining, not taking action, or a host of other things. God doesn’t desire for us to just barely get by in life, He desires that we walk in abundance and that we bring that abundance into every environment we find ourselves in.
Another thing is that we are called to be Kingdom Environmentalists. Now, before you go hug a tree on the side of the road, I am not talking about simply caring for the Earth, which I think is a real good idea. No, I am talking about all the different environments we find ourselves in. Environments will shape us or we will shape them. We tend to forget or not fully comprehend the complex power that is in our lives through Christ. We literally carry with us the very presence that wielded the universe into existence. That means, as we steward His presence environments will be shaped no matter where or what they are. I find in university ministry there are two camps: one that looks at their campus as so dark and intimidating, which is being driven by fear. God’s not a big fan nor the source of fear. Then there are those who don’t focus on what isn’t happening, but what is. Jesus watched and listened for where the Father was moving and what He was saying. He shaped every environment He found himself in. He was not fighting for victory, He was fighting from it. He was pulling down the realm of heaven into the earthly realm, no matter what that realm was.
In Ephesians Paul talks about how we need to stand firm against the devil in chapter 5. But, we cannot fully do this until we first realize that we are seated with Christ in the heavenly realms in chapter 2. Notice Paul wrote to people who were ALIVE. That means right now in Christ, we live bi-dimensionally. We live from eternity on earth. So, we have all the backing and resources of heaven. It’s like the Verizon commercial with hundreds of people following you giving you great reception. If we will just step out expecting God to move, He is going to move. We really can live on earth as it is in heaven, because we are living in both realms at the same time. You might want to chew on that for a skosh with some mint tea…and perhaps a rasberry scone.
Leave a Reply