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Helping students reach their personal ministry targets, Part 3

by Paul Worcester

National Collegiate Director, North American Mission Board

February 13, 2017
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This is the third in a five-part series of articles defining the game-changing strategy of Personal Ministry Targets. Click here for part two.

Plot your campus strategy with your core team

At the start of this spring semester I plan to take our leadership team through developing a ministry strategy to identify key pockets of people on campus, pray over them, and then make assignments and goals—divide and conquer. We hope to accomplish the following:

  • Share the vision for our personal ministry targets and reiterate the need to get the gospel into every group of people on campus.
  • Share a combination of biblical background and inspiring stories.
  • Take 15 minutes to make a list of as many pockets of people as we possibly can.
  • Rank which groups are most influential and which groups have potential to foster the most spiritual reproduction.
  • Discuss what groups we have natural connections with or could easily join in order to build relationships and share Jesus.
  • Assign and form teams in order to focus on particular groups of people on campus.
    • If a student doesn’t have any strong, natural target areas encourage them to join a team focused on a freshman dorm or another target that might fit them well.
    • This step may take more time than one meeting. Some prayer and thinking may be needed before nailing down everyone’s teams and targets.
  • Connect individuals or teams with a staff coach to help them develop a strategy.
  • Challenge them to come up with a strategy for reaching the target group. Encourage students to be aggressive and ambitious.
    • If the plan starts too small it will not inspire them and the momentum to reach the target area will fall by the wayside as school, work, relationships, Netflix, and attacks from the enemy will try to distract them from this mission.
    • Also consider that each semester is extremely short. You have around 15 weeks to do what you can.
    • Encourage them to brainstorm creative ideas and strategies to build relationships, become an insider in the group, and share the gospel broadly.
  • Make goals. For example, one of our teams has the goal of sharing the gospel with every new pledge who joins their fraternity this semester.
  • Spend time praying together asking God to open doors for us and give us courage to proclaim Christ to these groups. Pray over Colossians 4:2-6.
  • Each week during our Core Team meetings we will split into clusters of three or four and discuss progress we are making with our personal ministries.

Reflection Questions

  1. When could you plan a time to go over these steps with your student leaders and staff? What would that look like for your ministry?
  2. How do you think the students will respond to this process? What potential concerns might your students have regarding this process? How will you address those concerns?

Make sure to fill out the Personal Ministry Target Worksheet to make goals and strategies to reach your target area. This will be a helpful tool to use with students and staff to intentionally reproduce this process.

Continue reading Helping students reach their personal ministry targets, part 4 for steps to a flexible and reproducible strategy.