All good ministries begin with a clear vision of what you are wanting and hoping God will do around you. All clear visions are made to solve a problem. In our case, the problem of people not having the chance to know God personally.
Give It A Try
Find a picture or draw one that represents the vision you think of when you think of God bringing new life to people all around your city.
This will help you a lot as you move forward.
So what’s your vision? How many schools in your city or region don’t have access to knowing God right now? In your mind, what would it look like to see God open up the door on every one of those universities so thousands upon thousands can start to follow God?
Now, if your vision was like mine, it lacked a specific plan. It helped my heart connect to the mission Jesus gave us all, but didn’t provide any practical help in moving forward. So the next step is to make a map.
Make a map that contains all known university campuses in your city or nation. This will take some time and research, but this map will be your best guide for planning and praying as you seek to connect as many people as you can in your area to Jesus.
Once you have made your map, figure out which university campuses currently have some kind of known ministry presence (somebody currently doing ministry on those schools with known christians) and mark those schools in yellow, or some other color. If the schools don’t have a kind of ministry presence, mark them in blue, or some other color.
At this point, you have to make a giant step of faith and consider how many of these unreached schools you are willing to spend your time helping. Remember, this has nothing to do with how many schools you think you are capable of helping, this is entirely an issue of willingness and faith. Some choose to take on a smaller scope of 7 schools (probably the least amount necessary for a fruitful Catalytic scope), while some have taken on upwards to 50. It’s a faith step of pursuing a goal while not knowing exactly how reaching all those schools will be possible.
Just like when Jesus spoke to his disciples, God is inviting us today to take steps of faith to do things we can’t, with resources we don’t have. Why does he do this? So that we can learn to do what only he can make us capable of doing with resources only he has.
A scope of 10-50 schools truly is impossible for us to do alone. But what if God was already out in front of us preparing key people on many of those schools you marked as unreached? If he was, and all we had to do was find those few key people and train them to lead a movement on their school, it sounds more possible doesn’t it? This doesn’t make the faith step any easier though, because now entering into a plan to pursue a scope as big as the one you drew absolutely requires God to prepare people before you arrive. Certainly he is doing that somewhere, but we can’t be certain that he is doing that everywhere.
As you work out your vision, your map and start to figure out how to start looking on all of those schools keep in mind that you main job in all of this is to step out in faith and trust God to work.
Exploring is just as much about learning to journey with God and enjoy the close interactions you have with him along the way as it is about you being faithful to keep looking. Some days you’ll find key people, some days you won’t. Some exploring methods you try will work, others won’t. Don’t lose heart.
and meet other Catalysts