Catalyst 2011: A SLU Recap

Every May, InterVarsity students from all over Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri (we call it the Central Region) gather at Camp Windermere in Roach, MO for one of two weeks of InterVarsity's end-of-the-year conference, called Catalyst. Students hang out with old friends one more time before summer and make new friends along the way. They spend their days hearing excellent Bible teaching, worshiping in a variety of styles and languages, receiving leadership training to take back to campus next year, and eating lots and lots of camp food. I attended the very first Catalyst ever back in the Spring of my freshman year in college, back in 2006. It was a talk at that Catalyst that eventually led to me joining InterVarsity staff. Needless to say, I love Catalyst and look forward to the experience for my students every year.

This year I had a couple of fun opportunities to serve at Catalyst, besides getting to be with my students who came for the second week of the conference:

The Call
One of my favorite things about my job is getting to be a part of the journey of folks who are investigating Jesus for the first time but would not yet call themselves "Christians." At Catalyst, I had the opportunity to help lead a track designed for students in that very place. We spent four sessions together studying stories about Jesus from John and talking about our own fears, frustrations, and questions about Christianity, Scripture, and Christian people. It was insightful and, at times, challenging, to hear the concerns leveled against the Church and the Bible by these polite, well-spoken college students. They allowed myself and the other staff into their journeys and it was a joy to be with them along the way. We spent the week praying for them and encouraging them and trying to answer their questions to best of our abilities. Praise God! By the end of Catalyst, four of the students from the track made decisions to follow Jesus! It was such a treat to hear them share their testimonies in the main session after walking with them for even a couple of days. What a gift!

Leading Worship
I've devoted a whole blog post to this experience at Catalyst. Feel free to read about it here.

But, my own personal highlight came from spending time with the SLU students. On the third night of the second week, our Regional Director gave a talk about surrendering all of ourselves to Jesus, not just the parts we feel comfortable with. After the session, I noticed that one of the girls from SLU had been crying. I asked her if she wanted to talk and so we sat down together. She told me that she had come to Catalyst hoping to grow closer to God but felt like the opposite had happened. She told me that she had been living a very religious life of attending church regularly and praying daily. When she performed the routine, she felt good about herself and her faith. When she failed to, she despaired and wondered if God still loved her. She told me she'd been crying during the session because she knew that there were parts of herself that she was unwilling to surrender to Jesus. She wanted to follow him and become a Christian but didn't know if she could give up these parts.

We talked about God's unconditional love and the problems with living "religiously," where our performance is what earns our favor with God. We talked about Jesus' sacrifice and how freedom comes from surrendering ourselves wholly to him, not from being "good enough." After an hour or so of conversation, she decided that she was willing to make the leap and trust Jesus with her life. We prayed together and she gave her life to Jesus! She was so excited that she couldn't wait to share her story with the rest of the SLU chapter. The next night, she stood in front of fourteen new brothers and sisters and shared her painful journey to Jesus. After she finished, the students clapped and gave her a group hug. They prayed for her and praised our God for his saving work in her life. I'm guessing you can see why this was my favorite moment from Catalyst.

Praise God it's been a big year. It was difficult at lots of points but always sustained by Jesus. Thank you so much for your prayers and constant encouragement. I am so excited to continue partnering with you in reaching all of Saint Louis University with the life-changing, hope-bringing, joy-filling Gospel of Jesus. Thanks again from all of us at SLU InterVarsity!

Catalyst 2011: Worship-Leading and Me

I play guitar. I've been playing since I was about 16. I started writing lyrics around age 14 because I thought girls were attracted to songwriters. At 16, I became convinced that I could increase the attraction if I could actually play and sing the songs myself. I bought John Mayer's Room for Squares album and started writing songs like his, thinking that his charisma and appeal could be transferred by osmosis to me. This had mixed results at best.

Then this funny thing happened. I was part of the youth group at my church and, as happens to lots of Christians who happen to also be musicians, I was asked to lead worship for the youth group. As a teenage boy with a strong-though-subtle arrogant streak, I of course accepted any opportunity to be on stage holding my guitar (where all the girls could see me). I played in the praise band with some friends for a couple of years at the youth service and had a blast. I didn't know the first thing about leading people in worship but I loved playing music and serving the youth group.

Flash forward to college. I started writing more seriously and fell in love with the artistic process of communicating my story and perspective through words and music in making a connection with other people. I even put together a band and recorded an album of my songs. We started playing a lot in coffeeshops, churches, and restaurants around Saint Louis. Along the way, another funny thing happened. I became really disinterested in the idea of leading worship and even a little frustrated with "worship music" in general. C.S. Lewis once said that music in churches sounded to him like "fourth-rate poetry set to fifth-rate music" and I agreed. As my own musicianship deepened, I became annoyed by the predictable and seemingly shallow lyrics (note again the arrogance) that I was singing in church. When people would ask me to be on worship teams, I refused. I didn't connect with the music I heard in church and didn't think it was fair to lead people in singing songs I disliked and couldn't relate to. I still loved the sermons and community I found at church but mostly just tuned out during the worship.

Then, the last funny thing happened. I came on staff with InterVarsity. One of the values we have in InterVarsity is multi-ethnicity, which basically means that we believe that God's Kingdom is made up of people from across all times, places, tribes, cultures, languages, and musical styles. As I started going to staff gatherings, my "worship walls" came tumbling down. I sang incredible Latin songs with Spanish lyrics and complicated rhythms. I sang Gospel music with amazing dynamics and complex chord structures. I sang old hymns with beautiful poetry and equally rich theology. I saw worship leaders who were listening to the Spirit and actually leading people and not just leading music. My heart started to soften to the idea of worship music and to worship-leading in general. God was changing me.

The past couple years, I have had the opportunity to lead worship at a few different InterVarsity conferences for staff and students and I have fallen in love with it. At our recent student conference, Catalyst 2011, I was blessed with the opportunity of putting together two different teams of staff and student worship leaders. We met and practiced and became friends over the course of the semester. We learned each other's strengths and weaknesses and built chemistry as a team of musicians. But, more importantly, we worshiped together. We let the Spirit move in our practices and got ready to do the same at the conference. It was a beautiful thing. For the first time, I felt like I could hear the Spirit speaking to me while I was leading the music. I could sense when we needed to keep repeating a chorus or when I needed to say something to the worshipers that I felt like God wanted them to know. In a sense, it wasn't that different than having coffee with one of my students. I listened to Jesus and expected him to say something that they needed to hear when they needed to hear it.

As I grow as a worship-leader, the most important thing I'm growing in is hearing from Jesus. Musicianship and arranging will come with practice. Hearing from Jesus is a gift he gives when we actually stop to listen. We hear his voice as we stop talking and worrying about what people are thinking. I'm grateful for the gift and the Giver.

Wait, What Month Is It?

Happy March everyone! It's hard to believe but it is in fact the first day of a new month. January and February have flown by and we are already almost halfway through the Spring Semester. Crazy.

A lot has happened in these first two months and I wanted to give you a brief rundown of all the good things we've seen God doing on campus at SLU:

New Bible Studies. This semester, we've seen three new ongoing Bible studies planted by students, bringing our total to six with one more in process as I write. What I love about these groups is that they are focused on specific subgroups of students within the greater SLU community (we call them "neighborhoods"). We have students leading studies in the Black Student Alliance, among the fraternity/sorority community (see picture above), on the medical campus, with international students, and in two different freshmen dorm communities. We're looking to start a couple more in another freshmen dorm and with commuter students before the year ends. Studying Scripture with InterVarsity is what made me fall in love with reading the Bible in college and I am a big believer in the power of the Spirit working through the Scriptures to bring real change and healing in the lives of students. Exciting!

New Brother and Sisters. After being on campus for the past 6 years, first as a student and now as a staff, and seeing very few if any people become followers of Jesus and join the family, it's been difficult to keep hoping that we would see a movement of the Spirit in the hearts of folks seeking after God. I am overwhelmed and humbled to tell you that we have seen three students come to faith in the last month, each of whom were led to faith by a friend from our Core Team of leaders. I wish I could better communicate the joy that comes in receiving these phone calls from students where the joy is so thick in their voice that I know exactly what they're about to tell me. Mostly I just laugh and yell like a crazy person trying to get them to calm down and tell me the story. It's the most thrilling experience I've ever had to see so much happening at once. I think I could get used to this...

New Missionaries. At SLU, our desire is to see a multi-ethnic community of missionaries raised up among the student body. We don't want people to just become followers of Jesus (though that's obviously a BIG deal!); we want to see them become missionary followers of Jesus who are willing to share the hope and healing they've found with other folks on campus. As Jesus says himself in Luke 10 - "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field." In line with this call, my students and I are pretty passionate about helping the followers of Jesus we meet on campus realize this part of what it means to be a Christian. My Core Team of leaders is especially dedicated to seeing new InterVarsity students get connected to the community, learn how to share their story of meeting Jesus, and maybe even start a Bible study of their own one day soon! So, as we start these new studies, we're always looking for the next bunch of new folks who could one day be doing the same. Praise God - we're finding them faster than we can train them this semester! So far, we've invited two new leaders up into the Core Team and hoping to end the year with 20 leaders in our chapter. Pray with us that the Lord of the Harvest would indeed send out more workers into the field.

The Spirit is on the move and we are tired but excited at the halfway point this semester. He has been so exceedingly good to us and we give Him praise and glory for all that we've been graced to see. Pray that we would continue to search for (and find!) where the Father is at work on campus so that we can join Him in the work He has been doing since long before we arrived and will continue to do long after we're gone. Peace to you friends.

While the Students Are Away...

Today was the first day back to school for SLU students. They had their last day of finals exactly five weeks ago and now they've officially begun the Spring Semester. Books have been bought, stories from break have been told, and new routines are being established. It is always exciting to see my students again after weeks of praying for them from afar in my apartment and various coffee shops across the city. I loved hearing their stories of how Jesus met them over break and what they're excited about for the semester to come. Already today I've spoken to two different students who are excited about starting brand new Bible studies for the Spring! Inevitably, the question comes back to me, "So, Kale - what do you do while we're gone?" Great question!

I had several highlights over Christmas break but I'll share just a few of them with you here:

Regional Staff Conference (Dec. 13-16)
Like many national organizations, InterVarsity is subdivided geographically. I am on staff at Saint Louis University, which is part of the Missouri Area, which is part of the Central Region (Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri make up this Region). The picture you see above is the Missouri Area staff team, representing 7 chapters at 5 different schools. We're holding our boss, Elizabeth, who is the Area Director here in the "Show Me State." Every December, our Area gets together with the rest of the Region for a four-day-long Staff Conference. This time is always refreshing and fun for me. There is plenty of time to relax and reconnect with Jesus and old friends. I have never met a more talented or more fun bunch of people than the folks that I get to work with. It's both incredibly intimidating and encouraging to spend four days with people that I went through college looking up to and am now blessed to call my friends and co-workers. The biggest highlight for me of this time was spending time with the entire community studying John 21 as a group. Hearing Jesus reinstate Peter after the Resurrection is always powerful but this time around it was like he was speaking directly to me when he continued trusting Peter even after Peter had betrayed him. I connected to it so much that I decided to come back and preach on it at Rooftop Community Church, my home here in Saint Louis. If you're interested, you can listen to the sermon here.

Down Time
After Regional Staff Conference wrapped up, I got to travel to Nashville, TN for a few days to stay with some friends and attend an annual Christmas concert put on by my favorite songwriter, Andrew Peterson. If you haven't bought his album, Behold the Lamb of God, do yourself a favor and get it immediately. It's not really a Christmas album; actually it's more of an epic song cycle telling the story of the coming of Jesus into the world, from the Old Testament to the Gospels. I travel to see Andrew and a crew of some of the most talented musicians in Nashville perform this show every year and it seems to be getting better and better as the years go by. Incredible. I was blessed to spend some time in my hometown of Marion, IL with family over the Christmas weekend, which was also relaxing and refreshing. I love Saint Louis but there is a part of me that will always feel at home in Illinois.

The Planning Process
I returned to Saint Louis and began laying down some serious plans for this semester. I had been praying about the Spring for weeks already and I started to receive some of the coordinates of where I felt like God was leading me in putting together the Spring Semester for InterVarsity at SLU. We never know exactly what these four months will hold but God has always been faithful to begin preparing me for the journey ahead well in advance, even when I don't see it at the time. You'll hear more about the semester to come in a week or so but suffice it say for now that we have some BOLD plans down on the calendar and lots of space for Jesus to do some crazy things on campus this semester. I am beyond excited and now that the students are back I'm ready to put my hands to the plow! I'll be getting together with my leaders this coming weekend to cast vision for our semester and call each of us back to focusing our eyes on Jesus and our hearts toward our friends and professors at SLU who desperately need to meet him.

National Staff Conference (Jan 5-9)
The last major highlight for me from the past five weeks was National Staff Conference, the triennial gathering of InterVarsity staff from around the country to our own fair city of Saint Louis. 1200 InterVarsity staff from the U.S. spent four days together last week in community reflecting on one of the three tenants of our national vision: "Students and Faculty Transformed, Campuses Renewed, World Changers Developed." This year, we focused on the theme of "Campuses Renewed," thinking about questions such as "What does it mean for us to participate in the academic sphere of our campuses, not just the spiritual?" and "What role should InterVarsity play in speaking the Truth not only to individuals but also into structures and ideas of injustice happening around us on the campus and in the cities?" These are obviously enormous questions with equally enormous implications. I felt Jesus challenging me to think even bigger about how he wants to use my students and I to be a true blessing not just to students and faculty at SLU, but to the institution of Saint Louis University - its ideas, perspectives, structures, and culture. Fascinating.

Hopefully that gives you a good idea of what my "break" looked like. I feel so blessed to have had these past five weeks to spend time with Jesus and with folks like you who love my students and I and are excited to watch the Kingdom come on campus. Thank you for praying for us - we beg you to continue to do so and to pray even more often and more boldly that Jesus would move in power and that we would see many people at SLU come to know him this semester. We are going to keep our eyes on him and we trust that we'll have some incredible stories to share with you Along the Way. I'll leave you with the following video, which I'm proud to say was shown to all 1200 national InterVarsity staff this past week at our conference. It's a testimony of God's work through a difficult time on our campus last year. Enjoy!

Saint Louis University from InterVarsity-twentyonehundred on Vimeo.

Merry Christmas From SLU InterVarsity!

It's Final Exam Season here on campus. Students wander listlessly from the library to the cafeteria to the exam room to the dorm room and repeat. Energy is low, coffee shop lines are long, and the longing to leave this chilly Midwestern campus for a few weeks increases with every turn of the textbook page.

As has become the norm for me as InterVarsity Staff, the times when students are the busiest is normally the time when on-campus events and ministry lessens and the need for pastoral care and opportunities for students to "escape" campus for a few hours increases. In that spirit, my leaders and I hosted our annual Bacon 'n' Waffles Christmas Party this past Monday evening. "Breakfast for dinner for Christmas?" you may be incredulously wondering. Point taken but here's the story: long ago, before even I was a student at SLU (pre-2005), InterVarsity leadership on our campus was made up of mostly men. When asked what they thought would make a great Christmas party, the men replied, "Bacon...and waffles." Thus, a tradition was born of which I am only the humble recipient. Though I must say, I'm not complaining.

As has been the case for most of the events we've hosted this semester, my faith in God's ability to bring people waxed and waned throughout the day leading up to Bacon 'n' Waffles. I wondered if we'd have enough cars (or too many!), if we'd have enough food, or if anyone would honestly miss out on 2-3 hours of studying just to come eat breakfast food a few blocks from campus. And again, as has been the case all semester long, God showed up everywhere I needed him to and then some. At 6:50pm, I pulled my car behind one of the freshmen dorms to pick up students and found 20 people (the number we were expecting) waiting in the cold for me. As I waited for a few minutes, 10 more showed up. Enter the transportation panic - "How do I move 30 people using 4 cars?" Enter God - 3 of the 10 had brought their own cars with them. Then my mind turned to the food. We'd been expecting 20 or so - would the team of 3 I left behind in the kitchen possibly have had time to make the 20 or so extra waffles we would now need? Again, enter God - yes they did and plenty of bacon to spare as well.

So I just stopped worrying. I decided to go along for the ride and we had a great time. About 35 people in all came through the party, 5 of whom I was meeting for the first time - my students are such great inviters! About 10 of the folks you see in the picture above aren't following Jesus; they're simply friends of people who are and find our community of Jesus-followers attractive and fun - what a gift! One of my primary Core leaders reminded me that night that she had first come into our community at this same party two years before. Five months after first meeting us, she gave her life to Jesus. One year after that she joined our Core Team and started inviting other people to meet him. Who knows what Jesus might do with this year's new group of Bacon 'n' Waffles attendees? Join me in praying boldly that God would continue telling this story of transformation over Christmas break and as we start up again in January!

From all of us here at SLU InterVarsity, we pray that you have a peaceful Advent Season and a blessed Christmas! Thank you for partnering with us as we continue to speak the Great Story into the lives of students and faculty at Saint Louis University - we couldn't do it without your constant encouragement, prayers, and support. Merry Christmas!

Jesus, Sex & Dating: A Recap

"This event was great!! Speakers were on point! I look forward to future events." - First time InterVarsity attendee

"I liked discussing [sex and dating] directly with people in person. I also liked knowing how Jesus fits in to sexual relationships." - Occasional InterVarsity attendee

"It was nice that everyone was so open and willing to speak their minds but also to listen to others without shutting people down or being condescending." - Regular InterVarsity attendee

It's been a fascinating week. Starting last Tuesday, fourteen SLU InterVarsity students and I engaged in eighteen combined hours of evangelism around the topic of Jesus, sex, and dating. We talked to dozens of SLU students on every corner of campus and, as we invited them to join us for our event, we asked them questions about their own understanding of sex in our culture, their advice on dating, and whether or not Jesus had anything to say on the topic. Here's a few examples of what we learned:

• Most of the students we surveyed never had "the sex talk" from their parents growing up.
• According to the students we surveyed, the average person has sex for the first time at age 16.
  
• Only 55% of the students we surveyed think that sex is always a spiritual act.

Even in looking at these few pieces of data, I think you can gather both the necessity and a bit of the magnitude of attempting to make a connection between Jesus, dating, and sex. We heard lots of stories of brokenness from past relationships gone bad, of hurt and abuse from family members, and even of pain from poor handling of the subject by church leaders. We knew that this conversation would be important and we prayed that it would be a place of healing for many for whom sex and dating had only added to the brokenness.

At 6pm on Monday night, my leaders and I gathered to pray and set up the room. At 7pm, students started showing up, trickling in slowly in clusters of 2-3. They were greeted with name tags, themed snack options (Forbidden Fruit Snacks and Name-All-the-Animal Crackers - Genesis 2 shout-out), and friendly conversation from one or more of my students (they're so talented at hospitality!). As we got ready to start the event, we looked around and realized that nearly every one of the 60 chairs we had set up was taken - we estimate that about 55 SLU students were in attendance, making this InterVarsity's biggest campus outreach ever at SLU. The students began the night in table groups that rotated every five minutes, discussing various questions related to the night's topic, including questions like "What do you think about interfaith dating?" and "What is your view of your parents' relationship? Healthy or unhealthy?"

After about twenty-five minutes of table group discussion, my friend Andrea (IV staff at Washington University) and I gave our presentation on how Jesus connects to dating and sex. We talked about how God created humanity to be in relationship with one another, reaching its apex with sexual intimacy in the context of marriage. We talked about how humanity introduced brokenness and sin into the world in our suspicion that God was holding out on us and that we could control our own lives. We shared stories from our past of relationships gone bad. But, we also talked about hope. We talked about the freedom that Jesus came to offer from this cycle of broken relationships. We talked about the woman caught in adultery in John 8 and how we too can leave our baggage at the feet of Jesus, how we too can be healed of this disease that we've inherited.

When we finished, we asked students to respond to the presentation personally on response cards and then in their table groups as well. We rounded out the night with a time of Q&A where the students could submit index cards with specific questions for Andrea and myself. We tacked subjects from physical boundaries in Christian dating to homosexuality to how to find healing from past relationships. Several students stayed after to continue their conversations and ask for prayer from staff and IV leaders.

All in all, it was a fantastic evening - I'm so proud of my leaders for loving their campus so well in the past week, which was one of the most academically rigorous weeks of the semester so far. They had great conversations, invited lots of their friends, and displayed true servant leadership as they welcomed new faces into our community. Next week is our final Edge for the semester and I'll be excited to see who from the event decides to get plugged into our permanent community. Thank you so much for your prayers for our week of evangelism and for my own preparations for the evening - we would not have made it without you! I'll leave you with a few more of my favorite pictures from the evening:

So It's Kind of a Touchy Subject...

A couple of months ago, I sat down with some of my leaders and talked about what kinds of events we wanted to do over the course of the semester. They mentioned offhandedly that it would be great to have an event focused on sex and dating relationships because they had lots of questions and thought their friends would have lots of questions as well. So we put a date on our calendar - November 22nd - and decided that would be our night to talk about sex and dating. Sounds innocent enough, right? Just an InterVarsity staff worker trying to help some students piece together their thoughts on a confusing and sometimes painful subject. No big deal.

Then my mind started going. Wow, sex is a pretty touchy subject, I thought. It's not just Christians who have questions and opinions - everybody has questions and opinions about sex and dating. Wouldn't it be great if we could get lots of people who aren't following Jesus into the room to talk about it as well? Oh wait...what if we could somehow do some evangelistic conversations based on sex and dating and then invite people to come to the event to hear what Jesus thinks? That would be fascinating. How would that work exactly?

Well, we probably would want to gather some hard data about what our campus actually thinks about the subject so we should probably do a survey. But it would be fun if we could also do something that was a bit more of a spectacle to draw attention to the controversial nature of the topic. Then, the image of the poster you see in that picture above came to mind. Oh wow, I thought, wouldn't it be great to make a bunch of these posters and put them up in random gathering places on campus where a few of my students could engage people in conversation? But who would be willing to do that?

Turns out, about 15 of my students would be willing to do that. Their eyes got really big when I told them about my idea, but they signed up all the same. So we held some training and spent some time talking about Jesus and now they are heading out this week to intentionally get themselves into some pretty sensitive conversations about Jesus, Sex & Dating. They're going to ask some tough questions. They're going to tell some tender stories. They're going to talk about the healing they found in Jesus. And they're going to invite people to come to an event where they can find that same healing. Big week, right?

Here's where you come in. We need your prayers. We've never done anything like this before. Would you pray that God sets up fantastic conversations for myself and my students? Would you pray that He opens our eyes to see exactly the right people who need to hear from Him? Would you pray for a staff friend and I as we write a talk that both explains what sex was originally designed for and how Jesus brings healing to the ways we've abused it? Who knows what might happen when that many students dedicate a week of time to engaging people with the Good Story? I'll keep you posted.