Collective Action: Cooperative outreach among Christian groups at NYU
by Jeremy Del Rio
How God revitalized the outreach ministry of NYU's campus.
Have you ever felt like your best evangelism efforts resulted in wasted time and energy? I have. During my undergraduate days at New York University (Class of ’95), I served on InterVarsity’s executive leadership team for three and a half years in the capacities of outreach coordinator, small-group leader, vice-president and president. Early in that period, we experienced those feelings time and again, and we weren’t alone.
Small, bare-bones campus ministries proliferated at NYU and had little, if any, impact on non-Christian students. We all seemed so focused on resolving internal struggles simply to survive that evangelism was at best an afterthought, when we thought about it at all. When we actually did something about it, our attempts typically left us feeling ineffective and irrelevant.
Irrelevance
Our relevance to non-Christians was like that of a fast-food food court at a five-star resort. All the national franchises were present or would start a chapter in the next few years, and local and ethnic specific ministries had groups as well, but none of us offered what our customers wanted. We each served our respective brands of discipleship and fellowship, but students weren’t buying. Groups of six to fifteen people were the norm, often including the staff minister. The two chapters with thirty or forty students were viewed as campus mega-ministries, but even they were not growing.
Even worse, it seemed that at every Club Fair our common goal was not to recruit “seekers” who would challenge the strength of our convictions and require us to stretch our faith, but rather to find reinforcements who would allow us to live to see another day after the current leaders graduated in May. Thus we competed for the same handful of self-motivated, already dedicated Christians who had arrived at school without prior time-consuming commitments to local churches and were pre-determined to get involved in campus ministry.
Collective Action
Then something happened during the spring of my sophomore year that revolutionized the way NYU’s campus ministries thought about their role as salt and light at the university. We conceived of a collaborative approach to evangelism rather than a chapter-based approach that pulled our collective resources together and enabled us finally to engage non-believers in a meaningful dialogue about Christ. The model, called the Christian Inter-Fellowship Council (CIFC), has survived its founders and still impacts the campus today. Its lessons are applicable to other campuses and its successes could be replicated at your school.
The idea for the council started with an unconventional idea . . . actually, not too unconventional, just a little different vis-a-vis typical NYU Christianity. At the time, I served as the sophomore representative on our student council and was responsible for producing an unspecified event. Instead of proposing another beer-guzzling bar crawl or Saturday night dance-a-thon, I proposed that the student council sponsor a production of Bruce Kuhn’s The Gospel of Luke, a one-man show taken directly from Scripture. Couched in politically correct, “cultural diversity” speak, the the proposal was approved by the student council, but with much skepticism. One of my closest friends warned me on the telephone to “realistically estimate” that about 45 people would attend—this at a university with over 40,000 students!
The opportunity to produce Luke with the student council’s funding finally galvanized the fellowships to collective action. Without the cooperation of disparate ministries for prayer, mobilization and execution, this event would have flopped like the rest of our attempts. Eight organizations representing Catholic, Protestant, multi-ethnic, ethnic-specific, denominational and interdenominational affiliations, including InterVarsity, rose to the challenge. Group representatives agreed to meet regularly to strategize ways to insure that every undergraduate knew about the event and to figure out how to stimulate further thought and discussion about the gospel among non-Christians. While no single group acting alone could pull it off, acting collectively forced us to combine the few resources we had so that God could multiply the effect.
Luke proved more successful than any of us could possibly have expected. For more than a week promotional materials blanketed the campus. It sold out in less than two days, with more than 250 people attending. Students lingered afterwards to discuss the “script” at a reception. The school newspaper covered it on the front page, we raised more than $600 for charity, and our university, a very secular institution, named The Gospel of Luke “Event of the Year” and awarded the various Christian clubs for “Best Co-Sponsorship.” At Urbana ’93, Rev. Peter Cha cited the event at a general session attended by 18,000 students as exemplifying the impact campus unity could have on evangelism.
Paradigm Shift
Most importantly, our paradigm had shifted. For the first time we understood and experienced what Jesus meant when he challenged his disciples: “The world will know you’re my disciples by your love for one for another.” For the first time in our collective memory, evangelism at NYU took on a kingdom focus and not a fellowship focus, and unbelieving students were engaged by our love and not our competition.
We decided that if God could use us to produce one event with a university-wide impact, he might want to use us on an ongoing basis. Over the next semester, we formalized our relationship for the purposes of securing campus credibility and funding and adopted a comprehensive mission statement: ”The CIFC exists to unify the body of Christ at NYU in all of its diversity without regard to denominational, ethnic, or racial affiliation, and to engage the campus with Jesus’ message of love, salvation, and repentance.” We also committed ourselves to hold regular inter-fellowship prayer meetings and to produce two or three evangelistic or unity-building events each semester. During my junior and senior years, the CIFC continued to engage the campus with holiday outreaches, community service projects, evangelistic theme weeks called “A Taste of Agape,” concerts and coffee houses, and a weekly editorial column called “CrossWalk” in the school paper. Both years, the school named the CIFC “Religious Club of the Year,” and individuals on the council received awards for leadership and programming.
Ongoing Mission
Institutionalizing the CIFC at NYU provided a foundation for it to withstand the leadership turnover inherent in campus ministry. All of the CIFC’s founding delegates have long since graduated, but they left in place a structure that has allowed for future ministry growth. The CIFC is now officially recognized by the university as a campus umbrella group and consists of 19 member organizations representing the full face of Christianity including Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox undergraduate and graduate believers. The school regards “Agape Week” with the same status afforded women’s history month, gay pride, and other university-sponsored cultural events. CIFC outreaches continue to receive favorable school press coverage.
Mickey Sanchez, the CIFC’s current, sixth-generation chairperson and president of NYU’s Campus Crusade chapter, credits the CIFC with “making cooperative evangelism important in the eyes of our member groups.” Although the growth of the council has made it increasingly difficult to coordinate schedules and manage communication among everyone, Mickey says that the CIFC’s “vision for a unified witness to the gospel has stayed constant. God has been faithful in raising up leaders whose hearts burn with a desire to see the body of Christ come together to proclaim the gospel.”
Challenges
Administering a collaborative body like the CIFC has been difficult because both of its objectives—unity among believers and effective evangelism—are difficult to attain. Producing events, recruiting volunteers, securing funding—these are the “easy” elements because the CIFC is designed to merge one group’s strengths with another’s weaknesses in a synergistic way that can have an impact on the entire campus. It’s those other often elusive goals that are trickier to measure.
Christ-Centered
That’s why the CIFC has adopted a “Joshua-esque” strategy for achieving both unity and effective witness. When Joshua was about to lead the people of Israel into the Promised Land, he gathered the various tribes together and chose representatives from each tribe to carry God’s presence, the ark, ahead of the entire body. As they moved in unison behind one God, they watched God prepare a path through the waters of the Jordan River so that they all could cross on dry ground. When the tribes recognized their interdependence on each other and their common dependence on God, God provided victory for all of them.
Bringing the body together at NYU requires the CIFC to work deliberately at fostering relationships among diverse groups and their representatives. It also requires that the CIFC not attempt too much; true commitment to collaborating demands respect for the fact that Christian groups look and act as differently from one another as any other human groups do. There are all kinds of fellowships: charismatic, traditional, radical, reserved, Calvinist, Arminian and more. Unity means not glossing over distinctions, but rather celebrating how together we can embrace one Lord and Savior despite those distinctions.
Mickey describes the continuing struggle for unity this way: “On the one hand we cannot declare complete theological unity and on the other we cannot say that we don’t all agree on a significant and substantial number of matters.” The agreement, he says, can be summarized by the Nicene or Apostles Creed, or, in more modern terms, “We all believe and put our faith in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, whose historical resurrection from the grave cleansed us from our sins. Anything less does a severe injustice to Christianity, Jesus Christ and the truth.” The overriding message then is Jesus and him alone. Member groups maintain their uniqueness while looking beyond it in order to present one Christ and one body to the campus.
Mission Driven
The other key to establishing unity is remaining mission driven. The CIFC does not exist to replace any fellowship, but instead supplements and enhances the work that the fellowships already do by focusing specifically on evangelism. It defines evangelism as proclaiming Jesus boldly yet humbly to as many non-Christians as possible, and to achieve this objective, places heavy emphasis on producing events. Events provide very specific objectives with concrete tasks that can be delegated among members and serve to hold them accountable. Moreover, they “are definitely on a larger scale than would be possible through individual group action and consequently draw more attention from the NYU community,” Mickey says. “They move everyone’s focus away from the divisions that exist in Christianity and refocus their attention on the gospel.”
Application
Perhaps your school has a student council that will not fund an evangelistic event no matter how politically correct the proposal. Don’t be discouraged. The key to collective action is not funding, but rather intentional communication with a clearly defined goal in mind. The Gospel of Luke event simply helped force NYU groups to communicate. While you may not be able to duplicate those circumstances at your school, you can certainly use the model of the Christian Inter-Fellowship Council. The fellowships on your campus have creative ideas that should be shared and resources that could be combined and leveraged. What goal could possibly have more eternal significance than uniting the body of Christ to proclaim the saving grace of Jesus to those who need to hear it?
If you are reading this article then consider yourself a catalyst whom God may want to use at your school. Like Joshua, God instructs you: “Be strong and of good courage, for to this people you shall divide as an inheritance the land which I swore to their fathers to give them” (Joshua 1:6, NKJV). My father, a pastor and evangelist in New York City, often said, “Alone we cannot do this, but together we can take this city for Jesus!” How true for our campuses as well.
©2001
Last modified on: Jan 9, 2007