If you have not then please consider reading, commenting, and sharing at least once this year! The Blogference brings together ministry leaders from around the world to discuss relevant ministry issues. By leaving a comment and sharing your thoughts you create a diverse and energizing experience for leaders seeking to have an influence for Christ around the world!

The Topics This Year:

• Virtual Evangelism–A Personal Story

• Virtual Ministry–A Challenge

• Evangelism and Latinos

• Leading as  a Mom

• How Social Media is Influencing Culture and Changing the Church

• Thriving at College

• Missional Campus Ministry

• Spiritual Leadership

• Leading Strategically

• 50 Year Olds and 20 Year Olds–One of Campus Crusade’s Biggest Internal Challenges

To Participate the Blogference:

Rob Bell has ignited a firestorm of controversy with his recent book Love Wins.

How is the controversy affecting those whom you lead?

What sorts of responses are you coming up with when discussing the issue?

Are there any particular parts of Scripture or resources that you are using to walk people through the issues at stake?

What does transferability look like in 2010?

• Charlotte, a campus director, was the first to run a campaign that was being deployed on multiple campuses across the country.  She shared her insights, best practices and learnings on a message board accessible to all staff .  Many other directors read her post and adjusted their strategies for greater effectiveness based on Charlotte’s feedback and experience.

• Lauren, a student leader, wanted to help her friends learn to use a new tool to share their faith.  She used a webcam to film herself modelling it and then shared it to her friends with YouTube.

• Ben, a conference director, is determined to make the job easier for his successor.  He creates this year’s documents for the conference in a shared folder in Google Docs so with one-click next year’s director has everything at his finger tips.

With a small change in their workflow, Charlotte, Lauren and Ben are all making the job of other kingdom builders very easy.

Today’s digital tools make sharing really easy.  The hard part is changing your mindset to work in a collaborative way.

Take a moment this week and contribute one of your best resources or insights so that we can all get better.

Click here to see what’s been shared already on the RE-Think Blogference resource drive.

This week we will be taking resource submissions on anything related to minsitry: bible studies, discipleship, evangelism, event planning, etc! Just email your resource in to the blogference gmail account, and I will upload, organize and share it on the site.

Here’s what you do:

• Select one or many resources that you USE on a regular basis
• Email them to cccblogference@gmail.com in ANY FORMAT!!!
• Or if it’s an online resource go ahead and leave the link in the comments.

Here’s what I will do:

• Organize all the resources submitted
• RE-share them here on the blogference in an easy to view and download manner.

I cannot stress what a great opportunity this is to save a ministry leader time doing something that has already been done and free them up to do something that is important but not urgent. Please take a minute to share at least one resource!

About the author:

Brian Barela is the Director of New Media for Campus Crusade for Christ. He is passionate about empowering ministry leaders for kingdom expansion. He recently posted on The Leader as a Platform on his blog.

Thank you so much for your engagement and interaction these last three years. I’m hopeful that by expanding the people contributing content to the blogference that the learning and dialogue will increase and encourage you to lead more boldly and passionately for Jesus!

Can’t see the video? Click here to view it in your browser.

Here are some quotes from my interview with him:

Why Use Video to Communicate?

“There is so much information to sort through daily for students, mainly in the form of text, and the attention span of college students is limited, that words get lost in the vastness of information being presented online. Something visual provides a nice break from text-based content. A short (under 5 minute) video can be a great vehicle for delivering information because it utilizes more visual components rather than reading comprehension.”

What are some limitations of using a Facebook group, and particularly a text-based message to the entire group, as a primary means of information delivery?

“Information can and does get lost in student’s inboxes because they are members of many groups online, friends sending private messages, etc. The same can be true for news feeds because so much information is being funnel through that medium. Having even a small thumbnail of a video show up in someone’s news feed is going to provide a powerful tool for your ministry to capture attention.”

How can campus ministries that do not have high quality video devices or highly skilled video producers leverage video for greater effectiveness?

“Even smartphones and mobile devices have decent cameras to capture video. Also important is uploading these videos to a YouTube channel which can also be an outreach and evangelistic tool. You can tag your videos with the name of your campus, or a spiritual term, so that people can find your content when they search, and connect them to your ministry beyond your website of Facebook group or page.”

Follow Brendon on Twitter.

Check out his blog.

Check out his ministry website.

Are you using video to communicate? How? What are some challenges you face in seeing video have more of a role in your communications?

The main goal of the RE-Think Blogference is to facilitate discussion on ministry philosophy to sharpen your ministry skills and connect you to other like-minded missional leaders.

We are launching a podcast to expand the amount of content and connections we can bring to your door via the internet!

There will be interviews from ministry leaders around the world but I would love to see a significant part invested in answering questions and discussing issues that you are currently facing in your leadership role.

Here are some thoughts related to the categories/topics we will cover:

• Evangelism: best practices, new tools, response rates to various types of evangelistic initiatives, how to train others, etc.

• Leadership Development: books, articles, blog posts, productivity tools, productivity practices, mentors, sharing power, empowering those “below” you, etc.

• Mom’s, Wives, Women: balancing work and family, unique leadership challenges, helpful and encouraging books/articles/blog posts, etc

• Sharing and Collaboration: online and offline tools, strategies, and tactics for creating an environment of sharing, etc

Please share your thoughts in the comments and on Twitter! Just reply to @cccblogference with your thoughts or leave a comment below!

Imagine sharing your experience/strategy/perspective with others on a blog, a conference call, a Skype video chat, a Google document or just sitting across the table from someone. Now imagine the new leaders that could be empowered all over your city and the world. The tools are there, all it could take is a little time and humility on our part. We now have the ability to cross huge geographic distances instantaneously. A campus minister in Montana can share his strategies with someone serving in the Middle east in real time.

There are barriers for sure.

I like to learn new stuff. Before I can even process what I’m doing or thinking I’m on to the next thing. The urgency of ministry outweighs the need to help other campus ministers have insight into my daily life. Also, sharing what I’m doing (strategies, perspectives, tools, etc.) involves facing a lot of fear. Fear of looking foolish, fear of being challenged and fear of being wrong.

I need to get over myself. I don’t have it all together, I never will and it’s often better if I don’t because it empowers others. Who cares if I look a little foolish letting people into what I’m doing in ministry. The value of having someone engage with my situation is off the charts helpful for all involved. Think about it, it’s not the blog posts that are the real value of the blogference, it’s the collaboration in the comments.

Do you and you team see value in the tools that are available to share the wealth with others? Do you trust others enough to share what’s going on in your context and learn from their insight? Why do you fear sharing the wealth?

Photo courtesy of furiousgeorge81

In North America, there is no college ministry organization, denomination, region, or other “circle” that contains anywhere near a majority of the college ministry work. And however we might measure wisdom (or at least locate it) – rich history, number of ministry sages, number of students involved, years of experience, years of prayer, years of thought, years of training… the wisdom of everybody else added together will always equal more than my own circle’s.

This means – by definition – that unless I’m collaborating with those outside my circle, I’m behind the times. And I don’t simply mean that my ministry is in danger of being something less than “contemporary.” I’m actually in danger of not “knowing the times and knowing what Israel ought to do,” because my circle of counselors isn’t complete.

I have long been rather intrigued (because I’m a nerd) by Newton’s Law of Cooling. Basically, it observes that the greater the temperature difference between an object and its surroundings, the faster its temperature changes. So if I put my hot oatmeal in the fridge (instead of leaving it out on the counter), it won’t only eventually cool more, but it will also immediately cool faster.

So maybe this is Benson’s Theory of Learning:

The greater the differences between a learner and his collaborators,
the faster he’ll find himself challenged, stretched, and exposed to truly new ideas.

I’d far rather collaborate with 5 experienced college ministers from various circles than 20 from the same circle! (Remember, learning via collaboration doesn’t require agreement.)

I do understand the immense value in collaborating within our present networks and with like-minded or like-situated college ministers; particularly, it makes sense for very new college ministers to learn first from the “best of the best” within their circles.

But before long, the minister who learns only within his own circle will possess (without knowing it) the same issues faced by untraveled political ideologues who never change the cable news channel. There’s no way to realize what they don’t know, to understand practically why their own ideas are truly best, or even to grasp the actual stances of those in other camps.

Without a healthy dose of cross-circle collaboration, I’m in danger of becoming a college ministry ideologue – because the bulk of ministry wisdom will always reside outside my circle, no matter what circle I happen to call home.

I would love to hear any and all questions about this principle (or how to apply it), concerns about what I’ve said, illustrations of your efforts here, or challenges in practicing this! But beyond that, I also want to facilitate us “practicing what I preach.” So if you have any questions about what I’ve learned “out there” from numerous college ministry circles, fire away. Consider this an open Q&A for today.

I suggest every person who desires to see millions of students bringing the gospel to every corner of every campus should tithe of their time online to share tips, resources, ideas, struggles and stories. The mission can’t be executed by creating trade secrets, hoarding knowledge, or protecting resources.

Today’s web tools scream effectiveness as they empower learning, uber-transferability and scale. The platforms exist, but a mindset of collaboration doesn’t.  By spending five minutes to upload the presentation from your last small group leader training you could save someone hours.  Instead of pinging someone with an email, having the conversation on a forum might allow someone else to answer the question better than you could.  Tweeting the articles you’re reading helps identify valuable insights we can all benefit from.

Do you think the eternal rewards of investing 10% of your online time could be worth it and make the  other 90% of time more effective? There’s probably someone who knows a lot more about reaching students than you.  There’s probably someone who could really benefit from what you know about reaching students.  If we’re all on the same team, for the same mission, for the same King, then why aren’t we talking?

[Photo courtesy of tiridifilm]