Why & How We Are Going All In with Summer Missions

This past year something crystallized for us as a movement:  Summer Projects are THE key to reaching the campus and sending out laborers.

This year we looked around at all of our key leaders – all the students we had picked as student staff and those that were graduating and interning with us – and realized what they had in common was Summer Project.

Summer Project gave them the equipping and growth in their walk with God to become an incredible leader.

We must train more leaders as we push toward the goal of “every student on campus knowing someone who passionately follows Christ.” And we simply don’t have the capacity to give enough personal attention to training leaders during the school year.

So we decided to put all our eggs in the Summer Project basket.

We started asking, “How do we dramatically increase our number of students on Summer Project?”

Last summer another ministry on our campus, StuMo, sent 150 students on Kaleo  -almost exactly like a Cru Summer Project: 9 weeks, beach evangelism, etc. [For those wondering, that is more than any single Cru ministry has ever sent on SP].

So what can we learn from them? How did they get that many students to go?

Two Main Reasons*:

1) Focus

2) Increased Recruiting Base

Focus

StuMo only sends to one stateside location (and one international).

I love that Cru has hundreds of options across the U.S. and around the world. But I think we could learn something from our International Partnerships. Focusing on one country does not limit our sending but instead exponentially increases it.

Many years ago (pre 1993) Cru took more of a shotgun approach to sending to the world. It was a steady trickle of students to the nations. International Partnerships brought focus and a synergistic flood of sending students to the world.

As a student at Texas Tech I developed a heart for Russia because I heard about it everywhere – at the Cru meeting, at the Friday morning prayer breakfast, from upperclassmen who had been and were going back, etc.

What if we brought that same focus to stateside projects?

On our campus last year we decided to only recruit to San Diego and we sent 13 students there last summer. This year our goal is 30.

Our hope is that students will sign up for Project in groups and come back from Project as a missional community ready to have a huge impact on campus (and avoid a lot of the typical post-Project blues).

Increased Recruiting Base

This past summer StuMo had 40 leaders who said, “I’m going back on Kaleo next summer, and I’ll commit to get 3 people to go with me”. Their primary recruiters were not staff but student leaders.

Two big application points for us:

1. We are recruiting heavily for our student leaders to apply to be Student Staff on Project
2. We added this to our Community Group Leader expectations:

“That you will make going on Summer Project your first option for next summer. We encourage you to apply before Christmas (San Diego or Ethiopia are the ones we recommend). We also want you to trust the Lord to take younger students from your CG with you on Project.

* Of course other factors played into StuMo’s crazy Summer numbers. To name a few:

They have a large movement (I would guess around 600 students)
They’ve been slowly building numbers/momentum for Kaleo over many years
At their Winter Conference the ONLY thing promoted is Kaleo
Pretty much all their staff go to Kaleo

Here’s a few additional things we are doing to get more students on Summer Project:

1. We’re having a Summer Project recruiting dinner in November – last year we tried it for the first time and had 90 students attend. We call every Community Group leader and challenge them to bring their entire study. We challenge every SP alumni to bring 3 friends to the dinner.
2. We’re heavily scholarshipping to Winter Conference
3. We’re challenging not inviting

Let’s share the wealth so we can all get better at this:  What are you trying on your campus to better recruit for Summer Project?