Last updated October 13, 2017*
This week some 80 of InterVarsity’s leaders gathered in Madison for three days of prayer, vision, and creative thinking against the horizon of the year 2030. As an organization, we have never extended our strategic planning horizon that far out. As you know, the Executive Leadership Team has coalesced around a vivid “2030 Calling”:
Longing to see revival, we will catalyze movements that call every corner of every campus to follow Jesus.
We want to be part of a movement of organizations and churches working in some degree of concert to see a redeeming presence on 3,000 American campuses. Such a presence would entail intercessors enlisted, small groups multiplied, lives impacted, decisions recorded, and disciples sent. As part of this Calling, we want to see a significant expansion of InterVarsity witnessing communities on hundreds of new campuses and thousands of new corners over the decade ahead.
GFM will play an important part: hiring more staff, planting on more campuses, engaging more faculty, reaching more professional corners, serving more internationals, shaping more vocational stewards.
Please pray for InterVarsity, as we move forward from this time together, for:
- God’s presence and protection
- Wisdom and discernment, especially for the facilitating leaders
- A sense of mutual respect and united purpose
- That GFM voices would make a valuable contribution
- Perhaps especially for Kathy Tuan-MacLean and Anna Lee-Winans as they make their “debut” in their new roles as national focused ministry directors for Faculty Ministry and Discipleship respectively.
*Come back soon! Inside GFM has gone out with this update, however, Bobby is looking forward to sharing more information with GFM staff right away! Please re-visit this page early next week for more news on this week's meetings. Thank you!
This past Saturday, Glenn Goldsmith hosted half a dozen faculty for dinner and I facilitated a conversation about some of the most vexing challenges in higher education that faculty face these days. We touched on free speech issues, political polarization, race matters, viewpoint diversity, decline in tenure track positions, and more. Then we talked a bit about how, as faculty, to be the embodiment and voice of shalom in the middle of such cross currents—with students, with colleagues, through scholarship, and within the institution. No small thing when one’s plate just doing one’s job is overfull. We rehearsed Paul’s inviting catalog of admonitions in Romans 12.
Earlier this week, here in Madison, our colleague Jon Dahl hosted a faculty luncheon featuring Dr. John Lennox, a mathematician from Oxford who will be part of a Veritas Forum at UW tonight. Dr. Lennox invited the faculty to worry less about their skill at apologetics and more about warm friendships and mutually interested conversations with seeker friends. And one morning this week, John spent time at a Proxe station on the quad engaging students on the Veritas Forum theme: Is There Truth Beyond Science?
Each of you are similarly investing this week in the lives of grad students and faculty, helping them to bear witness and bring shalom in their situations. Thank you, and may the Lord make you fruitful in this good work.
