A solution to church finance or exhaustion of leaders in a student church is trying to keep the graduates. As Arie has commented on Sui’s blog, comparing with university students, a recent grad (with a job) has significantly better financial advantage, generally more mature than younger students, and will not be burdened by family matters for a few years. Great ministry resource, but how do we keep them?
It came to me as a shock when I learnt last week that one member of our congregation for 4 years, who has recently graduated from the university, has decided to depart and attend another church. Ask of the reason, “incompatibility” seems to be the key. FOCUS, as a student church catered for overseas students, is just not suitable for someone who is a fresh-grad, started working, and is seeking fellowship with other like-minded and in similar circumstances.
As a guy who like to rectify all problems, my immediate response is – “What?! So how can we fix FOCUS so that a graduate would not be able to use that excuse to leave us again?”. There is an issue – now give me the solution!
It is not just me who hate to see graduates go. In our last meet up with Josh, he was pushing an idea of “Grad+4″. Instead of loosing graduates who are staying back in Australia to other churches, he would like to keep the them in FOCUS for 4 more years – as young workers who can provide feed back to the student ministry, both financial and spiritually. They can also be more thoroughly equipped with God’s Word and ministry skills, before heading back home or going to other churches.
Sounds like a good idea. Again, how do we keep the grads?
I think it is not going to be easy. FOCUS is a very student centred church – everything we do is around the students. It is not just our church service happens to be in a lecture theatre. Our schedules are periodic – they go up and down depending on whether we are in week 1 or week 14 of an university term. When you meet someone new at church, you ask “what do you study? which year?” You take breaks when students are having holidays. You group people by the courses they are doing. You try to encourage each other during the exam weeks. We all discriminate art students…
There are just way too much of this student-ministry-mentality in FOCUS to cater for the graduates. Half the activities are run during the week days on the campus, and there is sometimes nothing during the exams, even on a beautiful Saturday! And what do you talk about during morning tea? COMP4001 or your office politics (of course the correct answer should be – what have we learnt from the sermon?!) But most unfortunately – sometimes I found graduates can be categorised as second class citizen in a student church. They are not covered by our mission statement – so take care, be self-motivated when you are around, but don’t expect attentions from our ministry team because you don’t study here…
In order to make FOCUS more attractive to the grads, we can either,
- Split the church into graduates and students, like what Pelita has done.
- Shift the attention to the graduates, include them as part of mission, and become less student-ministry centred.
- Train the graduates to be more student-ministry centred, so they will stay for the sake of proclaiming the gospel.
I don’t think there is an ideal solution. Splitting the church doubles your resource requirement, and the burden of running a student church remains. Shifting away from student-centred ministry violates why FOCUS is here in the first place – sending trained students to go back home and serve, as students really are the centre of FOCUS. Training the graduates is hard, and how many of them stayed because they are ministry-minded (instead of just too lazy to move on)?
We shall discuss more in the next episode.
brainstorming.. brainstorming..
may be open a new congregation ‘specifically’ for the grads..? ie. focus grads and focus?
(combination: traditional church sturcture with elders n stuff? for the grad, that is..)
another problem is.. at the moment, the solution that we think of is sectional, that is, pelita will ‘separate’ from focus in a couple of years, may be mbf in some many years. so, that may help keep the grads..? hence splitting the grads from students (as focus as a whole) may not be feasible either, unless we don’t split the church per fellowship.
mm.. seems to be adding problems rather than solutions? lol.. not really, this is a hint to a good answer.. hopefully.. :)
A congregation for the graduates? That congregation used to be called ‘TBT’ or ‘AABC’. Unfortunately TBT is now part of St. Andrew’s, and AABC will be part of St. Marks next month.
Now with AABC departing, there certainly left a hole in campus ministry. Graduates, and Asian-Australians. Maybe another AABC that is growing out of FOCUS, just like how the old AABF used to be people grown out of FOCUS?
As of splitting the church, you are thinking in term of (2) – re-focusing on moving the ministry away from the students. Thus each new congregation, be that Pelita, or Mandarin congregation if God is gracious, or whoever is still bearing the moniker of “FOCUS” – will all move away from stundet-centred ministry. I will talk about that in my next article.
And after thinking through some issues, it appears to be adding more problems, by putting our mind on “keeping the grads”. I’ll show that in my next article.
I received an email via the mailing list recently about a meeting that JN would like to have with the graduates, Saturday 9th of July at Barnabas Centre. I suppose these issues are related.
Hmm… You’ll find out that 9 July has long been scheduled as a long termers training/social day (since beginning of the year), and we had already missed out one due to busyness after the church camp.
“..will all move away from stundet-centred ministry”
“And after thinking through some issues, it appears to be adding more problems, by putting our mind on “keeping the grads”. I’ll show that in my next article.”
that’s true.. This problem is more like multiple choice question with no right / wrong answer(s).. looking forward to read your upcoming article, and what JN has to say for the grads too.. :)
“9 July has long been scheduled as a long termers training/social day (since beginning of the year)”
It appears to have been extended to all graduates, not just long-termers.
Well, I have not consulted JN for any of these, but just my gut feeling about the whole situation (isn’t that what blogs are for?)
And another thing is also thinking long term – you might have graduated, and planned for the next 4 years staying in FOCUS. What about the next 10, 20 or 30 years then? Where are you going to serve? Other committments kick in, and sometimes you will be distracted by other priorities. My wishful thinking is that everyone will be like the Driscolls, but again, that’s wishful thinking.
Moreover, how many actually planned staying for serving? Or just for the sake of “convenience”? And how is your service reflecting the direction of the church?
Maybe I am just too pessimistic looking at some of the things.
this issue is quite particular to a specialist congregation – one thing i would like to work on is to train people to fellowship in a general congregation. this is because they are the sort of churches people will find back at home (once they grow out of their 20s).
There are other reasons why wokers leave FOCUS that is parents’ preasure cos they’re worried that their child won’t be able to find a partner in FOCUS. This is what i have found out from some people.
How do you sort out parents worries??
Other issue is if young wokers are staying, who will do the pastoral care for them?
One thing to realise is that FOCUS is a specialist congregation. At least from what I have seen of its operation. At the end the problem is not “how to keep the graduates”, but whether FOCUS should transform from a specialised congregation, which seems to be working so far targeting the overseas students, to a generalised family congregation, that while have its benefits, but (1) many of us do not understand how it operates (2) whether it will disturb the overall strategy.
Splitting is another solution. But it also introduces other problems (and sometimes not necessarily solve the initial problem).
As of parents’ pressure, I am not in position of speaking about it. If it is only parents’ worry, then I think it is relatively easy to sort out. Not that if it is someone’s own worry. But by all means, someone should be able to serve other churches if marriage is an issue.
Thanks for all the contribution to the topic! I have not yet finalised what I am going to write next (sorry for all the advertisement), but keep the thoughts coming!
hmm.. interesting comment amanda. partly right and understandable.
i don’t like to see FOCUS change to it’s direction and goal.
i think preaching to overseas students is good and it’s normal for graudates to leave after a while, althought they are not pressured to leave.
getting to stay back is a bit hard, because they are adults and we can’t force them to stay.
starting a program for graduates is good, because at least this will give the undergraduates a reason to stay at FOCUS if they wish. but splitting into 2 groups undergraduates and graduates isn’t good , because there’s very little indifference between fellowship wise.
maybe get them to fill out a questionaire on what sort of things they expect or want to learn if they plan to stay back.
I’ve been offline for a few days till Telstra fixed my phone so sorry about the late reply.
Our church is big enough to cater for just about anyone but one strategy you might consider is the strategy of medium sized groups. The idea is this: the Gospel is relevant to everyone and will minister to everyone. If you have a good gospel lead generalist ministry then anyone can feel welcome. What you need to do is provide places for people to connect so that they can then form the relationship bonds that keep them in the church so that the ministry can occur and to minister to their specialist needs. Hence the medium sized groups.
The medium sized groups meet once a week or once a fortnight. The one I attend meets weekly on Saturday nights and caters for single and single again adults.
BTW, I can’t resist putting in a link to a picture of our church from space :)
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=-34.869672,138.667942&spn=0.005881,0.008827&t=k&hl=en