"If you can't predict the future - and increasingly you can't - action trumps everything."
--From Just Start, by Leonard Schlesinger, Charles Kiefer, and Paul Brown
This isn't a new idea, but it's an easy value to forget among our organization - both among staff and our students. It's so easy for us to overanalyze the unimportant particulars, logically give every excuse under the sun, proclaim that we need more training, and assess every possible situation. It can give us the cover of impressing others by looking super intellectual, smart, logical, and extremely prepared, but the truth is - it's all a facade to hide our deep fears and paralysis around evangelism and all of the unknown the future holds for us.
My colleagues and I have gutted our fall conference in hopes of creating an environment that reverse engineers this over-analytical culture to propel us forward in building God's kingdom and developing followers of Jesus.
That's why the conference has been simply re-named: act.
act:2015 is InterVarsity's discipleship fall conference for students all across upstate NY. We gather together for a weekend in Liverpool, NY (basically in Syracuse) to spend quality time with God off of our campus grounds and be challenged to follow Jesus by taking action, not just thinking about taking action. This year, we focused on the concept of stewardship and studied the book of Daniel to unpack some ways we were called to be stewards of the kingdom of God.
I was asked to teach some of the sessions on Daniel in order to train students to use the inductive study method to study God's Word on their own and within community as well as facilitate discussion around what we find about stewardship in these passages.
I was nervous about teaching the inductive study method in large groups of people, but once we got started and I saw what kinds of observations students were discovering and the connections they were making, it was exciting to see what I learned on my own and what students were learning as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment