Tree rings.

Being an Asian American woman on staff shapes my leadership and interactions with students on campus.  And as an Asian American on staff with InterVarsity, I have the unique opportunity to be a part of the Asian American Ministries (AAM) - a segment of InterVarsity's ministry and organization that seeks to reach more Asian American students with the gospel and empower them to become industry leaders and culture-shapers for the kingdom.  

Every 3 years, AAM hosts a conference for staff who are Asian American and/or serve Asian American chapters or chapters that are predominantly Asian American students.  I've only been to one other AAM staff conference, but I've learned that this conference holds value for these AAM staff in many different ways.   For some, it's a helpful context to gain vision and tools for reaching Asian American students.  For others, it's a helpful just to be among a community - a family - of people who understand your culture, your work, and how those tend to intersect.  And for others, it does both.

For me, I find the conference to be a helpful space and community to help me further explore my ethnic identity with Jesus and how this ethnic identity affects my staff work and my life in general.  I've found that there a lot to learn from the ways I do connect and the ways I don't connect with my fellow colleagues, but it is very much like family - you many not know each other well, you may not connect over everything, but we care about each other and challenge each other to grow.

This year's theme was called, "Flourish," to help us as staff expand our reach and extend our influence.  There are many things I could share from this conference, but if I could only choose one, it is this:  an invitation I sensed from the Lord was to consider how I could reach and empower the Asian American students all over the upstate part of NY to flourish.  I am currently the only Asian American woman InterVarsity staff in upstate NY, and while I don't feel like I have a ton of experience, wisdom, or influence right now, I firmly believe that just being on staff can be a huge beginning factor.  God can use my five loaves and two fish to multiply His work.  

A photo posted by Tammy B. (@tammyoncampus) on Mar 4, 2016 at 2:22pm PST

Now, as for what this would all look like, I have no idea.  But the Lord is with me, and I am confident in Him.

Planning unplanned things

One of my top priorities as InterVarsity staff is to help students meet Jesus.

The problem is, I don't always know how to to do that.  I myself am not Jesus, and I don't always do a great job of knowing what Jesus wants to say to a student in any given moment to be able to help facilitate that.

Or, you know, I'm a sinful person and my own sin can get in the way of recognizing God's invitations.

It can be tempting to get caught up in the training, and coaching, and leading and forget that they're all for the purpose of creating space for students to meet Jesus.

Students, too, can have a hard time spending time with Jesus or recognizing God's presence throughout their day.  It's easy to procrastinate, put too much on their plates, and then have a hard time managing all of the things, thinking that they're all more urgent than spending quality time with Jesus.

This past week, the Rochester Area InterVarsity Staff came together to create space for students to meet with Jesus.  We invited all of our students from our chapters to come to Geneseo to spend a couple of hours in the middle of their day on Saturday for a self-led retreat.  We set up a few stations centered around nine spiritual temperaments and provided them an inventory to help students recognize ways they may best engage with God, and have space to try a new way of engaging with God.  We also allocated a sanctuary with beautiful stained glass as a room for complete silence.  We gave them a retreat guide, but told them that they didn't have to use it.  Students brought their own lunch, and they had the option of eating their lunch in silence as a way of continuing to engage with God.

I didn't really know what to expect.  For me, it was freeing to be able to create a space that students could lead themselves through.  It was freeing to not have to teach something, or lead something, or plan exhaustive details.  I myself got to spend some quality time in silence with the Lord.  For students, it was freeing to dedicate some quality time to meet with the Lord in silence, while also doing it in community.

Praise the Lord for the way He meets us when we create space in our lives to hear from Him!

Learning from Daniel

"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.