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As missionaries, we have long been concerned with how we can influence the most lives in the little time we have in this life. There is a vast field of harvest. Likewise, there are so many different roles to play while reaching lost people around the world with the Gospel. We think about this frequently as we want to commit our time and efforts in such a way as to bring about the most fruit.
Over the years, we’ve been struck with how difficult ministry can be from a logistical standpoint. This is illustrated best by a problem we encountered early on in ministry. When we were running the Long Beach State Campus Crusade movement back in 1999 we found there was no easy way to keep an accurate list of our students. We needed a database which included data relevant to our ministry, could be updated easily by multiple people, and easily accessible to our student leaders and other staff. Managing a shared, current, and relevant database should have been a simple task. We found it to be laborious and increasingly time consuming with each successive year running a ministry. There were thousands of entries and deletions a year as students entered college and then graduated four years later. It was a full time job of data management just on one campus and distracted us from our mission, taking away from valuable face to face time on the campus. No software existed that managed all our database needs. In fact, Campus Crusade as a ministry had no system or practice in place for keeping information on students. As our movement grew each year, it was difficult for us to figure out who of our contacts was in the ministry and who was not; it made it difficult for us to contact them, and it made it difficult for us to know relevant statistics about the ministry we were working so hard to build. That was over 10 years ago. To date, the situation has not changed.
I was recently talking to the man in charge of making software for all staff in Campus Crusade, software that enables us to work more efficiently in our ministries. I asked him why so little development had been done to resource the staff when keeping track of students and alumni. His answer was simple. There are precious few people in the ministry who have the skills to fill this need. Can you imagine that out of thousands of staff ministering to the hundreds of thousands of students in the world, scarcely anyone who has such programming skills, is willing to use them in the service of the Lord. Of all the kinds of missionaries within Campus Crusade, the most critical and rare are computer programmers.
There is some software available to us in Campus Crusade. One that comes to mind is, the Summer Project Tool. The Summer Project Tool enables students to apply for summer mission projects online and it allows staff to use the resources of computers and servers to help in evaluating summer project applicants. In the past, applications were done on pen and paper. The size of team needed to evaluate those applications was enormous, requiring many man-hours of work to evaluate summer project applications every year. Moreover, the application process was slow, tedious and the number of applicants as well as the number of summer projects had to be capped in order to handle the workload. Many students were not able to go on a summer project simply because there was no spot for them with the cap. Now that there is the Summer Project Tool, there is no limit to the number of applicants and no cap on the number of projects. The result: this year, we have set new records for the number of projects and applicants going overseas. I realize the impact that one person’s programming had on so many lives. Students who go on summer projects almost always become ministry leaders and often get involved in full time ministry beyond college. The programming work from one person had an impact far greater than what any one movement leader could have accomplished even in the course of an entire career. Programmers are sorely needed in the mission field. I am one of the few people in the nation who has the requisite skill set to provide for this most important of needs.
Recently God began to impress upon us how many lives we can affect for the Gospel by simply using the skills He’s given me. We began to see this vision and this vision has turned to conviction. Conviction’s turned to calling and we realize that God certainly wants us to go to Orlando, Florida. He’s directing our family to the main Campus Crusade office to provide for this most precious yet valuable ministry need. We realize that with the work we will be doing there, everyone within Campus Crusade, throughout the nation, will not only be more efficient, but will gain capabilities they’ve never had. The result will be that many more students will be reached with the Gospel, many more will be transformed, and many more will be sent to reach the lost. There is literally nothing else we can right now that can have more impact than this. To read more about how God lead us to this decision, you can read more about our new direction here.
--Ken
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