At 8:00PM on August 14th, at Rocketown in beautiful downtown Nashville, a campus will relaunch. A campus geared towards reaching college students that are in a stage of life that is as much about growing than it is about learning.

I am personally pumped up and can’t wait to start. I’ve got big dreams and plans and I am praying that God does as well, but I also have questions.

Cross Point Community Church believes in this age group. While most churches have a college ministry, Cross Point has a college “church”. An entire church campus dedicated to college students. That’s where the whole “how to launch a campus in 10 days comes in.” Sure, we will launch. We have volunteers returning, new ones starting and teams in place to make this successful, but I can’t help but be challenged by this question: How do we create an environment where college students will come and consider this campus their “home” church? This isn’t a secondary meeting. It will be the same programming as Sunday morning.

Most of us grew up getting up on Sunday mornings and going to church, so we have a mindset that church happens on Sunday morning. This is going to be a change for some people. Or maybe we will attract those kids that never got up on Sundays and went to church, or students who were out too late on Saturday night. That’s just fine with me.

Whoever comes, I believe the answer to my question is this: Community. Once a student steps inside the doors at Rocketown, my prayer is that they will experience that “Everyone is welcome, nobody is perfect and anything is possible.”  A campus cannot launch without being intentional about community. That’s our goal. Acts gives us an account of the first church and Act 2:44-47 lays out how we can launch successfully.

⁴⁴ All the believers were together and had everything in common. ⁴⁵ They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. ⁴⁶ Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, ⁴⁷ praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

I pray we sacrifice to give to those in need together. I pray we meet together regularly. I pray we eat and laugh together. I pray we worship together. I pray we see many saved together.

August 14th at 8:00PM at Rocketown. It begins. Let’s do this.

I know I have only been a student pastor for about 8 months now, but I have picked up on some things already. For example, I know how to successfully navigate a 5 minute conversation with someone and never let on that I have no clue what their name is. Don’t get me wrong, I WANT to learn everyone’s name but there’s a time and place for “What’s your name again?” and it’s not to be done in the middle of someone pouring out their heart about their two week relationship gone sour after he was square dancing partners with another girl! Have some respect!

One thing I have learned though is how to be a pastor on facebook. No, I don’t mean copy and paste your latest message into 54 different status messages each week. I mean, well, you will understand once you see for yourself. Oh, and also – I didn’t learn the hard way on all of these. Just a few.

1. Don’t poke back. Under no circumstances should you ever “poke back” someone. I don’t care if they poked you first. Don’t do it. I have NO clue what it actually means, but the mystery and non-explanation from facebook should tell you enough that it’s not the greatest of ideas.

2. Turn chat off. I would love nothing more than to spend my precious facebook time chatting it up with 26 different middle school kids, but I just can’t do that every time I am on facebook. I mean, I have to change my status and check to make sure my students haven’t committed any murders in the past 24 hours and then go click “like” on every status my wife posts (yes, that’s a part of a husband’s job these days.) Actually, I take it back. I really wouldn’t love chatting it up with 26 middle school students every night. Just on Wednesday’s.

3. Uh, check your pictures. People can tag you in any picture these days. So, take a look through every now and then and make sure that one picture of you from college where you are witnessing to the toilet bowl isn’t on there. Not saying you have to appear to be perfect, but come on…let’s not get too extreme.

4. Don’t be Big Brother. You aren’t the facebook police. One of the easiest ways to keep kids away from your ministry is by constantly pointing out how “bad” they are. They wanted to be your friend on facebook because they like you, not because they want you to comment “tsk tsk tsk” on every status message about talking to a boy. Also, don’t comment on everything going on in someone’s life just because you already have seen it on facebook. I did do this one and was called a “creeper” for knowing stuff that was made public. Yeah, I didn’t get it either, but certainly learned from it!

5. Be normal. Not every post has to be a verse or have some kind of spiritual significance. Be yourself. Students are interested in hearing how normal you are. Obviously a filter is needed, but don’t think I don’t post about using my wife’s deodorant! Cause I do. Post about it…not use my wife’s…wait, I did do that.

There’s 5 easy to follow rules for being a student pastor on facebook. Learn those and you are quickly on your way to building meaningful, deeper relationships with students. Plus you will learn all the new cool shorthand ways to say things. Who knew that SMH meant “shaking my head.” SMH.

Week 3 was the big one. Purity. We talked about it all. You know, portable grills, neural pathways and fish. Yeah, really we did. Purity is so much more than just sexual purity. It begins in the mind and we challenged the students to create healthy neural pathways (google it, I promise I explained it), and when it comes to temptations – don’t be fish. Fish are nothing but an appetite. See the bait, want the bait, eat the bait and before they know it they are hooked and being reeled in. Don’t nibble. Don’t take the bait. Make your purity a priority.

It’s going to be tough. It’s not going to be easy. We know that. We know that because a lot of the times all we do, all, all, all we do is sin.

Week 2 consisted of bringing “Godly Back.” As in bringing God into a relationship. As with every message in this series, I am telling my students that these are intended for their future. At this age, they just don’t need to be in a relationship. But let’s face it, they aren’t going to listen to me on that one. So hopefully they will listen to me on this one.

If you want to bring Godly back in a relationship:
- Become who you want to marry.
- Talk about God.
- Your relationship should bring you closer to God
- Always keep in mind. Dating is a process for marriage.
- Ask yourself, “Does my relationship glorify God?”

Here’s the video we created. It’s set to Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back.”

I promised that I would post the video that we shot for week 1 of our Flee series. Our message centered around 4 reasons you should “flee” a relationship.  They were:

1. If mama ain’t happy.
2. Friends don’t let friends date losers.
3. If there’s disrespect you must reject.
4. Don’t flirt to convert.

Week 2 is about “Incorporating God into your relationship” and the song we remixed is “Sexy Back.”  I promise that it makes sense. Enjoy.