What's Your Win?

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One of the books I have had to read as a new staff member for FCA is called 7 Practices for Effective Ministry by Andy Stanley, Reggie Joiner, and Lane Jones.  As you can probably gather, the book discusses several practices (7, in fact!) to make your ministry more effective, the first of which is, “Establish your win.”  As I was mulling this over I came across a pretty sobering paragraph in the book that said:
“Read or study any report about church attendance in America.  They all suggest the same thing.  Each generation is more skeptical and less likely to attend.  Most experts believe that 70 percent of college students who have grown up in church will drop out when they go to college.  Attendance is declining and those on the outside seem to have a growing indifference toward what the church has to offer.”
I don’t know about you but this hurts my heart.  As I continued reading, I couldn’t get that 70% statistic out of my head.  The composition of huddles varies from school to school.  At some schools, there are a lot of kids who don’t normally go to church, so the obvious “win” there would be for those kids to make a decision to start a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  But what about the other kids?  Those, particularly at the high school level, who have already made that decision.  What’s our “win” with these soon-to-be adults?  For me, it would be to have them truly “own” their faith by the time they graduate.  I’d want every single student who regularly attends an FCA huddle to go off to college or start a job being able to answer three questions:
1. What exactly do you believe? 
2. WHY do YOU believe it? (i.e., not just because you’ve gone to church all your life)
3. How can you share that with others?
When I went off to college, I could certainly give you a memorized answer of the first question, but I’m not so sure I would have had a great answer to the second.  Thankfully, I landed in FCA pretty early on in my freshman year and was able to figure this out with the help of friends and upperclassmen who were willing to pour into me.  It’s such a privilege to devote my time to replicating this model in our middle schools and high schools here in Loudoun. 

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