Any community that wants to be on mission with Jesus has got to be marked by incarnation. The heart of incarnational ministry is to encounter the love of God and to embody that love in a particular place with a particular people. Look at any community that has brought the gospel to a new environment in a transformational way and you’ll see them encountering the love of God and embodying his love in that place. They incarnate the gospel and lives are transformed. Sounds great right? So why isn’t every Christian community living incarnationally? We see two ways that a community can miss the mark of incarnation and fail to see transformation occur. We can fail to inhabit a community and we can fail to actually incorporate the gospel into our lives.

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Do you ever feel like your ministry is stuck, jammed or bottlenecked? For whatever reason it just can’t seem to grow to that next level no matter what you do?

May I suggest that it could be that you don’t have a clear pathway for people to develop beyond yourself.

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[This is part of a series on “How Do I Develop an Apostolic Leader?” You can read the other posts here.]

By Chris Nichols

“Recently a pilot was practicing high–speed maneuvers in a jet fighter.  She turned the controls for what she thought was a steep ascent – and flew straight into the ground.  She was unaware that she was flying upside down.

This is a parable of human existence in our times – not exactly that everyone is crashing, though there is enough of that – but most of us as individuals, and world society as a whole, live at high-speed, and often with no clue to whether we are flying upside down or right-side up.  Indeed, we are haunted by a strong suspicion that there may be no difference – or at least that it is unknown or irrelevant.“   –  The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard

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[If you have a great story from college or know a great story please submit here]

“For it seems to me that God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession, like men condemned to die in the arena. We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to men.” – 1 Corinthians 4:9

I am Eduardo Lape, Jr, a 17-year old apostle of the Lord from Davao, Philippines. I am a college student at Ateneo de Davao University. I became a Christian when I during my high school years, 3 years ago, when my classmate, who became my mentor, invited me to a 3-day spiritual retreat called “Encounter”. From that day onward, my life was never the same again. And the fire set inside me by the Holy Spirit just made me want others to also experience the joy of being in the Lord. So I immediately started a ministry at my former campus together with my friend prophet, Benedict. We got our whole class dedicate their lives to Jesus.

By Eric Rafferty

As another school year wraps up and we take account of some of the things Jesus has done on campus with students at UNO, we are recognizing that this was an incredible year. The ministry we lead at UNO had its best ever year of growth. We’re three years into planting at this commuter campus and we’ve seen the chapter grow from 30 students in 2011 to 50 in 2012 to 74 in 2013. We’ve seen the number of small groups grow from 7 to 9 to 14, reaching out to different corners of campus from athletes to international students.

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By Brad Brisco

When discussing what it means to live a missional-incarnational lifestyle I will often say that the word “missional” denotes our “sentness,” both individually and collectively as the church. It is about our direction—we are sent. The term “incarnational” reflects the idea of “staying.” It is about how and where we are sent. While missional speaks to being sent, incarnational speaks to embedding our lives and the gospel of the Kingdom into a local context.

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Annie & Stephanie: Two Alaskan students starting something new

By Shawn Young

Do you think it’s possible for students to plant ministries, or does it take a “professional minister” to do it? Historically, Christian student initiatives have been controlled, limited or dismissed by professional clergy because they “lack the theological training necessary”.  But the simple fact is, there are not enough campus ministers to reach the 4000 colleges and universities just in the United States, much less the rest of the world.  We simply cannot afford to confine the expansion of new ministry to the number of “full-time campus ministers” we can hire.  The only way that every campus will have a witnessing community is if students are taken seriously as planters themselves.

I believe that every Christian student carries within them the potential to start a Jesus-centered community that can reach others with the gospel.  Annie and Stephanie are two students who proved this to be true.

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