I wanted to take a few minutes & talk about the progression of the "Loved & Loving" project & the Campaign for Brokenness. If you haven't heard about these yet, there are some blogs that sort of chronicle what they are & what we've done already.
Real quickly I want to give you the goals for the next few months:
1) Keep meeting & growing the L&L project for the spring semester.
2) Develop a website for the Campaign for Brokenness as well as logos/graphics for L&L by next fall.
3) Work on developing a peer mentorship program for APU.
Loved & Loving:
Right now there are 20 members of the launch team. We're trying to stay low-key & under the radar at APU so that our wristbands don't become too watered down & so that this project can naturally run a course of its own, rather than a course we prescribe it. Right now there are, I'd estimate, 600 wristbands floating around APU, we also sent/will send 95 wristbands to the Lost Boys of Sudan within care packages from APU. In the last couple weeks I've begun to adopt a sort of duplication model for the deployment of the project, this is the first point I want to highlight.
What seems to have happened naturally is that, as the project spreads, new people ask about the project. Consequentially, I've been sitting down with some of these people and getting them involved (i.e., I give someone a wristband, they ask me about it, I talk to them about it, I give them 20 wristbands, then someone they give a wristband too asks about it, etc, etc, etc.). Maybe a "discipleship" model is a more appropriate name for this model, which brings me to the next point.
I've had many encouraging conversations over the last few weeks with a lot of very passionate & able people who want to be involved with the project or who are already involved with the project. I can also say, easily, that I've made new friends & strengthened existing relationships this way. I really think it's powerful just to sit down & have conversations with one another, build relationships, and talk about what we're struggling with. I've been thinking a lot about these conversations because they are the real purpose behind the Campaign for Brokenness.
Campaign for Brokenness: Peer Mentorship?
The big idea behind the Campaign for Brokenness, as I've outlined already, is to acknowledge our brokenness & to be open about it, to talk about it with each other. That's why the first & primary concern of mine is to develop some kind of peer mentorship program at APU, and possibly to bring this program to other academic institutions if proven useful.
I hope to work with APU (specifically, the office of campus pastors) over the summer to develop this program. I'm not sure yet what it will look like, I only know there is a need for SOMETHING like this...
That's about all I've got so far. Again, our goals are to create a website & develop the beginnings of a peer mentorship program by Fall 2008. Thanks!
