Colleen asked some great questions yesterday in the comments, and so that’s where I’ll start.
We will be moving probably in April. There is a small chance we could go before then (with March as the absolute earliest), but I’d guess we’ll be going no earlier than April fools day. (no joke.)
As we have prayed and thought through our current roles on campus, I’d say starting about a year ago (maybe more), we felt that more and more of our time was being spent doing operational support type things (websites, communication, graphic design, etc), and that type of stuff was very energizing. That’s not to say we don’t still enjoy sharing our faith and engaging with students, or that we have changed our mind about our personal vision. We still long for Christ to be made famous on the college campus. We’re still devoting our energy to that end.
We’ve just broadened the scope. Before we were praying and laboring for a handful of campuses in Western NC, representing somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 students. In the regional office, the scope is 27 local areas (of which Western NC is one) representing a little over 1,000,000 students. (2 million if you count our partnership with Brooklyn)
So that’s the why. What we will be doing in the regional office is working with the operations team. On the team, each person is both a specialist and a generalist. My specialty will be in the creative vein, working with web design, writing, and social media. I also would love to help in leading worship/program planning at several regional conferences per year. As a generalist, I will help the team in the vision to “increase capacity and sustain the mission of turning lost students into Christ-centered laborers” In short, we want to do things that will free up field staff to be more effective at what they are already doing, and enable and equip them to move out in ways they haven’t before. Jacqueline will be helping out on a limited part-time basis in the office with the finance team and the conference/event planning team (both subsets of the operations team)
Colleen’s last question is one that I’m glad she asked.
“Is this at all related to the difficulties that you have had in raising support recently? How are you guys doing with that?”
Which is directly related to the most frequently asked question of them all.
“Will you still have to raise support?”
The answer to those questions, however, will take an entire post. Tomorrow I’ll cover that.
In the meantime, what other questions do you have? (and a big thank you to Colleen for asking great first-round questions!)