It's been a few weeks since I wrote my last blog update - lots going on in the world of Operations!
The weeks leading up to Christmas were full of meetings and calls and e-mails about details concerning TCX, our annual winter conference. Around 1500 college students are attending TCX this year to be challenged, trained, equipped, encouraged and challenged. It's our hope and prayer that students would not leave this conference without being changed by God in some way that will make a lasting difference in their lives.
God's continually used TCX in my life in significant ways. This year is no exception. Mid-way through the conference this year, one of my impressions is the need for an increased awareness of sin in my life, and submitting in obedience to confess it and repent. I think about my sin a lot, and confess it to God periodically, but I feel a prompting to deal with it in a more direct way.
There are other significant things that God is calling me to do, or pray about, or surrender to Him that He has brought up this week. I'm sure I'll be blogging about them in the near future. :)
I also want to share a link with you: www.tcx2010.com. This website has up to date info about TCX this year, and will hopefully give you a picture of some of the things God is doing in and through students and staff this week. Check it out!
(I've also blogged quite a bit about the other TCX conferences I've been to in the last 5 years. Click on the 'tcx' label below this post to see 'conclusions' drawn from former years at the conference.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Operationally Building Movements Everywhere
Here's a small picture at a typical task for an operations team member with our regional office:
TCX, our annual winter conference is our biggest event. It takes all of our 200+ staff in the Upper Midwest to pull this event off. One of the biggest days at the conference is registering all of our attendees. Successfully pulling off the registration at this event takes a lot of preparation.
My role this year is making sure every student that arrives has a room. Of course, we don't just assign them any room with anyone - we try to keep students with their campus or geographic area (what we call a missional team). If you're from a small school in South Dakota, we try to put you with others from your state.
It's actually a simple process. Once students arrive at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Minneapolis, they check a sign in the lobby that lists what campus is staying on what floor. They head up the elevator to their designated floor, where they meet a staff member who assigns them to a room. From there they drop off their luggage, and finish registering on the 3rd floor of the hotel.
Part of my role involves training 24 staff in how to properly register the students. I love involving campus staff in ministry operations. I think it's important for them to see how important operations tasks are, so we on the Ops team and they as campus staff can continue to work well together.
With around 1450 students this year from over 100 different campuses, the hardest part lies in sorting data. I have an Excel file of every students' name and campus, and will sort through to count how many male and female students registered from every campus. I then consult a list of missional teams, and group the campuses into their geographic areas.
The next step is to obtain a list of rooms from the hotel that we have. I generally planned for 1600 students this year, which means we book 400 hotel rooms. I try to pair the number of rooms needed with the number of rooms available on a floor. Basically, we book the entire hotel.
(Along with the students, we have around 250 staff in attendance, (with their children), 125 high school students for a similar conference of their own, and 75+ Volunteers and guests. Over 2,000 people!)
This task of assigning students a hotel room is just one in a list of responsibilities that I have. I'm betting that not many of the 2,000 conference attendees will think about this process. But it's actually a task I enjoy and an area I love.
It's easy to get lost in the details. It's even easy to forget there are students attending the conference, as my interaction with them is sometimes limited. But when I overhear a student talking about sharing his faith for the first time, or chat with a student interested in serving with Campus Crusade in a role like mine, I'm reminded about the purpose of the details. I do the details in order to build spiritual movements everywhere. It's our hope to continue to pray and think about the ways God can use them to advance His Kingdom - during and after college.
TCX, our annual winter conference is our biggest event. It takes all of our 200+ staff in the Upper Midwest to pull this event off. One of the biggest days at the conference is registering all of our attendees. Successfully pulling off the registration at this event takes a lot of preparation.
My role this year is making sure every student that arrives has a room. Of course, we don't just assign them any room with anyone - we try to keep students with their campus or geographic area (what we call a missional team). If you're from a small school in South Dakota, we try to put you with others from your state.
It's actually a simple process. Once students arrive at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Minneapolis, they check a sign in the lobby that lists what campus is staying on what floor. They head up the elevator to their designated floor, where they meet a staff member who assigns them to a room. From there they drop off their luggage, and finish registering on the 3rd floor of the hotel.
Part of my role involves training 24 staff in how to properly register the students. I love involving campus staff in ministry operations. I think it's important for them to see how important operations tasks are, so we on the Ops team and they as campus staff can continue to work well together.
With around 1450 students this year from over 100 different campuses, the hardest part lies in sorting data. I have an Excel file of every students' name and campus, and will sort through to count how many male and female students registered from every campus. I then consult a list of missional teams, and group the campuses into their geographic areas.
The next step is to obtain a list of rooms from the hotel that we have. I generally planned for 1600 students this year, which means we book 400 hotel rooms. I try to pair the number of rooms needed with the number of rooms available on a floor. Basically, we book the entire hotel.
(Along with the students, we have around 250 staff in attendance, (with their children), 125 high school students for a similar conference of their own, and 75+ Volunteers and guests. Over 2,000 people!)
This task of assigning students a hotel room is just one in a list of responsibilities that I have. I'm betting that not many of the 2,000 conference attendees will think about this process. But it's actually a task I enjoy and an area I love.
It's easy to get lost in the details. It's even easy to forget there are students attending the conference, as my interaction with them is sometimes limited. But when I overhear a student talking about sharing his faith for the first time, or chat with a student interested in serving with Campus Crusade in a role like mine, I'm reminded about the purpose of the details. I do the details in order to build spiritual movements everywhere. It's our hope to continue to pray and think about the ways God can use them to advance His Kingdom - during and after college.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
A lesson from rush hour.
This morning, the crazy traffic downtown showed me something that will be very helpful for my job.
I've actually enjoyed my 5 mile, 25 minute commute to the office so far. You've probably heard by now that Minneapolis got a ton of snow over the weekend. The roads are fine now, but there's so much snow that there is generally one less lane on many major roads that have heavy traffic during rush hour. This makes for a much longer commute.
Traffic had just started to pick up a few blocks from the office. I was trying to watch the cars in my lane up ahead to see how packed it was, when suddenly the car in front of me hit their brakes.
Luckily the roads were clear and I stopped in time. I needed to both watch far ahead of me to make sure I was going in the right direction, and immediately in front of me to ensure I didn't crash into some one.
And so it is with operations. The ability to focus on the task at hand is obviously essential, but it is also important to be heading in the right direction as I work. The other day I found myself updating contact information on some forms, when I realized that we wouldn't need the forms for several weeks, and I had quite a bit to do that moment for a conference.
This sort of reminds me of a quote I heard back in the B-School: Climb the corporate ladder. Just make sure your ladder is up against the right wall.
I've actually enjoyed my 5 mile, 25 minute commute to the office so far. You've probably heard by now that Minneapolis got a ton of snow over the weekend. The roads are fine now, but there's so much snow that there is generally one less lane on many major roads that have heavy traffic during rush hour. This makes for a much longer commute.
Traffic had just started to pick up a few blocks from the office. I was trying to watch the cars in my lane up ahead to see how packed it was, when suddenly the car in front of me hit their brakes.
Luckily the roads were clear and I stopped in time. I needed to both watch far ahead of me to make sure I was going in the right direction, and immediately in front of me to ensure I didn't crash into some one.
And so it is with operations. The ability to focus on the task at hand is obviously essential, but it is also important to be heading in the right direction as I work. The other day I found myself updating contact information on some forms, when I realized that we wouldn't need the forms for several weeks, and I had quite a bit to do that moment for a conference.
This sort of reminds me of a quote I heard back in the B-School: Climb the corporate ladder. Just make sure your ladder is up against the right wall.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Bring on Week Two!
I'm excited to get back to the office this week; we've got a lot going on. TCX, our annual winter conference, is coming up in quickly! Two weeks from tonight, December 26th, I'll be setting up our conference office at the Hilton in downtown Minneapolis. It takes a ton of behind-the-scenes work to prepare for and execute a four-day conference for 2,000 people. We have a great website this year with some more info; check it out here.
Also on my radar this week are the international summer missions projects for our region. This year I'll help 6 couples from the Upper Midwest coordinate their 4-6 week long trips to international cities. Each trip will have several staff members, and probably 15 students on average. This week I'll be meeting with a few people who will teach me how to coach our project directors through the process of leading a successful trip. One thing I'll do this week is update the very out of date info on our website - I'm no web designer, by any means, but we don't have one in the office so we'll make do! (You can see the website here).
Also on my radar this week are the international summer missions projects for our region. This year I'll help 6 couples from the Upper Midwest coordinate their 4-6 week long trips to international cities. Each trip will have several staff members, and probably 15 students on average. This week I'll be meeting with a few people who will teach me how to coach our project directors through the process of leading a successful trip. One thing I'll do this week is update the very out of date info on our website - I'm no web designer, by any means, but we don't have one in the office so we'll make do! (You can see the website here).
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Week One Thoughts
Whew! My first week of work at the Regional Office is down in the books. It was great! I really like my team and the other officemates I've met this week. I feel so privileged to be serving with Campus Crusade, especially in the Upper Midwest region.
What strikes me most after this week is that God really does equip those he calls to serve Him. I've heard this promise many times, but I believe it now, in a different way. He's been growing my heart for the world in a few different ways since new staff training, specifically in the last 4-5 months. Looking back I can see Him preparing me for switching to a new role within the Operations team: coordinating our international summer missions projects.
I'm a quote collector (collecting and archiving all kinds of info is one of my strengths). One of my favorites is from Amy Carmichael: It is a safe thing to trust Him to fulfill the desires that He creates.
I have desires that He probably won't fulfill in my life, for whatever reason. Some of them are from the world, constantly forced upon me. Some are true desires He's given me. Many people cite Psalm 37:4 as one of their favorite verses: Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. This doesn't mean God will give me what I want. It means He will place the desires He has for my life in my heart. When I take delight in Him, the desires won't matter so much.
God's given me desires to do things that I never pictured myself doing. The reason why doesn't matter, because it's not about me - it's all about Him.
What strikes me most after this week is that God really does equip those he calls to serve Him. I've heard this promise many times, but I believe it now, in a different way. He's been growing my heart for the world in a few different ways since new staff training, specifically in the last 4-5 months. Looking back I can see Him preparing me for switching to a new role within the Operations team: coordinating our international summer missions projects.
I'm a quote collector (collecting and archiving all kinds of info is one of my strengths). One of my favorites is from Amy Carmichael: It is a safe thing to trust Him to fulfill the desires that He creates.
I have desires that He probably won't fulfill in my life, for whatever reason. Some of them are from the world, constantly forced upon me. Some are true desires He's given me. Many people cite Psalm 37:4 as one of their favorite verses: Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. This doesn't mean God will give me what I want. It means He will place the desires He has for my life in my heart. When I take delight in Him, the desires won't matter so much.
God's given me desires to do things that I never pictured myself doing. The reason why doesn't matter, because it's not about me - it's all about Him.
Monday, December 06, 2010
100%!
Great news: over the weekend I reached 100% of my financial goal, and today I got the final "ok" today to report to the office! I could not be more excited to head into the office tomorrow to join my teammates in reaching college students with the Gospel.
The "office" I so often speak of is the Upper Midwest Regional Office in Minneapolis, MN. In the US, Campus Crusade for Christ is organized into 10 different geographic regions. One of those is the Upper Midwest, made up the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Each region has an office in a major city, ours being Minneapolis, as sort of a nucleus of staff that offer leadership and support to staff around the region.
There are two main teams in our Minneapolis office: the Leadership Development team, and the Operations team. The Leadership Development team is basically the HR team of the office. They facilitate staff interviews, coordinate and lead our interns, help coach staff in their support raising, among many other things. HR in a non-profit organization really intrigues me; our HR team has more of a focus on training and development than legal/compliance issues that a for-profit company deals with. (There is an HR division in Orlando at our International headquarters, so I'm sure they deal with similar issues as a for-profit company).
The Operations team has several functions, providing leadership in areas of Fund Development, Information Systems, Technology, Finance and Conferences/Events, among others! Our overall goal is the same as campus staff: build spiritual movements everywhere, so everyone knows someone who truly follows Jesus!
Well, that's enough ministry mumbo-jumbo for one evening!
Photos of my new office cubicle coming soon! (:
The "office" I so often speak of is the Upper Midwest Regional Office in Minneapolis, MN. In the US, Campus Crusade for Christ is organized into 10 different geographic regions. One of those is the Upper Midwest, made up the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Each region has an office in a major city, ours being Minneapolis, as sort of a nucleus of staff that offer leadership and support to staff around the region.There are two main teams in our Minneapolis office: the Leadership Development team, and the Operations team. The Leadership Development team is basically the HR team of the office. They facilitate staff interviews, coordinate and lead our interns, help coach staff in their support raising, among many other things. HR in a non-profit organization really intrigues me; our HR team has more of a focus on training and development than legal/compliance issues that a for-profit company deals with. (There is an HR division in Orlando at our International headquarters, so I'm sure they deal with similar issues as a for-profit company).
The Operations team has several functions, providing leadership in areas of Fund Development, Information Systems, Technology, Finance and Conferences/Events, among others! Our overall goal is the same as campus staff: build spiritual movements everywhere, so everyone knows someone who truly follows Jesus!
Well, that's enough ministry mumbo-jumbo for one evening!
Photos of my new office cubicle coming soon! (: