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.