By Jesse Criss
One of my good friends, mentor and brother in Christ is Randy Carter . He is amazing and I often find myself sealing his brilliant ideas and adapting them as my own. This is one of those crazy brilliant ideas.
In a conversation about building relationships between leaders and students Randy challenge me that I might need to teach them the thing that I do very natural, collecting with students. The end result of that was “The BIG Three” which you can check out here, LIFE, LOVE & FAITH. Randy then suggested that I challenge my leaders to have LOW and HIGH level conversations with students.
A LOW level conversation was a text, email, note, facebook post, snap or phone call to just check in with a student. The intent is quick, simple and immediate communication. The goal is not to unravel the universe in 140 characters but instead to communicate that they were missed or to just checking in.
By contrast a HIGH level conversation was a face-to-face conversation with a student. Actually meeting that student in the real world where tone, body language and emotion could add to the conversation. This would be an opportunity to go deeper and a place where “The BIG three” could be asked.
The goal was to implement LOW level communication basically weekly. Challenging leaders to have regular contact with kids outside of the context of the program night. When it came to HIGH level communication we said that at minimum, it should happen once a term or 4 times a year. To be clear the goal is not necessarily one-on-one meetings. That’s just not possible for many groups but rather to gather with 2 or 3 people and dive deeper into the questions of Life, Love and Faith
Randy’s challenge has been a game changer for us and I think is something everyone needs to all consider trying. Often we as Pastors and Leaders agree that this is needed but we tend to leave it up to chance. This model challenges us to move it from a chance into an intentional part of our ministry.
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