The Institute of Evangelism

Every Church an Evangelizing Community!

Robin Wallar

About Robin Wallar

Robin Wallar is the Lead Pastor of LIFT Church. LIFT is a church that believes the university campuses of Canada represent the greatest opportunity for the hope of Jesus. While studying nuclear engineering at McMaster University, Robin worked to plant a LIFT Church which is now seeing a discipleship movement thriving across our nation’s college and university campuses. Robin serves alongside his wife Laura, their two children and an orange cat named Samson. They live in the beautiful city of Hamilton.

Today’s Pressing Questions: Insights From a Campus Church Planter

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This is the second article by church planter, Robin Waller. Every church and ministry can learn from his insights into the questions today’s students are struggling to answer.

 

Over the last 13 years I have served in a church involved in the discipleship of thousands of students across a number of major university campuses in Canada. Our mission, as LIFT Church, is to see people made fully alive in the hope of Jesus, by being the Church on college and university campuses. Our interactions across these thirteen years have led to a great deal of first-hand experience with the hopes, dreams, struggles and questions that university and college students are currently facing.

 

Questioning identity, belonging and purpose

At a baptism service this past summer, we baptized five people. This group included a former Muslim, a Hindu, an Atheist and two people raised with exposure to the church. Those baptisms were a microcosm of the current broader climate of the university: the campus is diverse, post-Christian and in no way dominated by the edifice of Christendom.

While many in the church could view this climate as a key threat to our faith, diversity and postmodernism are perhaps some of the greatest gifts that the church has received. Despite the intellectual and philosophical pitfalls of postmodernism, it has created an environment where the individual in search of truth and meaning is dominant. Each person is deeply wrestling with questions of identity, belonging and purpose. Who am I? Who are my people? Where are we going?

 

The Gospel speaks

The Gospel speaks with great power and precision to all three of these questions, providing a light that shines in the many dark corners of university life. These are not new questions by any stretch of the imagination. Though there are nuances that are specific in our technologically-fueled climate, the Gospel, as it always has, transcends both time and culture to speak life and hope.

University students are not afraid to confront the broken reality of our world; something that Christians through the ages have simply called sin. This brokenness is self-evident to them. But they are anxious, alone and in desperate search of a secure identity. This is evidenced by the 65% of students who self-report as feeling overwhelmingly anxious, and by the 13% that have contemplated suicide.[1] In a generation that has been raised to believe they can be anything they want, they must now choose to be something specific. The choice is overwhelming. Into this frantic search for an identity, many potential solutions present themselves: athletics, academics, politics or sexuality. The result is university students who are wracked with anxiety in a culture where performance and value are intrinsically and inexorably linked.

 

The Grace of Jesus

However, the Gospel speaks both to the profound sinfulness of humanity and the supreme and amazing grace of Jesus who, despite our brokenness, has invited us to be whole. To the question “who am I” it says, you are loved, valued and invited into relationship by a God who is wholly and entirely good! The Gospel defines who we are by first establishing that there is a good and great God who loves his creation. In his sovereignty we are invited to be true sons and daughters of the King of Kings! That truth is not just religious jargon; it is like a drink of fresh water in a desert to many university students. The basics of the Gospel, our sin and God’s grace, are the most powerful message we have. The Gospel answers the question “who am I?” with an emphatic statement: you are fully alive in Jesus! What could be better?

Any church that wants to seriously engage the university campus must offer the fullness of the Christian Gospel. This is because the Gospel does not invite us to define ourselves by what is in us or even what we are for or against. Reception into the Kingdom of God is not predicated on anything that we do, rather it is built upon Jesus’ grace. In the same way we are called to surrender our lives to Jesus and receive his grace to become sons and daughters. We are also invited to build a community under his name and become brothers and sisters. For this reason, a meaningful, and sacrificial church witness is essential to engaging university students. Programs and events will simply not cut it; we must go deeper and actually embody the Bride of Christ – the Church.

 

A framework for belonging

Group identity has always been a major part of what it means to be human. In the current university context there is intense pressure to associate and define ourselves by individual identity and thereby find or create the distinct group to which we belong. In this way, the Gospel provides a framework for belonging that is not based on fitting our individual identifiers, be they liberal, conservative, Black, White, Asian, or otherwise, but on the person of Jesus who died for all. For there is neither “Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). This empowers students to understand and live in unity, rather than experience division due to individual social, economic, racial, and gender lines.

However, community by itself is an insufficient cause for existence. The mandate of the church is not to exist for its own sake but rather the benefit of others. We were created for partnership in the mission and purpose of God to see creation restored to relationship with him (2 Corinthians 5:20). Without a doubt the Christian life is hard and will involve great trials. In those trials, rather than responding with the assumption that something is wrong, we can invite students to persevere in their work to see Christ glorified in their lives. In that perseverance, they develop grit and faithfulness to pursue a purpose beyond themselves. They learn to be satisfied in a life given to the glory of Christ. What could be more beautiful and fulfilling than to see the Creator of the Universe glorified in us?

The yearning for meaning and purpose is as real today as it has ever been. It is a search that will inevitably include trials, tribulations and suffering. When a student encounters these challenges they are wired and taught that something is inherently wrong. This leads to a desperate search for purpose without suffering, challenges or trials and the accompanying anxiety created by the fear that their lives will amount to nothing. The Gospel releases the pressure of performance and value by providing students with the mandate that all of our efforts are for the glory of Jesus and not ourselves.

 

At LIFT Church we disciple thousands of students in the way of Jesus and believe that they are asking incredible questions to which the Gospel not only provides answers but also offers a “fully alive” life of wholeness, unity and purpose in which Jesus is King. We would love to see every church engage the university students around them in the same way.

[1] College Health Association-National College Health Assessment II: Ontario Canada Reference Group Executive Summary Spring 2016. Hanover, MD

The history and hope of LIFT Church

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LIFT Church was founded in 2006 by a small team at McMaster University. Simply put, our vision was to see students come to know Jesus. With the conviction that students on other campuses in Canada needed to hear the Gospel and be empowered to share it with others, the vision has since grown to include other campuses in Canada.

Currently, LIFT Church meets on four campuses in southern Ontario: McMaster University (2006), Brock University (2015), Mohawk College (2019) and the University of Guelph (2019). During the academic year approximately 600 students now gather for worship across these sites. Our best guess is that they are made up of roughly equal thirds: those with no prior church connection, those with some very nominal church connection, and already committed Christians. It makes for a fruitful mix, as we live out our mission to be sharing Jesus with those who do not know Him and equipping those who do, to do the same.

 

The university milieu

The universities and colleges of Canada are an enormously influential enterprise. More than 2 million students and tens of thousands of staff interact on our campuses every day. The nations of the world vie for attention at our universities, with 350,000 students from more than 150 nations currently enrolled. Our universities spend over 13 billion dollars on research in a single year and have generated over 1.5 million brand new jobs in the last 10 years – three times more than any other job creation vehicle.[1]

However, the most significant output of our universities is not their scientific discoveries, artistic work, or even their direct cultural impact. Rather, the most significant influence of our universities is found in the individual lives of those that comprise them. University drastically reshapes the relationships, purpose, and ultimately the identities of those who are within.

 

The question asked – who am I?

The underlying objective of the university experience has become answering the question “Who am I?” However, this question is not asked in isolation. Students often ask it in the context of tense financial realities and amid the pressure to succeed at their studies. There is also now the added pressure to discover a social belonging, achieve athletic success, and determine a sexual identity in an increasingly ambiguous landscape. To top it all off, there are a thousand voices screaming for attention and shouting, “We have the answer.”

The effects of this environment are telling. A recent study of 25,000 students at Ontario Universities found that 67% abused alcohol, and 19% participated in drug abuse of some sort. Perhaps more alarmingly, 65% feel overwhelming anxiety, and 13% have seriously considered suicide.[2]

 

 

Does the Church have an answer?

Christians often believe: (1) that the church cannot compete amidst the ever-mounting pressures and competing voices that university students face, and (2) that the content and culture of universities are one of the greatest threats to the faith of this generation. However, in our experience, we have found: (1) that universities create a most fertile ground for the Gospel, and (2) that the church cannot speak to a world in which we are not present. It is clear that students in this environment need Jesus, and at LIFT Church, we believe that it is our call to introduce them to Him.

From our perspective, the environment of the university or college is the perfect place to plant churches! As evidenced by the statistics cited earlier, students are naturally seeking for purpose, relationships and a mission for their life; in other words, they are looking to be whole. This is why LIFT Church exists: to see people made fully alive in the hope of Jesus by being the church on every campus. It is our prayer to see a discipleship movement that will result in churches being planted on ten major post-secondary campuses by 2026.

 

Disciple-making disciples

In the last thirteen years, we have seen thousands of people hear the Gospel preached weekly on university campuses, we have baptized hundreds of brand new followers of Jesus, and we have trained many hundreds to be disciple-making disciples.

It is out of the seeds of our discipleship emphasis that we arrive at our church planting strategy. Effective discipleship and effective evangelism should always go hand in hand. As we teach people to follow Jesus and be transformed in who they are, we equally call them to embrace the missional call on their lives to see others know Jesus as well. Mobilized-disciples that can effectively evangelize are the most basic and essential ingredients of church planting. Church planting is the natural and inevitable by-product of effective discipleship.

 

Simple Church – a church planting strategy

Discipleship at LIFT Church occurs through small missional communities called “Simple Churches.” Simple Churches are a vehicle to see the “priesthood of all believers” move from a theological construct into a lived reality; we work to take a student from no knowledge of Jesus to church-plant ready in just four years of university. If they have effectively been able to lead a Simple Church as a student in one location, then it is not a substantial stretch for them to do so in another location. In so doing, we mobilize the ordinary believer to become a church planter.

Every time we plant on a new campus, we start with Simple Churches. Our focus on Simple Church as a church planting strategy means that the basics of discipleship and evangelism are the foundation of the church. Through Simple Church we can provide a context to support many hundreds of people. However, the real benefit is that effective discipleship and evangelism, activated through the ordinary believer, means that we can also commission churches in new locations with low costs in both physical and human resources. While these churches start small, they can scale rapidly to have a substantial and multiplying Kingdom impact.

Through Simple Churches, we teach and empower all of our students to be disciple-making-disciples in their world. By encouraging students to form meaningful relationships with each other where they invest large amounts of time together and are by nature of the campus in close proximity to one another, genuine space for vulnerability is created. Time, proximity and vulnerability are the essential fuel for effective discipleship, and the university campus provides the context where they almost automatically exist. (See Acts 2:42-48.) The university context provides a natural context to plant churches that in turn plant churches by mobilizing ordinary believers to become disciple-making-disciples. It is really that simple.

 

Finally – a few figures

Here is a breakdown of the 600 that meet at the four campuses. There are 440 at McMaster, meeting for 13 years; 100 at Brock, meeting for 3 years; 50 at Mohawk, meeting for 6 months; and 15 at Guelph where they have only been going for 3 months and have not started meeting for worship services yet. Of that 600 we would say that 350 are consistently engaged, (roughly twice a month) and of the consistent attendees 70% are in a Simple Church and about 70% of those are serving in a leadership role, approximately 250 people.

[1] Universities Canada, Facts and Stats, https://www.univcan.ca/universities/facts-and-stats/

[2] College Health Association-National College Health Assessment II: Ontario Canada Reference Group Executive Summary Spring 2016. Hanover, MD

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