believe, belong, bless
Contextualizing Win Build and Send – A first pass by Geoffrey Hsu
This paper is an attempt to address some of the tensions that I feel when speaking about Campus Crusade’s distinctive of Win, Build, Send. This paper is but an outline of ideas that would take many more pages to develop fully. As a result, I’ll make statements that I can’t defend fully here and might not make much sense. On the other hand, I hope for many of you, much of this will appear intuitively true.
DNA, Mission and Strategy
In the conversation of what Campus Crusade’s DNA is, we are often presented with the notion that Win, Build, Send best captures this sense of what or who we are. I, however, am influenced by notion that Win, Build, Send is best considered an approach or a strategy toward doing ministry. As central as the approach has been to the tremendous ways the Lord has used our ministry, and despite my fondness for this strategy, it seems important to raise the question, “Is a particular strategy appropriate DNA material?” It seems to me that a strategy or approach to anything must be largely situational. For example, the writing is on the wall for traditional strategies of selling music. The traditional strategy used to involve selling entire albums of music through traditional brick and mortar stores. You can package a bunch of mediocre to lousy songs with one or two hits and get a premium for selling the whole album.
With the advent of the Internet, mp3s and iTunes, an entirely different environment emerged, necessitating a different approach. The most workable strategy to earn revenue will no longer involve brick and mortar, but the sale of individual songs by download over the Internet. There is no need to compare which approach is better. The question is only, “Which approach is best suited toward its context?”
There is no question of how the Lord has blessed the win, build, send approach to doing ministry. In fact there is something that feels exceptionally timeless about the approach. However, I’m concerned that our environment has been and continues to change radically. This is largely due to the shift in the underlying worldviews that have shaped our understanding of the gospel, and our mission to the world as the body of Christ. Do we want to defend and concretize our understanding of “who we are” around a timebound and culture-bound strategy? Is our mission to preserve a strategy? I humbly suggest we should not and to do so would be unfortunate.
I find it far more useful to return to a phrase that has shaped my understanding of our mission. “Come Help Change the World” seems to capture for me the real mission of Campus Crusade. It best captures the transformational nature of the gospel that I want to be about. It reaches beyond a reductionistic gospel that is primarily interested in saving souls and acknowledges a gospel that is able to transform lives, communities, cities and social systems. It provides a guiding star for our discipleship, and it provides a metric for our work. “Come Help Change the Word” is a mission.
I think our mission should shape strategy. We should not let a strategy shape our mission. Having said that, I can’t throw out Win, Build, Send. I wouldn’t call it our DNA, but I would say that as a strategy it is central to our sense of who we are. I don’t want to rid us of Win, Build, Send, but rather to contextualize the approach so that it gets new life in this new and radically different environment that we find ourselves ministering in today.
The Tension
In an increasingly postmodern world, Win, Build, Send feels very distinct, linear, and sequential. In a modern world, the world in which Campus Crusade developed and thrived -- separating, systematizing and quantifying was the right and normal way to understand and do ministry. It made sense. It fit the context. But as the world around us changes, particularly the North American context that I’m in, our ways of being and doing ministry feel increasingly irrelevant to all but those deeply entrenched in our Christian subculture. For the culturally savvy evangelist, our “brick and mortar-ness” becomes more and more apparent each time we attempt to do evangelism.
Distinct and Narrow
Win, Build, Send feels too distinct. My Win activities are clearly defined and shape how I relate to others. I approach people as lost. I treat them as non-believers. They are the “world” that we should venture out into only for evangelistic safaris hoping to win some to the Lord. We can hold this adversarial posture until they become believers. Until they become believers, we hold them at arms length.
When they pray a prayer to accept Christ, they move into a new category, which dictates a different sent of relations. Now we love them because we are Build-ing them. They are one of us. They are “in” and need caring and nurturing. I’ve no objection to loving and caring for new believers. My objection is that we have viewed Win, Build, Send as very distinct categories such that my loving and nurturing posture is reserved for those who have prayed a prayer, and not often applied to those who have yet to pray.
There is also a narrowness of our categories. When we talk of Win, I believe we are talking about a narrow view of evangelism, which is primarily to get people to pray a prayer. However, the gospel that will change the world must be a message that invades and transforms every area of life and society. It will certainly include salvation, but it must also be good news to the poor, oppressed and marginalized.
Furthermore, our tradition, for the most part, sees evangelism as primarily an event. Only recently, with some resistance, have we begun to appreciate the dimension of the process. A contextualized Win needs to embrace both the process and event of evangelism today.
Build needs to be more than simply training people to simply do ministry, but must include a dimension of personal life transformation in the context of community.
Send must represent more than just more winning. The missionary nature of our faith is not simply for the purpose of collecting more people into heaven. It is not to recruit more into your organization. It must include a transformation of the communities and cities in which we find ourselves.
Linear and Sequential
Win, Build, Send is also very linear. It suggests that you cannot really proceed in the journey toward Christ with someone unless they first come to a certain intellectual understanding of the atoning work of Jesus. The unspoken assumption has been that you can’t really teach or disciple someone until a person makes an intellectual assent to a set of propositions.
It is also assumed that you cannot really mobilize a person into kingdom work unless they have reached a certain level of maturity in Christ. In the best Campus Crusade tradition, we have placed people in points of service well beyond their abilities and watch them grow through it. But often, our methodical and systematic approach toward building requires certain competencies before moving someone along to the next point of service.
This linear nature of Win, Build, Send certainly prevents us from inviting non-believers to join us in kingdom work. This is due in part to our nearsighted understanding of our mission, but also to our sequential view of developing believers.
The Proposal
I would like to preserve the feel of Win, Build, Send, but introduce categories that might be more useful to reach and minister to the pagan, postmodern world in which I find myself in North America (though I think it will be a useful approach in other parts of the world.)
I would like an approach toward ministry that understands evangelism as both a process and an event. I need an approach that extends the generous loving posture of the shepherd to those who have yet to “pray to receive Christ.” I want a gospel that is as much good news to my community and city as it is to me personally.
My thought is to take the notions of Win, Build, Send, and translate them into three “components” of healthy ministry. The similarity of these three components will be apparent, but should not be considered sequential steps but constitutive elements of healthy kingdom ministry.
Believe, Belong, and Bless
As we move into a new era of life and ministry, I think it will be more useful to use the terms: Believe, Belong, and Bless. Believe shares the evangelistic thrust of Win. Healthy kingdom ministry by definition must include the bold proclamation of the gospel. Like Win, Believe concerns itself with the proclamation of the gospel.
The difference however lies in a couple of places. First, the evangelistic approach for today’s lost has been written on extensively and I’ll not address it here. I think Ed Stetzer’s Evangelism Journey provides helpful insights in viewing evangelism as both an event and a process. Second, the content of this gospel must be more holistic. The gospel of Jesus is certainly concerned with saving souls, but it is at least equally as concerned with those who are hungry, abused, hungry and sick. The gospel of Believe recognizes that our good news is both word and deed.
There is another reason to prefer Believe over Win. Win immediately frames the task of evangelism as a contest of sorts. We can begin to view our task as a competition or a debate where one cannot allow a happy coexistence. We must “win.” While the word Believe might not be the best term, but was chosen because it is not combative and better reflects the invitation to belief that one would expect from a God that does not force himself upon us.
Belong roughly correlates with Build or the discipleship aspect of our work. Here we are focusing on the spiritual formation and other developmental aspects of our faith. Belong was chosen to reflect the importance of doing spiritual development in the context of community (and, I confess, partly for the alliteration).
More importantly, discipleship must be more than a mere impartation and acquisition of knowledge. We must return to a notion of discipleship that develops people into wellrounded followers of Jesus who experience life transformation in the context of a community of believers.
Bless is an attempt to capture the nature of the mission we are sent on. At times it felt as though Send was too narrowly defined as go and make converts (as opposed to making disciples). Or worse, Send was misunderstood as a command to go and create more staff. Our strength of being a movement with its shared values, dreams, and commitments has led us at times to a myopic view of our mission. This results in a focus on building our own ministry or kingdom.
The gospel of Jesus was the arrival of the Kingdom of God. While the forgiveness of sins and the salvation of souls is a central piece of this gospel, Jesus demonstrated a richness to the gospel that we have lost. Jesus’ gospel demonstrated what God’s Kingdom, His reign, would look like if the Lord’s Prayer was made operative in this world. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus showed us that the good news was that poverty, oppression, and social injustices were also realms that the gospel had the power to redeem.
To Bless, captures a fuller understanding of what Jesus’ disciples have been called to participate in as his followers. The gospel that calls people to repentant of their sins, also calls us to care for the sick, the hungry, the homeless, and the marginalized. It is the gospel that Jesus modeled for us.
A “New Circle Diagram” (this is what didn't transfer)
What I find most useful about the Believe, Belong, Bless approach to ministry is that it need not be linear and sequential, it allows for broader categories and allows for better contextualization into various situations and cultures.
These benefits are more apparent if Believe, Belong, Bless were not placed on a line, but drawn into a circle. This diagram better illustrates the many different “angles” that may serve as entry points for people to enter into the discipleship of Jesus. In many parts of the country and world where Christendom still has a foothold. It may very well be that the best way to introduce people to Christ would be through traditional means like the Four Spiritual Laws, evangelistic campaigns and the like. In environments where rationalistic approaches are well received, our ministry would do well to use our tried and true materials.
In postmodern contexts where claims to absolute truth do not inspire inquiry but suggest intolerance, we intuitively seek a different approach. The Relational Incarnational approaches to evangelism have recognized the importance of loving relationships that function as bridges. They must be genuine or they will be sniffed out immediately.
Increasingly, the church has been renewing its understanding of service to the community as a tangible means of expressing good deeds, which leads to good will, which open doors for the good news. For many today, seeing the church once again return to a posture of being a blessing to the world, is a powerful argument for Christ.
The point is that evangelism in different contexts, cultures, and with different people in the same contexts, will require an approach from different directions. Or perhaps it is best to say that we need to approach the task of evangelsim with some combination of all three directions at the same time.
Final Thoughts
I’ve tried to take the best of Campus Crusade’s win, build, send tradition and update it for the new postmodern time in which we find ourselves. I have only been able to capture some of the larger thoughts and many are yet half-baked, but this is a work in progress. I hope this may spur some thinking and if it does, please sharpen my thinking by sending me an email at geoff@thehsus.com.
Subsequent versions of this paper will:
- Contain a discussion of Kingdom theology to shape our understanding of mission
- Apply a centered-set vs. bounded-set paradigm to evangelism and discipleship
- Discuss the three conversions: To Christ, To community, To mission
- Discuss the usefulness of this approach for cities
This paper is an attempt to address some of the tensions that I feel when speaking about Campus Crusade’s distinctive of Win, Build, Send. This paper is but an outline of ideas that would take many more pages to develop fully. As a result, I’ll make statements that I can’t defend fully here and might not make much sense. On the other hand, I hope for many of you, much of this will appear intuitively true.
DNA, Mission and Strategy
In the conversation of what Campus Crusade’s DNA is, we are often presented with the notion that Win, Build, Send best captures this sense of what or who we are. I, however, am influenced by notion that Win, Build, Send is best considered an approach or a strategy toward doing ministry. As central as the approach has been to the tremendous ways the Lord has used our ministry, and despite my fondness for this strategy, it seems important to raise the question, “Is a particular strategy appropriate DNA material?” It seems to me that a strategy or approach to anything must be largely situational. For example, the writing is on the wall for traditional strategies of selling music. The traditional strategy used to involve selling entire albums of music through traditional brick and mortar stores. You can package a bunch of mediocre to lousy songs with one or two hits and get a premium for selling the whole album.
With the advent of the Internet, mp3s and iTunes, an entirely different environment emerged, necessitating a different approach. The most workable strategy to earn revenue will no longer involve brick and mortar, but the sale of individual songs by download over the Internet. There is no need to compare which approach is better. The question is only, “Which approach is best suited toward its context?”
There is no question of how the Lord has blessed the win, build, send approach to doing ministry. In fact there is something that feels exceptionally timeless about the approach. However, I’m concerned that our environment has been and continues to change radically. This is largely due to the shift in the underlying worldviews that have shaped our understanding of the gospel, and our mission to the world as the body of Christ. Do we want to defend and concretize our understanding of “who we are” around a timebound and culture-bound strategy? Is our mission to preserve a strategy? I humbly suggest we should not and to do so would be unfortunate.
I find it far more useful to return to a phrase that has shaped my understanding of our mission. “Come Help Change the World” seems to capture for me the real mission of Campus Crusade. It best captures the transformational nature of the gospel that I want to be about. It reaches beyond a reductionistic gospel that is primarily interested in saving souls and acknowledges a gospel that is able to transform lives, communities, cities and social systems. It provides a guiding star for our discipleship, and it provides a metric for our work. “Come Help Change the Word” is a mission.
I think our mission should shape strategy. We should not let a strategy shape our mission. Having said that, I can’t throw out Win, Build, Send. I wouldn’t call it our DNA, but I would say that as a strategy it is central to our sense of who we are. I don’t want to rid us of Win, Build, Send, but rather to contextualize the approach so that it gets new life in this new and radically different environment that we find ourselves ministering in today.
The Tension
In an increasingly postmodern world, Win, Build, Send feels very distinct, linear, and sequential. In a modern world, the world in which Campus Crusade developed and thrived -- separating, systematizing and quantifying was the right and normal way to understand and do ministry. It made sense. It fit the context. But as the world around us changes, particularly the North American context that I’m in, our ways of being and doing ministry feel increasingly irrelevant to all but those deeply entrenched in our Christian subculture. For the culturally savvy evangelist, our “brick and mortar-ness” becomes more and more apparent each time we attempt to do evangelism.
Distinct and Narrow
Win, Build, Send feels too distinct. My Win activities are clearly defined and shape how I relate to others. I approach people as lost. I treat them as non-believers. They are the “world” that we should venture out into only for evangelistic safaris hoping to win some to the Lord. We can hold this adversarial posture until they become believers. Until they become believers, we hold them at arms length.
When they pray a prayer to accept Christ, they move into a new category, which dictates a different sent of relations. Now we love them because we are Build-ing them. They are one of us. They are “in” and need caring and nurturing. I’ve no objection to loving and caring for new believers. My objection is that we have viewed Win, Build, Send as very distinct categories such that my loving and nurturing posture is reserved for those who have prayed a prayer, and not often applied to those who have yet to pray.
There is also a narrowness of our categories. When we talk of Win, I believe we are talking about a narrow view of evangelism, which is primarily to get people to pray a prayer. However, the gospel that will change the world must be a message that invades and transforms every area of life and society. It will certainly include salvation, but it must also be good news to the poor, oppressed and marginalized.
Furthermore, our tradition, for the most part, sees evangelism as primarily an event. Only recently, with some resistance, have we begun to appreciate the dimension of the process. A contextualized Win needs to embrace both the process and event of evangelism today.
Build needs to be more than simply training people to simply do ministry, but must include a dimension of personal life transformation in the context of community.
Send must represent more than just more winning. The missionary nature of our faith is not simply for the purpose of collecting more people into heaven. It is not to recruit more into your organization. It must include a transformation of the communities and cities in which we find ourselves.
Linear and Sequential
Win, Build, Send is also very linear. It suggests that you cannot really proceed in the journey toward Christ with someone unless they first come to a certain intellectual understanding of the atoning work of Jesus. The unspoken assumption has been that you can’t really teach or disciple someone until a person makes an intellectual assent to a set of propositions.
It is also assumed that you cannot really mobilize a person into kingdom work unless they have reached a certain level of maturity in Christ. In the best Campus Crusade tradition, we have placed people in points of service well beyond their abilities and watch them grow through it. But often, our methodical and systematic approach toward building requires certain competencies before moving someone along to the next point of service.
This linear nature of Win, Build, Send certainly prevents us from inviting non-believers to join us in kingdom work. This is due in part to our nearsighted understanding of our mission, but also to our sequential view of developing believers.
The Proposal
I would like to preserve the feel of Win, Build, Send, but introduce categories that might be more useful to reach and minister to the pagan, postmodern world in which I find myself in North America (though I think it will be a useful approach in other parts of the world.)
I would like an approach toward ministry that understands evangelism as both a process and an event. I need an approach that extends the generous loving posture of the shepherd to those who have yet to “pray to receive Christ.” I want a gospel that is as much good news to my community and city as it is to me personally.
My thought is to take the notions of Win, Build, Send, and translate them into three “components” of healthy ministry. The similarity of these three components will be apparent, but should not be considered sequential steps but constitutive elements of healthy kingdom ministry.
Believe, Belong, and Bless
As we move into a new era of life and ministry, I think it will be more useful to use the terms: Believe, Belong, and Bless. Believe shares the evangelistic thrust of Win. Healthy kingdom ministry by definition must include the bold proclamation of the gospel. Like Win, Believe concerns itself with the proclamation of the gospel.
The difference however lies in a couple of places. First, the evangelistic approach for today’s lost has been written on extensively and I’ll not address it here. I think Ed Stetzer’s Evangelism Journey provides helpful insights in viewing evangelism as both an event and a process. Second, the content of this gospel must be more holistic. The gospel of Jesus is certainly concerned with saving souls, but it is at least equally as concerned with those who are hungry, abused, hungry and sick. The gospel of Believe recognizes that our good news is both word and deed.
There is another reason to prefer Believe over Win. Win immediately frames the task of evangelism as a contest of sorts. We can begin to view our task as a competition or a debate where one cannot allow a happy coexistence. We must “win.” While the word Believe might not be the best term, but was chosen because it is not combative and better reflects the invitation to belief that one would expect from a God that does not force himself upon us.
Belong roughly correlates with Build or the discipleship aspect of our work. Here we are focusing on the spiritual formation and other developmental aspects of our faith. Belong was chosen to reflect the importance of doing spiritual development in the context of community (and, I confess, partly for the alliteration).
More importantly, discipleship must be more than a mere impartation and acquisition of knowledge. We must return to a notion of discipleship that develops people into wellrounded followers of Jesus who experience life transformation in the context of a community of believers.
Bless is an attempt to capture the nature of the mission we are sent on. At times it felt as though Send was too narrowly defined as go and make converts (as opposed to making disciples). Or worse, Send was misunderstood as a command to go and create more staff. Our strength of being a movement with its shared values, dreams, and commitments has led us at times to a myopic view of our mission. This results in a focus on building our own ministry or kingdom.
The gospel of Jesus was the arrival of the Kingdom of God. While the forgiveness of sins and the salvation of souls is a central piece of this gospel, Jesus demonstrated a richness to the gospel that we have lost. Jesus’ gospel demonstrated what God’s Kingdom, His reign, would look like if the Lord’s Prayer was made operative in this world. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus showed us that the good news was that poverty, oppression, and social injustices were also realms that the gospel had the power to redeem.
To Bless, captures a fuller understanding of what Jesus’ disciples have been called to participate in as his followers. The gospel that calls people to repentant of their sins, also calls us to care for the sick, the hungry, the homeless, and the marginalized. It is the gospel that Jesus modeled for us.
A “New Circle Diagram” (this is what didn't transfer)
What I find most useful about the Believe, Belong, Bless approach to ministry is that it need not be linear and sequential, it allows for broader categories and allows for better contextualization into various situations and cultures.
These benefits are more apparent if Believe, Belong, Bless were not placed on a line, but drawn into a circle. This diagram better illustrates the many different “angles” that may serve as entry points for people to enter into the discipleship of Jesus. In many parts of the country and world where Christendom still has a foothold. It may very well be that the best way to introduce people to Christ would be through traditional means like the Four Spiritual Laws, evangelistic campaigns and the like. In environments where rationalistic approaches are well received, our ministry would do well to use our tried and true materials.
In postmodern contexts where claims to absolute truth do not inspire inquiry but suggest intolerance, we intuitively seek a different approach. The Relational Incarnational approaches to evangelism have recognized the importance of loving relationships that function as bridges. They must be genuine or they will be sniffed out immediately.
Increasingly, the church has been renewing its understanding of service to the community as a tangible means of expressing good deeds, which leads to good will, which open doors for the good news. For many today, seeing the church once again return to a posture of being a blessing to the world, is a powerful argument for Christ.
The point is that evangelism in different contexts, cultures, and with different people in the same contexts, will require an approach from different directions. Or perhaps it is best to say that we need to approach the task of evangelsim with some combination of all three directions at the same time.
Final Thoughts
I’ve tried to take the best of Campus Crusade’s win, build, send tradition and update it for the new postmodern time in which we find ourselves. I have only been able to capture some of the larger thoughts and many are yet half-baked, but this is a work in progress. I hope this may spur some thinking and if it does, please sharpen my thinking by sending me an email at geoff@thehsus.com.
Subsequent versions of this paper will:
- Contain a discussion of Kingdom theology to shape our understanding of mission
- Apply a centered-set vs. bounded-set paradigm to evangelism and discipleship
- Discuss the three conversions: To Christ, To community, To mission
- Discuss the usefulness of this approach for cities
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