Why I Wrote GROWING A STUDENT MOVEMENT

by D. Alexander Rodriguez

The command of Jesus is to make disciples of all people within all places at all times.  Jesus did this by investing in a few to reach the many. This is why we must spend more time crafting the people in our small groups than crafting the program of our large groups. To invest in the few is to reach the many is the why of discipleship. So how do we go about doing this?

With someone proactively going out to bring someone in! It is this proactive process of FINDING  we see in the Bible.  It is Elijah who proactively found Elisha to lead. It is Jesus who proactively found the 12 to disciple. It is Paul who proactively planted Churches. We do not need to wait for a vision, we should not stall in hopes to hear a voice, because King Jesus has already given us a verse: “Go out and make disciples”. If we disobey this command, It’s not for a lack of clarity but a lack of conviction to be proactive in finding people to disciple.

Now, the extreme to this finding aspect of discipleship is bringing people into community only to entertain them instead of disciple them.

The variable between just entertaining people and actually discipling people is intentionally bringing food to the table for someone else to eat. Luke 24:25 says, “….and beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he (Jesus) explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning Himself” This means the Center of the Gospel is not what man wants, but who Jesus is, what Jesus came to do for us, and in the light of that what we should want to do because of who He is. Discipleship must be about our holiness as a willful response to seeing Christ’s worthiness. We should talk about dating and marriage, talk about money and tithing, talk about priorities and life planning, BUT WE MUST NOT TALK ABOUT ANYTHING WITHOUT TEACHING JESUS EVERY TIME. Jesus must be the bread we bring to the table for someone else to eat.  But this cannot be done without abiding in Jesus on purpose instead of finding time on accident.

FEEDING people Jesus, however, doesn’t guarantee immediate life change. This means although we find and feed, the last aspect of discipleship has to be FIGHTING for them.

As Tim Keller illuminates in “The Meaning of Marriage”, When couples fight for truth or love, but not both, this is when relationships die. Truth without love results in hardened hearts from loveless words. Love without truth results in hardened hearts from unspoken words. 

The either-or approach to truth or love is the wrong way to fight. The only way to fight fair is suggested in Ephesians 4:15 as the Apostle Paul advocates for us to, ”speak the truth in love”. This is the only combination to fight for solutions in romantic relationships, likewise, this is the only combination to fight for souls in a discipleship relationship.

If we have truth without love we will have a one-sided gospel: always talking about how we must repent without ever talking about why we should believe, preaching about hell without talking about heaven, pushing down against sin without ever lifting Jesus up, talking about what we need to do as Christians without ever talking about what Christ has done for us. This will produce disciples void of the gladness and grace of God because all they hear is what we need to do and what we are not doing. Likewise, If we have love without truth we will still have a one-sided gospel: always talking about why we should believe without ever talking about why we must repent, always preaching how Jesus wants to get us out of hell while never preaching how Jesus wants to get hell out of us, always talking of Jesus taking up His Cross for us without mentioning how Jesus commands us to take up our crosses for Him, talking about God’s love for us without teaching how God has said: “If you love Me you will obey Me”. This will produce disciples void of the gratefulness and grit of God because all they hear is how Jesus has done something in us, forgetting this same Jesus wants to do something through us. We do not need to proclaim truth without love, nor love without truth, The Gospel is the call of Jesus to both “repent and believe”.  This gospel is best received when we disciple both truth and love into our people.

The Moravian missionaries preached the truth that Jesus is the only Way to God. With love, they sold themselves into slavery to reach an island of slaves where missionaries were outlawed and the Gospel was unknown. Elizabeth Elliot preached the truth of God’s forgiveness to the Auca people of Ecuador. She did this with love, as this was the same tribe that made her husband a martyr and herself a widow. But forgiveness forgets the past as it sees the vision of the future. AW Milne preached the truth of sin and holiness to the people of the New Hebrides that martyred every missionary before them. He did this with an undeniable love for their souls, as these same people wrote on his tombstone, “When he came there was no light. When he left there was no darkness”.

When we fight for our disciples through truth and love- We value their future more than their feelings, we are more filled with Heaven than others are filled with hell, and our boldness to do the right thing outweighs anyone’s boldness to do the wrong thing.

This is how to make disciples, to find, feed, and fight for the lost lambs of God. This is the Great Commission of discipleship- required of all Christians in all places at all times.

Daniel Alexander (Alex) Rodriguez is the national training director for XA. He develops core curricula for staff training, presides over essential staff training venues, like the annual Reach the University Institute (RUI) and the national Campus Missionaries-in-Training (internship) program, and oversees the creation of staff training resources, like the Small Group Leader Podcast, Season 1 and 2. He is the author of Real Devotion, Discovering the Whys Behind the Whats of the Gospel (2021) Wisdom House Publishing.

In 2009, just months after our wedding, my wife Jordan and I left our jobs at a large local church in Indianapolis to begin the process of pioneering Chi Alpha (XA) at Indiana University. At the time it seemed like a big risk and a huge undertaking to leave that kind of security, but we knew for certain that we had discovered our calling as missionaries on the college campus. 

Derek and Jordan Britt

Jordan and I had a strong foundation theologically (I graduated from Southeastern University in Lakeland, FL with a degree in Pastoral Ministry). We also had a strong foundation missionally as we came into XA from a church with a huge heart for missions and a passion for evangelism. Much of what Chi Alpha valued felt familiar. But as we went deeper and deeper into the community we realized we had a lot to learn. 

It’s always a little awkward for staff coming into Chi Alpha without being Chi Alpha students and we definitely felt a bit like fish out of water at first. However, at every turn we felt the love of the community and in time it transformed us. Whether it was Jeff Alexander (our district director in Indiana fighting for us and loving us so well), Steve Lehmann (our area director in the Great Lakes who saw something in us that pushed him to pursue us from the very start), or Mario Solari (our CMIT director who took us in at a difficult time and showed us what a healthy Chi Alpha discipleship community looked like), every staff member we interacted with gave us a window into the loving community we hoped to eventually replicate at Indiana University. 

As we met students during our internship at Florida State and then at Purdue University as we started to raise funds for planting at Indiana University, we realized more and more how much had been missing from our lives before this point. These students were passionate about Jesus in a place where that seemed rare. Not only that, they talked about Jesus all the time, not just at an altar call or in a Bible study. As healthy as a community as we came from, I had never personally experienced that in the ministry that I led before Chi Alpha. 

When we pioneered Indiana University we set out to create a community as we had experienced. A place that didn’t just value services and weekend experiences, but one that was committed to every student being truly devoted to Jesus, committed to being a community that cares deeply for each other, and was committed to every student taking real responsibility for their campus. We had so much help over the years in creating that from amazing people that came alongside us and fought for students at Indiana University. Kenji Kuriyama, a Chi Alpha student from Louisiana and a godsend from Chi Alpha to us was a huge part of that, but also our early staff members like Luke and Nicole Furr and others who committed for the long haul and have been fighting with us since the beginning. In these last ten years, we’ve seen God use so many people to take us from discipling 15 students in small groups and at our weekly large group gathering in 2011 to a few hundred students in 2021.

This past August was ten years since we moved to Bloomington, we have two other family members now that are helping us reach the campus (Davis – 7, Jonas – 5) and we have an alumni base and a student community that embody the ideals we have learned from so many in XA over the years. 

In these last five years we have seen the fruit of what communities like that produce, namely missionaries and new ministries. We now have the privilege of being a campus missionary-in-training site where new workers just like us back in 2009 come to be trained. And we get to watch these missionaries set out from Bloomington, just like we did from Florida State, to pioneer new communities of real devotion, real community and responsibility across the Midwest. 

We are forever grateful for the impact of Chi Alpha on our lives and are honored that our story is a Chi Alpha story, even though we didn’t come from Chi Alpha. And we can’t wait to see what God does next. 

Derek Britt serves as the Chi Alpha director at Indiana University, and as the Chi Alpha director for the state of Indiana.

chialphaiu.com and xaindiana.org