Western Michigan University

Prime Time for Transformation

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Wed, 18 Nov 2015 17:05:09 +0000

Gordon Govier

Prime Time for Transformation

Before he even knew that ��ñ�� existed, Derek DeKam knew he wanted a career that involved working with college students. “College to me was an amazing time of transformation: socially, mentally, obviously spiritually,” he said. “I love all of the changes that happen in those four years.”

Derek’s undergraduate years at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) in Michigan were exemplified by the title of one of his college papers: “My Search for Truth.” After trying church for two years in middle school, he stopped going amidst the confustion and frustration he experienced from not understanding the Bible and some critical comments from church leaders. But when he got to college, his hunger for knowing God resurfaced as he searched for answers to his questions about purpose and meaning.

At GVSU he started attending two different campus Bible studies that were not affiliated with any national ministries. His best friend joined him in his quest, and the more that he learned about Jesus the more he was captivated by the Christian faith. He also found professors who were willing to mentor him in the faith.

A week after graduation he entered graduate school at Western Michigan University (WMU) with the goal of becoming a college counselor. By then a friend had told him about ��ñ��, so he connected with the grad fellowship at WMU. ��ñ��’s Campus Staff Member at the time, Scott Erbe, discipled him. Derek learned how to study Scripture, be a small group leader, and share his faith. And that’s when he discovered what he really wanted to do.

He knew that, as an academic counselor he would be able to have a small influence on a large amount of students. But he would only be able to talk with them about Jesus if he worked on a Christian college campus. As an ��ñ�� staff worker, however, he would get to meet with students regularly and mentor them, just as he had been mentored. “That seemed to be a lot more compelling to me than influencing students by just seeing them a few times a year,” Derek said.

Today, ten years after coming on staff, Derek is the area director for west Michigan, overseeing staff at both GVSU and WMU, as well as five other campuses. He and his wife Alicia, also on staff, live close to the GVSU campus, and he still meets with students. Rather than spending all his time on administration, as he feared, he’s discovered that being an area director gives him wider influence, and opportunities to develop more students in Christian discipleship and leadership. “Impacting more students and more campuses was very appealing to me,” he said.

Working in Grand Rapids, which he calls a “highly churched area,” allows Derek to reach out to students who have a Christian faith background but haven’t developed a personal relationship with Jesus. “Cultural Christians, nominal Christians, are our biggest mission field,” he said. “[We don’t] assume these people that have gone to church here or there or maybe even weekly know Jesus.”

Every year, for the past seven to eight years, the students whom Derek has been working with have become more intentional about sharing their faith as a culture of risk-taking and faith-sharing has steadily taken hold and continued to grow. But creating that culture didn’t happen until Derek and some of his students became increasingly frustrated over their fruitless evangelism efforts.

As Derek and the students spent time in prayer and fasting, humbling themselves before God, they began to see things they had missed. “We were sharing the gospel but we weren’t really inviting people to respond,” he said. “We didn’t want to offend anyone so there was no clear invitation. And we weren’t expecting that God was powerful enough that they could respond.”

At the same time, they also developed a stronger prayer foundation. “When students are faithful in prayer and faithful in taking risks, and they see God work in powerful ways, it changes their expectations and helps them be more dependent on God, and more prayerful,” Derek said.

The area team’s goal is to have 300 students make decisions to follow Jesus over a three-year period. At an area retreat recently, they celebrated 109 decisions made during the first year!

“It’s exciting to see nominal Christians come to true faith, but it’s also exciting to see those come who know nothing about Jesus,” Derek said. That includes international students. Derek is thankful for volunteers from local churches who have developed deep relationships with these students who often come to the U.S. eager to learn about Jesus.

Derek has achieved what he wanted, a job that helps students discover what he discovered in college: answers to their questions about meaning and purpose in life.

News Keywords

Western Michigan University

Grand Valley State University

Seeking out the Underserved

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Tue, 06 May 2014 18:55:03 +0000

News

Gordon Govier

Seeking out the Underserved

UPDATE: In 2018, the now-married Shaylen Hardy was named director of ��ñ��'s Black Campus Ministry.

No way was Shaylen Jackson going to be able to go to an ��ñ�� conference in the middle of basketball season. Shaylen was a scholarship athlete on the Western Michigan University (WMU) basketball team and the Black Campus Ministry conference was being held in Atlanta in December 2005. Shaylen had already missed several weeks of basketball as a member of the volleyball team.

But Shaylen’s ��ñ�� staff member, who worked with the Collegiate, Black, and Christian chapter at WMU, encouraged her to at least pray about going to the conference. “So I prayed about it,” Shaylen said. “And the more I prayed about it, the more I felt like the Lord was leading me to go to this thing even if it didn’t make sense.”

She went to her coach, convinced he would not let her go to the conference. But he said, “If you feel like that’s what the Lord is telling you, then you should go.”

Called to Staff

At the conference Shaylen had the opportunity to talk with students from campuses across the country. Some were the lone student representing their campus at the conference. Others told her that there was no one ministering to black students on their campus. And God began to speak to her some more. “I realized the gift I had been given to be a part of the black community at Western Michigan and recognized that not everybody has that opportunity,” she said.

Through her experience in Atlanta in 2005, and at ��ñ��’s Urbana Student Missions Conference in St. Louis in 2006, Shaylen was called to join ��ñ��’s staff. She is passionate about campus ministry because of the way it transformed her life. “Once I got involved with Bible studies with ��ñ��, I felt like it was one of the highlights of my week because of how God was changing me and what he was doing in my small group,” she said.

Discovering Bible Study

Shaylen joined the Collegiate, Black, and Christian chapter as a WMU junior, after spotting a poster about the group. “I thought, ‘Well I’m all those things, so I should go check it out.’” But even though she had grown up in the church, she had never studied the Bible on her own. “That kind of revolutionized the way I saw God and my relationship with Him,” she said.

Shaylen spent two years after graduation working with ��ñ�� at WMU, and loving it. But her former volleyball coach, who had been hired at Michigan State (MSU), invited Shaylen to move to Lansing and join her MSU coaching staff. Shaylen didn’t think God wanted her to leave WMU, where the ministry was going well, so she declined the offer.

The offer came again. She decided to pray about it, sure the answer would be no. Instead she got a “yes.” Shaylen said, “I think God used the volleyball position to shake me out of Kalamazoo, which is where I grew up, and move me to Lansing.”

From WMU to MSU

Shaylen left WMU, but she didn’t leave ��ñ��. She kept connected as a part-time Campus Staff Member while she worked for the MSU athletic department for three years. “I was coaching volleyball, going to graduate school, meeting students, and doing Bible studies,” she said.

As Shaylen then returned to fulltime status with ��ñ��, she has become a chapter planter at MSU. She started working with undergraduate black students, then added graduate students, and is now also working with Latino students. She is driven by the vision of sharing with MSU students the transforming campus ministry she experienced at WMU, particularly Bible study.

The planting didn’t start out smoothly though. On staff at WMU, she had been part of a well-coordinated team. “But planting is just you, you do everything,” she said. On top of that, the students she was dealing with at first had more of a consumer’s mentality than a missional perspective. “They just wanted to be affirmed, they weren’t willing to take risks,” she said.

Starting Over

So she had to replant the chapter plant. She felt like she had failed. But she needed to do it in order to find students who were willing to develop their faith. “A lot of my [current] students don’t come in missional, but there is openness to learn, to take risks,” she said.

Shaylen has applied a lesson she learned from one of her coaches: in the world of wins and losses a loss is not necessarily a failure. “Even when we don’t experience the outcome we anticipated, God can use it,” she said. “In his Kingdom, God can use things that fall short of our expectations that still bring him glory. He can work in deeper ways than what we see. I’m in the process of learning that.”

With her athletic background, ��ñ��’s new Athletes ��ñ�� ministry would be a natural niche for her. A former teammate recently told Shaylen how much she appreciated how Shaylen lived out her faith during their time together, and how it helped her get through some of her own challenges. “So many of the gifts that we have been given in ��ñ�� would be a blessing to the athletic community,” she said.

Shaylen has an undeniable passion for athletics, but right now she has an even deeper passion for student communities that are underserved by ministry. The students at MSU are reaping the benefits of her commitment to serve them.

News Keywords

Michigan State University

Western Michigan University

Bible Study