Epic Bay Area Project 2006 - Part 1

June 17 – One day before the Staff team arrives

Okay, sitting here in our room, on the 3rd floor of Washburn Hall on the San Jose State campus. Not too bad, really. The 1970’s décor, along with its period-authentic musty odor, is not enough to detract from the fact that we have blessed air conditioning! The high temperature today was almost 100 degrees…yikes. The rest of the staff team arrives tomorrow. Months of planning, phone calls, and emails, all to get us to this point…will it be enough? Are we ready? I think so.

What are we trying to accomplish with this Project? That’s a question that I’ve been asked multiple times, by those within and outside of our ministry. Good question. Here’s how I’d answer that:

1) The vision for the Epic Bay Area Project is:

To establish a Project community that is Christ-centered and Christ-incarnate, in order to organically launch similar multiplying movements on the campuses of the San Francisco Bay Area.

First, we draw a distinction between being Christ-centered and Christ-incarnate. This certainly does not apply universally to everyone and, in fact, should not be the case for any of us who are Christ’s disciples. But the fact is that, from a cultural standpoint, Asian American students are particularly in need of the understanding that there should NOT be a difference between what we know, what we feel, and what we do. We are notorious for having head knowledge without the accompanied heart transformation. So we make the distinction in order to shed light on our need, in hopes that the Lord will impact us in this specific way through the Project.

To be Christ-centered speaks to our motivations, to why we do what we do. This is ALL about Him, so we check our agendas, our egos, our issues and our insecurities at the door. This is HIS mission and this is for His glory. To be Christ-incarnate speaks more (but not exclusively) to our outward deeds. We take Jesus with us. Wherever we go, Christ goes before us…His words, His love, His purpose, His very life. For we have been crucified with Christ and we no longer live, but it is Christ that lives in us. Specifically towards that end, our Project will spend time each week in the heart of San Francisco doing inner city compassion ministry.

The other aspect of our vision is that our Project would be focused on launching movements on college campuses. The term “organic” seems to be in vogue these days. That’s fine, but we had more in mind than to simply sound relevant when we chose to emphasize this as part of our vision. An “organic” or “simple” movement holds to the idea that the greater the degree of complexity, the less it can be reproduced. I’ll write more about this topic later, I think. For now, I’ll say that, here in the Bay Area, unless a movement is sustainable and reproduceable, it’s chances of lasting are slim. An organic approach gives us a shot…which brings me to my last point.

2) The San Francisco Bay Area, to me, is the perfect convergence of need and opportunity. The need is truly significant here. This area has a reputation as hard, difficult soil for ministry. There are dozens of campuses throughout the South and East Bay that do not have a discernible spiritual presence. The opportunity compels us, too. If things can work here, they can work anywhere. There is also a large, largely unreached population of Asian American students and communities here. The fact that the Bay Area is both hard and untapped make it the “perfect” place for an Epic Summer Project. Some think that it’s a hard sell to get students to sign up for a Project that feels so much (too much, perhaps?) like their own “backyard” and yet yields so little fruit. My perspective is that our Asian American community and these students need to see that God has called us to hard places. Not just to hard places overseas, like in communist Asian countries, but to the hard places in our own communities, too.