By Gerdion Venter
Halfway through my two-year internship in Canada, I was already thinking about what came next. When I realised how little time I had left in Ottawa before returning to New Zealand, I began asking myself: what did I want to leave behind? What had I actually accomplished?
I spent my first year in Ottawa finding my feet and learning how to work in campus ministry. The men I met with weekly were fantastic, the ministry was growing, and our men’s Bible study expanded from two people to 10 or more each week. Praise God! Yet I felt discouraged. Why? Because I’d come to Ottawa longing to see a culture of spiritual generations take root on campus—where the men I invested in would themselves invest in others, who would in turn invest in still more. That spiritual multiplication simply wasn’t happening.
The realisation that I had only one year left to work closely with these men was frightening. But it was also liberating. Knowing my time was short gave me the courage to be bold about passing on the vision of spiritual multiplication.
I invited five of the older students to join a small group specifically focused on learning about spiritual generations, based on the principles in 2 Timothy 2:2. This wasn’t an invitation to add another commitment to their calendars, but to join a group where they would be challenged to actively invest in someone—or to seek out that person to invest in. Their response astonished me. All five began investing in others to varying degrees.
Dietrich, a final-year student, sprinted with the vision. He started investing in one of his classmates, who came to trust in Jesus as a result. Dietrich also invested in Jayden, a Christian student, and encouraged Jayden to find someone to pass on what he’d learnt. Each of the other four had beautiful stories of what happened when they started investing in others.
All this happened because God showed me that I had very little time left to invest in those around me at Carleton University—that I needed to be bold. If you had one year left to work with the people in your ministry, what would you change? What would it look like to live as if that were true right now? Because the truth is, no one knows the day or the hour—Matthew 24:36.