[10] It's Gonna Have to Be Students - Chris Thrasher Wheatley

On today's episode, Peggy Kao Enderle interviews Chris Thrasher Wheatley about adjustments he and his ministry have made "in the midst of the craziness." They talk about the confusion we're feeling, making small but decisive steps in ministry, and how God is opening doors for students to take initiative.

LINKS

We've created a website (updated daily) full of resources to help you with Ministering Online Through COVID-19: intervarsity.org/online. 

Transcript

Peggy Kao Enderle:   0:12
Hey, Chris, how's it going?  

Chris Thrasher Wheatley:   0:13
It's going well. Nice to see you, Peggy.

Peggy Kao Enderle:   0:16
Thanks for joining us and sharing more about what you've been up to since all the crazy started.  

Chris Thrasher Wheatley:   0:22
Yeah.

Peggy Kao Enderle:   0:22
So when you first heard things were happening, for you personally, what was your first reaction?

Chris Thrasher Wheatley:   0:29
We live in rural Northern California. So it didn't feel as real up here, I think, as it did in some of the urban centers. But I was reading the news: what was happening in China, what was happening in Italy. As soon as stuff started happening in Italy, I realized, okay, this is a pattern: this is probably gonna happen in a lot of other places. I was looking at the middle of March because I was going to go with one of our schools down to Campus By the Sea and do some manuscript study in the book of Mark. And our whole family has signed up to go. And I'm looking at the middle of March thinking, "I don't know if that's gonna happen." There's news reports; there's mixed reports; people are saying different things; the government's kind of handling it all in different ways. I just remember being very confused and wondering, "How do I make some of the bigger decisions that are gonna affect you know, our chapters doing chapter camp over spring break?" I remember the beginning of March being really confused and not sure how to make some of the decisions. There's an RLT (regional leadership team) meeting the second week of March, and so there were 15 of us in the room and we started that meeting. There were maybe two schools in our entire region that had, like, shuttered their doors and decided they weren't gonna have on-campus lectures anymore. So out of the 50 chapters, two of them were affected by this on these decisions. And then as the meeting was going on, every like, 20, 25 minutes, another text would come in of another school. That was, you know, not gonna allow student on campus until April, not gonna allow students on campus until commencement, and just one after another. And it was the craziest feeling being in this meeting, one text after another. It felt kind of like the anxiety in the room building, and we realized, "Oh, man, this is gonna require some pretty big decisions on our part in terms of how we're gonna handle this as InterVarsity directors.

Peggy Kao Enderle:   2:28
When everything happened with COVID-19, you gathered your staff and you tried to start creating some rhythms for them right away. What are some of the things you've done?

Chris Thrasher Wheatley:   2:39
Normally, my style of leadership is to try to encourage, you know, ground up ideas. But I quickly realized that this thing was throwing us in a crisis mode. You know, campuses are shut down and none of us were really that prepared to do ministry. And so it felt like, "Okay, I need to adapt my leadership." And I think our staff also to be a little more top-down, decisive at least to give some kind of framework for people to plug into. So we called an area team meeting, got all the staff in our area together, and we just said, "Let's let's try something." And I said, I want to do a daily devotional: nothing crazy. We all know how to lead devotionals, and let's just work together as an area. We'll invite all the students from our area to jump on these calls. It's a beta test, but it will give us at least some structure to start with. People were trying to grasp for, you know, they don't know what's gonna happen. They don't know when they're going back to school. They don't know if their professors were gonna be able to teach them again. And if they're gonna be able to go back to the dorms. So, let's get our team together. Let's work on some devotionals and build in a structure that we could actually start to get people's feet back under them.

Peggy Kao Enderle:   4:02
And so you set up the structure specifically for staff at the beginning?

Chris Thrasher Wheatley:   4:06
We actually set up the structure, in my mind, I just wanted to get my staff moving and any students that we got on because when we first started our Psalms devotional, we were doing 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. every day. And I figured, if nothing else, if that's what we do, then we're getting the staff kind of moving in the right direction and any students they could pull on that first week it was, that was the week we were supposed to be at Mark camp for two of our chapters. Any student that came on, it would be great. It would be a bonus. And, actually quite a few joined us. And then the next week we had them inviting their friends. So it started small. But I feel like a lot of a lot of parables Jesus talks about it in the Kingdom is like, you start with a small thing and it starts to grow, and then you bring in more people. So that was great. And then one of the highlights for me was watching there's student that we had had that had been a leader at a community college ministry up in Reading north of us. And she transferred out to one of our four year schools and was a leader there. And she's a quieter student; she's a little more introverted, but it felt like she came alive on these Zoom devotionals. She was, you know, engaging, asking questions. And then she offered to lead the spiritual discipline for the second week of the Zoom calls. So every single devotional we jumped on, she led us through breath prayer. And I really think you know, it's surprising to me that when we have new ideas and we try new things out, sometimes people will rise up and step into leadership in ways that we wouldn't have expected. So there really is a glass-half-full mentality when it comes to creating new structures on the fly, you can be anxiety-filled - there could be a lot of like "We don't know what we're doing." But there's also a lot of opportunity there.

Peggy Kao Enderle:   6:01
Yeah, and I think some people see the push for trying new ministry - they can see it as oppressive. But it sounds like for you you really had this open-handed like, "We're gonna try something. If it fails, it's fine. But we're just gonna make space for creativity to happen."

Chris Thrasher Wheatley:   6:19
Yup. The other option was we just sit on our rears and do nothing, 'cuz we aren't going on campus to lead a Bible study, you know. So I think making it fun, trying stuff, not trying to do too much. I think sometimes we try to make it perfect or we try to do too much, and then that also will kind of freeze us in place. So collaborating together and having fun. It was great. And then what's really ironic about the whole thing is we did the devotional as an entire area for two weeks and awesome - a lot of good fruit out of it. You know, students were given us great feedback on it. In fact one student, he had gone home and has a pretty tough life at home. And he said, you know, this this thing, really, this really helped me through the transition home with some stuff I'm facing here. So you would think, like, "Wow, let's just keep doing this thing." You know, we have this devotional series; it's working and you know rinse and repeat and just keep running it through to the end of the semester. But as we talked as an area, it became really clear that staff and students wanted to actually take it down to a school level. So, you know, take it down to their chapter and run it in their individual chapters. And for me, there was a certain point where I realized this was a place-holder. It was never meant to go for months and months and months, you know, and it actually served its purpose in a two-week period. It got all of our staff moving and got our students saying that we could do online ministry, and now they want to take the reigns. And so I was a little sad. I'm like, "I actually like leading these things with my area and running it together." But it's actually better to see the students asking for the opportunity to lead those things on their chapter level. So it's been fun.

Peggy Kao Enderle:   8:08
So it sounds like you started off as directive because you saw there was a need for leadership. But as time has gone on, you went towards a more collaborative style with both staff and students to what you now have.

Chris Thrasher Wheatley:   8:22
There would have been a point, if I kept being directive in my leadership, there would have been a point where it it would have felt oppressive or like micromanage-y, if that's a term. So giving them space to take it and run with it is actually kind of what you would hope, you know. And when I think about some of the sticking points we're still coming up against, I don't know that directive leadership is going to get us out of the how we do stuff on a given chapter level. It's gonna have to be students. So if they feel ready to grab things and run with it, then we have to give them space to do it.

Peggy Kao Enderle:   8:58
Well, thanks, Chris. It was really great to hear what you are doing up there in Chico, and I love how you're partnering with students and continuing to do that.

Chris Thrasher Wheatley:   9:08
It was good talking to Peggy..