Fall kickoff. The summer heat is lingering, college football is back, small college towns are expecting a jarring change from their slow-paced summer. It’s time to go back to school! For thousands of students, it’s their first time at school — college — and there’s anticipation of what a “new start” could look like.

You already belong here because you are already loved.

Many schools have a day or two in the fall that is set aside for clubs to have a chance to invite students to join them. At the University of Michigan, we call it Festifall. Basically every club is trying to get thousands of freshmen to join their specific club through fliers, loud music, invitations to parties, free water bottles, free T-shirts and free tuition (OK, that one is a joke). But really, upperclassmen are enthusiastically trying to get people to join their clubs, and many people join just because they are searching for a place to belong, whether they are aware of it or not. My freshmen year, I got lured into many clubs’ email lists simply because I wanted to fit in somewhere. I signed up for so many lists that it took months (okay, years) to finally unsubscribe to all of them. Everyone wants to belong somewhere, and these clubs are invitations to students saying, “You can belong here.”

At New Life Church, we try to go to the students and invite them to come check out church or a small group with an invitation of, “You already belong here because you are already loved.” Here at the University of Michigan, we have a stereotype of being perfectionists. This has definitely played out in our ministry. We have a lot of Google Docs and Excel sheets that make sure we do all the things we need to do in ministry. We had every intention to also be at Festifall to have a chance to reach out to students. However, last year we forgot to secure our spot at Festifall! Every year we have a checklist of things to do during fall kickoff in order to reach out to students, and somehow that one fell through the cracks.

Yet God still moved. Missing Festifall forced us to think of a new idea to try to reach out to students. Two coworkers and I decided to go on campus on a day that wasn’t Festifall and pass out free water bottles with stickers that had New Life Church’s Sunday service times. After that, an owner of a local coffee shop donated cold-brew coffee for us to pass out. On a hot, 97-degree day, we ended up passing out over 560 water bottles (we kept having to buy more!) and 10 gallons of cold-brew coffee. Because we weren’t “competing” with other clubs, we actually had more of a chance to interact and have conversations with the people we were passing out water to. Not only that, but we were actually meeting a real need. It was very hot, and people were quick to take us up on our offer for free water.

As I said earlier, everyone is looking for a place to belong. We had a chance to invite students to a place where they belonged. However, even if they said no to this invitation, we still had the opportunity to serve and love people passing us on campus. After years of always being at Festifall, God led us somewhere else to love the students on campus.

This fall we purposefully aren’t going to be at Festifall. We’ll be back giving away free water and cold-brew coffee. This makes me excited to see what other things we’ll miss in our ministry systems, Google Docs and Excel sheets. May it give more space (or just more acknowledgement) to the fact that it is the Lord who moves.