Redesigning the system

Office of Student Leadership and Campus Pastors Office roll out new changes

The student leaders on campus were informed at a leadership service Feb. 29 that beginning in the fall semester of 2016, the student leadership structure would change. LU Shepherds, a new office, due to the restructuring of the Office of Spiritual Development, in conjunction with the Office of Student Leadership (OSL), will oversee the spiritual life of residential students.

Starting in July, David Wheeler, professor of evangelism and the executive director of the Center for Ministry Training, will begin serving as the executive director of LU Shepherds. According to Wheeler, the decision to make this change was done entirely with “the students in mind.”

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“It’s not that it wasn’t working,” Wheeler said. “It’s the fact that we can make it better. … The whole point of this is to do the best thing for the student.”

The current leadership structure within OSL is a trickle-down style of leadership from Resident Directors all the way down to prayer and life group leaders. With these changes, the positions of spiritual life coach and prayer and life group leader have been moved under the office of LU Shepherds and renamed. From now on, the positions will be known as student shepherds and community leaders respectively and will be under the leadership of four male and four female shepherds.

According to Stephen Myers, the associate director of prayer and life group leaders in OSL, this change is similar to how things operated when he was a prayer leader during his freshman year at Liberty 10 years ago.

“When I was a prayer leader my first year here, I was a prayer leader under the Campus Pastors Office,” Myers said. “My RA was under the Resident’s Life Office, but in reality on the hall, I couldn’t have told you there was anything different.”

While Wheeler will be the executive director of LU Shepherds next year, Tim Griffin, the current executive director of the Campus Pastors Office, will serve as the director of LU Shepherds next year.

According to Wheeler and Griffin, instead of the former trickle-down system, Resident Assistants and student shepherds will operate at the same level while serving the students on their hall. The difference between the positions of Resident Director and Resident Assistant is that they perform “residential leadership through a spiritual lens” while student shepherds and community leaders will perform “spiritual leadership through a residential lens.”

COMMUNITY — The 2016-2017 RAs and student shepherds talked about their halls at the annual leadership fair in hopes of attracting community leaders. Photo credit: Matthew Pierce

COMMUNITY — The 2016-2017 RAs and student shepherds talked about their halls at the annual leadership fair in hopes of attracting community leaders. Photo credit: Matthew Pierce

Griffin explained there will be two full-time staff members directly responsible for weekly training and administrative details regarding the student shepherds. Additionally, eight shepherds will serve as spiritual mentors for the 241 student shepherds providing day-to-day spiritual support and accountability on a 30 to 1 ratio.

More recently, Wheeler and Griffin were tasked with narrowing down the potential candidates for Student Shepherds to the amount of spots available and placing them around campus for the upcoming school year.

“As much as possible, we relied on the system that was in place in years past,” Griffin said. “So what we did was we looked at the ranking system, looked at the rankings that the RDs had given, and then we sat down with our staff … and from that we basically put together a list of about 500 students.”

After those 500 interviews, where the list was shortened to the 241 available positions, a mixer was held March 22 for Resident Assistants and student shepherds to meet and talk about working together in the upcoming school year. Both parties had the opportunity to then fill out a preference form where they could write a few names of who they would most like to work with.

“I would say probably 70 percent of the pairings were almost perfect matches based on preferences,” Griffin said.

Further, Wheeler pointed out that the main purpose of all of this restructuring was to move the Campus Pastors Office closer to the students. He shared stories of countless times where the Campus Pastors Office would not find out about a difficult situation in a student’s life until weeks after it had passed and that they felt helpless at that point.

“The whole idea was, how do we take the Campus Pastors Office and move it closer to the students?” Wheeler said. “How do we get closer into the students’ lives if we don’t have people in the dorms who are also hands and feet in there?”

Both Myers within the OSL and Wheeler and Griffin from the LU Shepherds office expressed how incredible the communication has been between the two offices during this season of change. According to Myers, there are currently 1,061 prayer and life group leaders on campus and that in the multiple meetings he has per week with members of LU Shepherds, they cover all the logistics of handling all of these students moving under the leadership of a new office.

“Change is always difficult, but I can assure you that the whole point of this is to really improve this for the student,” Wheeler said.

PIERCE is a news reporter.

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