Rob Schrumpf

Lead Pastor

Making a Home as a Family on Mission

What makes a house a home?One of the challenges this past year has been the recapturing and rebuilding of the Campus House culture after a crazy couple of years.Lockdown and send home. Pack up and clear out. Tear down and live stream. Spread out and mask up. Rebuild and reframe. Pack up and move in. Open doors and heads spin.The fall semester was mostly spent getting our bearings, finding some semblance of normalcy as we “began again” forming rhythms of worship and community. There was a lot of excitement, but also a fair number of challenges, as we all tried to adjust, welcome new people into our midst, develop and disciple leaders, and start to make this beautiful, new house feel like home.Surprisingly, the latter has been more difficult than we had imagined. I think I underestimated the collective memory span of university students. Two years without the big rocks of our ministry—without the annual spring break trip to the Smokies and other retreats, Vision Trips, service projects, Starry Night festival, and other ‘culture builders,’—we had lost not only momentum but a bit of our ministry’s identity.Coming into the spring semester, we prioritized the ongoing establishment of a fuller expression of church. In the last five months, we saw Campus House culture deepening with our students and relationships building with our non-student community. Student-led initiatives and ownership among our growing group of community folks, the delineation of space and communication of vision, dinners, game nights, and the reboot of retreats, Vision Trips, and more have contributed to the house becoming a home.We continue to pray that we will ever-increasingly be built together into a church family on mission—filled with the Holy Spirit, eyes fixed on Jesus, and devoted to one another for the sake of the Kingdom.We are grateful for the new house. We are grateful for the One who puts the lonely in families, and who calls us to partner in His mission and restoration project. We are grateful for your partnership in this good work.Always grace, Rob Schrumpf, on behalf of the Campus House Staff Family