Chris Reeder for SMU President

I am so excited and blessed to be chosen to serve you next year as your SMU President. I am so appreciative to all of you who helped me with my campaign, supported me, and made this possible. My campaign started with a vision from the Lord and a dream for what SMU could be. I promise to display integrity in following through on my goals for Wider Involvement and Deeper Commitment. Now begins the real work, and over the course of the next year, I hope for SMU to engage each of you in helping you to align your life towards the completion of the Great Commission.

Now that the campaign is over, and my pictures are down, the dream for SMU is no longer about me, but it is about you. By electing me, you have chosen to be a part of the dream, and I pray that you would make the dream manifest by continued involement in SMU and the Mission of the Kingdom.

Blessings on you all. I look forward to serving Biola.

Please support me by printing this poster out and posting it in your dorm.

Thank you everyone for your support.

Click here for a larger, printable image: Campaign Support Poster

I see the Student Missionary Union not just as a place for students to serve, but I see it as a service in itself to the Biola Student Body. Our mission statement is to motivate and mobilize students to align their lives toward the completion of the Great Commission. This means that we do not exist to just send students to do missions, and neither do we exist to just to fire up students about missions, but rather, we exist to help Biola students find out how they are supposed to live in order to fulfill the Great Commission. Completing the Great Commission will take more than missionaries willing to live in the dirt in foreign countries. It will take teachers, business people, accountants, secretaries, artists, linguists, photographers, journalists, conservationists, international developers, preachers, theologians, professors, parents, boat captains, librarians, pilots, tour guides, nurses, chemists, hotel managers, waiters, authors, and countless others. The areas of study and interest that Biola students are currently pursuing are usable in the Great Commission. It is SMU's job to help you find out how.

As President, I will be sure that SMU will grow and improve in its' service to Biola by:

1. Improving marketing so that the wider Biola student body can know what SMU is, the services that it offers students, and the ways that students can be involved.
   
2. Adopting a deeper commitment to following-up with students who are impacted by our mission trips and Missions Conference.
   

These two things make up the core of my vision for SMU next year. If you want to know how I would do these things and why I believe they are necessary to better serve Biola, please read my blog posts "What I mean by 'Wider Involvment'" and "What I mean by 'Deeper Commitment'".

This year, I have been working in the Short-Term Missions department of SMU as a Co-Director of Team Development. My job has been to train and mentor the leaders of SMU's mission trips, and to help those leaders form their teams. Last week one of the leaders that I am training said something to me that put to words something I've felt ever since I lead a trip last year. He said this,

"SMU is Biola's best kept secret".

When he said that, I felt flattered and proud to be a part of this great organization. Yet at the same time, I felt saddened. Saddened that SMU, an organization that 86 years ago was created to serve the Biola Student Body by giving them the tools and inspiration to bring the Kingdom of God to bear in the World, was now reduced to "Biola's secret". And my friend was right. SMU has a reputation around Biola as being a small huddle of "MKs and ICS kids". When I told the people on my floor that I was running for SMU President, dozens of times I was asked, "What is SMU?" or "What does SMU do?".

This is an absolute heartbreak to me, because it is my passionate conviction that SMU is a service to Biola, and if most of Biola doesn't know the services we offer, and that we offer them to every Biola Student (not just certain "missions kids"), how can we be successful in serving them?

Actually, I think that SMU as "Biola's secret" or as "a huddle of ICS kids" is more perceived than actual. In fact,

SMU is the biggest student-let missions organization in the western hemisphere. We put on the biggest annual missions conference in the nation, and the trips that we just sent out over Interterm had members that represented every major on campus.

So, what do I mean by "Wider Involvement"? I mean that as SMU President I will make it possible for the Wider Biola Community can be involved with SMU's services and ministries by improving our communication with the student Body and heightening SMU's level of visibility on campus. I will do this by:

• Working with the AS Senate to publicize SMU events and services to all students.
• Building up the SMU website to be a more helpful resource, and updating it more regularly.
• Creating an SMU Facebook profile, so that students can be invited to SMU events on Facebook .

• Making a monthly State of the Union video address from the President available on the website and Facebook, to update the campus on what is going on at SMU.
  

• Putting on an SMU job fair every spring, thereby openning up the opportunity to work at SMU to all students.
• Use surveys to evaluate our progress.
  

Over the past many months, I have thought and prayed a lot about weather or not I should run for SMU President. I had a handful of ideas for ways that SMU could improve, but nothing that would justify running for President. I decided that if the Lord didn't give me a vision for where He wanted SMU to go next year, that I would not run. I thought if there was no vision, then my reason for running would be about my own ambition and not about serving the Lord and Biola.

Since then, however, the Lord has put it on my heart that SMU is not just an organization through which students can serve, but it is a service in itself to Biola. SMU's mission statement is To motivate and mobilize students to align their lives toward the completion of the Great Commission.

I looked at this, and then I looked at the things that SMU currently does to fulfill its mission statement. To motivate students, we have Missions Conference (MC). This past week, we were told by President Barry Correy that, "For Biola, the question of involvement in missions is not if, but it is how". I know that many people were motivated by MC to align their lives towards completing the Great Commission. To mobilize students, we have short-term mission (STM) trips that we send out over Interterm and Summer. In fact, by the end of this summer, SMU will have sent 14 different trips to minister in 15 different countries this year. Through the combined impact of these trips, hundreds come to Christ and the life change that happens in the students that we send is too deep to mention in a passing statement.

As I thought about these ministries, and the massive impact that they have, I asked of the Lord and those around me, "What is missing?". The resounding answer was this:

Both of our main ministries are Short Term.

What I mean is this. We send out month-long trips and plan a 3-day missions conference, but we don't have the structure to follow-up with students who are impacted by the trips or Missions Conference. The students come off of their spiritual highs and settle back into campus life, never being offered the opportunity to be mentored, counseled, prayed-with, or to give back and motivate and mobilize their fellow students. Students come off of these experiences often knowing that God has a call on their lives, but without missions-minded community, the call gets blurrier instead of clearer.

So, what does "Deeper Commitment" mean? It means that as SMU President I will adopt deeper commitment to following up with students impacted by their missions trips and by Mission Conference. To do this I want to:

• Add a weekly SMU chapel on Tuesday nights that will be directed at topics in missions.

• Add two new staff positions in SMU whose job it will be to facilitate mentorship and community to help students find their place in the Great Commission.

• Coordinate follow-up events for Missions Conference.
  

• Put on a reatreat each semester for all the SMU volunteers to facilitate fellowship and unify under the mission of SMU, to impact our campus so that students can impact the world for the Lord Jesus Christ.