By Beau Crosetto

Consider the potato.

It is fully formed and grown underground and unless you dig it up, you would never know that it was ripe and ready for harvest. You literally could walk right over it 100 times and never know.

I think there are harvest opportunities like this as well. There are communities ripe with potential and just waiting to be harvested. Cities that are ready for revival, campuses eager for the gospel message, neighborhoods longing for community and Jesus.

We just don’t know and we just don’t see it.

It is an interesting thought to think that there are communities of faith that are ready to form with little effort needed. It is very different than the usual thought of starting something new.

We tend to think starting a new ministry is

• Hard
• labor intensive
• scary
• time consuming.

But what if there are communities that are ready for us now? What if there are missional people ready to lead out with Jesus and they just need a spark? Or better yet, they just need to be discovered?

When I got the word: Potato 

During the fall all the directors of ministry in Southern California with InterVarsity got together to talk, vision and pray. One exercise in prayer had us praying over a drawing on the wall. The drawing on the wall was of an empty plot of ground and we all were instructed to listen to God for words, images, and scriptures about this plot of ground that was the Southern California college campuses. What was God saying to us about this ground?

One of the images I received was “potato” and I drew it up on the map. God then began to speak to me and others about the reality that some of the schools in SoCal are ripe for the harvest, but we just can’t see it. It is as though they have been growing beneath the surface. They are just waiting for someone to come and spark the movement. This concept really intrigued me and I instantly thought of Loyola Marymount University.

Loyola Marymount as Potato

Since my move to LA last June, LMU has been on my heart and I have felt a supernatural leaning towards this campus. It is hard to explain in words but it feels like deep in my gut/spirit God keeps saying to me

“LMU is ready…We are going to start something here.”

What is weird is that InterVarsity has not had ministry here in over 20 years and this campus, since it is private-catholic, is not very open to the idea of an InterVarsity coming. It is not the first place you would look to start a new ministry. In fact, it is a place that many are avoiding and even overlooking. There is little to no evangelical ministry on campus.

I think this campus is a potato waiting to be harvested.

Since June I have spent time praying there, writing my five-year ministry plan and using the campus as a space to dream about unreached places and what it will take to start new works of God where there isn’t vibrant witness. LMU is a sort of “think tank” environment for me to keep the reality of unreached campuses fresh in my mind.

But every time I am there I get fired up and a little mad. I think to myself,

“Why are we not here! This campus is ripe with potential!”

USC Fall Con

I decided that when I preached at the USC and USD (San Diego) Fall Conference last September that I was going to dedicate one of my talks to inspiring students to reach new campuses that we were not yet on. I asked them to stand if they knew someone at a campus that did not have intervarsity on it yet. About 20 people stood and you wouldn’t believe where the majority of friends had someone they knew? LMU.

One woman from USD connected me with a sorority friend at LMU and for the last month my wife Kristina has been disciplining her and a friend into mission and dreaming about starting Greek InterVarsity on that campus. By the way the campus is 25% Greek!

I can literally feel the potential in those meetings they are having and my wife has had a strong image and sense from God that the campus is “Thirsty”. When you talk to students on campus they say things like, “I cannot find a vibrant community of faith” or “as a protestant, there is nothing for me here”.

The Athletic Woman 

Just last week as my wife and these two women were talking about God, a woman came up to their table and said,

“Are you talking about God?”

My wife was so surprised and she said told the woman that yes they were. The woman immediately responded with,

“Can I join you?”

Of course my wife let her sit in and the woman explained that she is on the crew team and wants to start a Bible study for her athletic friends. She has been looking and looking for Christian community but cant find it on campus. She has even reached out online to a sports ministry to come to campus with no avail.

This woman is thirsty, and she may even be a potato.

This is changing our strategy on campus! This feels like the book of Acts! When is the last time someone came up to you and said, “Are you talking about God?” I think that happens in ripe communities that need to be harvested! This woman is like a potato saying, “Pick me, I am ready!

My wife shared the vision of how we are launching missional communities in the Greek Chapters on campus but that she could very easily train athletes to start communities as well. It is the same training just nuanced. The woman seemed excited and is going to pray about it.

My wife came back excited of course and our conversation was filled with dreams and potential. What could God be launching at LMU and have we started to uncover the potato?

Have you considered that there might be communities “ripening” underground near you? Have you asked God where he might be growing something that is unseen?

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