Dear College Ministry,

The college ministry has been known as Revivalution or Rev for 10 years, and OCM before that.  Names are very important, and we just sensed in our collective spirit that it was time to change the name once again.  There wasn’t anything wrong with the name per se, but we felt that we had come to a place in our ministry where God was calling us to new land and with that was giving us a new name.  After bouncing ideas off of people, praying through, and seeing what would represent not only what we are about, but provide more of an identity, who we are, the new name for “Rev” that I came to was FLOW.

Now you’re probably wondering, “What does that even mean?”  Well, FLOW can stand for a lot of things, but I think the main images that I want to focus on are Spirit and water.  Let’s take that first one, Spirit.  Without the Spirit flowing in and through us, the new motto or tag line that I came up with to accompany the name FLOW – learn. live. love. – doesn’t mean anything.  Without the Spirit, we can’t learn about Christ.  Without the Spirit, we can’t live like Christ.  Without the Spirit, we can’t love others like Christ.  So there should be this constant flow of the Spirit in our lives.

Then there is Water (which is another metaphor for the Spirit, but here let’s just talk about water as water).  Where water flows, things grow, and that’s what we want to see happen on the campuses.  Our church gets our name from Isaiah 58:11, and likewise we want to see “well-watered gardens” on every campus.  But water also flows downhill, with gravity, and this can represent the world and complacency i.e. “going with the flow.”  But as Christians, we are called to go against the flow (of the world that is) and to follow Christ, a path that isn’t easy to take, but well worth it.  So those are just a couple of the things that I want to highlight.

And then there’s the passage that this name is loosely based on, Amos 9:13-15, which not so coincidentally has references to new wine (this past school year’s college zone theme) and gardens:

¹³ “The days are coming,” declares the LORD,

“when the reaper will be overtaken by the plowman
and the planter by the one treading grapes.
New wine will drip from the mountains
and flow from all the hills,
¹⁴ and I will bring my people Israel back from exile.

“They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them.
They will plant vineyards and drink their wine;
they will make gardens and eat their fruit.
¹⁵ I will plant Israel in their own land,
never again to be uprooted
from the land I have given them,”
says the LORD your God.