The connection between iGo Global and Texas Super Summer has always been a good one. Most of our current staff were involved in Super Summer at some point in their lives. For me, personally, Super Summer was the event God used to change the trajectory of my life as a teenager from Angleton, Texas (Home of the Wildcats! Purple and White! Fight! Fight! Fight!)
And when we started iGo, we naturally turned to Super Summer for recruiting. After all, students who are ready for Super Summer are likely candidates to follow God to the ends of the earth.
Every year we would show up at Super Summer with some information. They would graciously give us some time on stage to call students to be involved, and we would do our best to encourage students to apply for one of our amazing trips all over the globe. That was pretty much it as far as our marketing and recruiting strategy. One year we added a cool element by making a phone call to Ky while he served in East Asia (yes, we called him. Skype wasn’t around yet). That idea was indeed fruitful. For several years, I ran into students whose story was that God called them the night we called Ky.
Fruitful in those days, however, meant a handful of students would respond, apply, and then follow through by participating on a team. But everything was about to change. I wish I could tell you how brilliant we were. I wish I could tell you that we had all the scientific data behind us when we made our next strategic decision (we discovered the scientific data a few years later). The truth is we wanted this thing to grow, and we were willing to try anything.
At a lunch meeting one afternoon with Leighton Flowers (aka the King of Texas Super Summer), we threw out the idea of putting together one Texas Super Summer mission team for the summer of 2005. Instead of recruiting for all of our trips, we would show up at each session of Super Summer with a different story to tell. This new story would be that all Texas Super Summer students (as many as applied and were accepted) would go together to Cologne, Germany all together in 2005. There at that lunch table Super Summer Global was born.
Scientific data (like I said we found this years later) supports the theory that given too many good choices, most people find it difficult to choose. Many don’t choose at all. What we did with SS Global was simply take the choice off the table. Students no longer needed to decide where God might be calling them to go. They only had to decide if they should go. I will never forget being at the first cloudburst and hearing Leighton stand up and announce the plan, throwing out the vision that every Super Summer student was called to go at some point. Why not now? We had moved this thing from a commercial to a calling; from network to partnership, from a plan to a movement.
And God unleashed those students. In the summer of 2005, 100 students and adults served on the first ever Super Summer Global team in Cologne. Crosspointe Fellowship from Greenville, Texas joined forces with SSG to make the final number of that group 113, which meant that in one week we sent more people than our largest summer in our history. Our second wave of interns (JSI’s) led the SSG team on the ground after spending most of their summer in Cologne. Natalie (Townley) Stary left her position with Texas Super Summer to join our staff to coordinate our Super Summer partnership, further evidence that God was providing for iGo as Brad would say, seldom early, but never late.
In addition to that small army from our new partnership, we mobilized several other teams of students to other countries as God continued to grant us favor with missionaries and students willing to go. The foundation He had laid over the first four years was solid, and He was ready to build. And as we quickly saw, He knows a thing or two about building. 2005 was just the beginning.
Check out the iGo Global facebook fan page for pictures of the 2005 teams. You can also click these links: Big Red and Japan
