Starting in 1991, Dare 2 Share Ministries was founded on an idea: to equip and encourage teens to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with their friends. Initially a ministry in which founder Greg Stier pursued part time, the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, mere minutes from the Dare 2 Share headquarters, transformed the ministry and its founder, intensifying a sense of urgency, and broadening its vision to ultimately see “every teen everywhere reached by the Gospel through a friend”.
Dare 2 Share’s fundamental ministry model from the beginning was rooted in live events: gatherings of youth groups and their leaders in high-energy, equipping-oriented, mobilizing multi-day events where thousands of youth would gather in conference centers around the country multiple times per year. These events combined solid training, the introduction to effective evangelism models and tools, and passion building and mutual encouragement that helped students to start effectively engaging their friends in winsome conversations right away.
While Dare 2 Share successfully pursued philanthropy-based fundraising with a broad cross-section of donors, a significant component of D2S’s “economic engine” was also rooted in the registration fees which the ministry received from attendees at their conferences. Given the aggressiveness of its growth vision, and a sense that the ministry was beginning to hit a “plateau” in its growth trajectory, in the early 2000s the leadership team, led by Greg Stier and his key lieutenant, Debbie Bresina, began to question Dare 2 Share’s ministry model and strategy. The ministry began to struggle with revenue generation, a situation made more difficult by the economic recession in 2008. As a result, leadership was forced to make the tough call to significantly reduce staff size in order to balance revenues and expenses.
More fundamentally, Dare 2 Share’s leadership also began to ask questions about the sustained ministry impact that they were having among those youth and youth groups that D2S was targeting. The results of an extensive research project in 2013 were troubling. While there was some evidence of positive impact from D2S materials and conferences, there were a number of areas where real ministry fruitfulness and the potential for further growth were candidly disappointing: sustained student conversations about faith with their friends was not nearly as frequent as D2S leaders had hoped, and comparisons between D2S-connected teens and non-connected control groups were discouraging.
Even while the economic condition of the ministry had stabilized, Greg, Debbie, and the rest of their leadership team seemed to be at a crossroads. The vision for mobilizing teens to share the gospel with their friends was as bright as ever. But the model for moving this vision to a greater scale, and for equipping and motivating teens for more resilient engagement simply didn’t seem to be working in its current form.
It was time for some strategic changes and choices.
- As Dare 2 Share considered its future challenges to see more fruitful ministry impact, as well as to grow the number of engaged teens and youth groups that it sought to mobilize, what do you think are the core issues, or barriers, that the ministry was facing? What is at the “crux” of their strategic situation?
- What are some ways that you think would be helpful for Dare 2 Share to begin addressing its strategic challenges? Is there further information that you think they should gather? Are there any key questions that their leadership team should be seeking to answer? Are there some strategic options or paths forward that they should be considering more deeply?
- What would you recommend doing should you be asked to join the Dare 2 Share leadership team? How would you support these recommendations?