North Twin Cities Chi Alpha | Isaac & Mia Van Proosdy
Drive up Highway 169 in the North Metro and you’ll pass a scattered collection of four community and technical colleges with a combined enrollment of over 20,000 students. For years Pastor Chad Spinler of LifeGate Church recognized these campuses as ministry opportunities and cast vision with fellow churches in the North Twin Cities (NTC) section to establish a Chi Alpha presence in the schools.
Historically, community and technical colleges haven’t been at the forefront of campus ministry. But when Josiah and Micah Kennealy pioneered a Chi Alpha chapter at Normandale Community College, the venture proved possible. Chad again rallied the NTC section around the vision of reaching these four schools. The precedent was set and the NTC churches were behind it. The only thing missing was leaders to run with it. Enter Isaac and Mia Van Proosdy.
Isaac and Mia graduated from North Central University in 2013 and then served as Young Adult Pastors in Michigan until 2017 when they moved back to Minnesota. Isaac got a job at his alma mater and they got involved at LifeGate. They both sensed a call to missions with a focus on college students, so Chad asked them, “Would you consider missions here?” They turned him down twice, but as they prayed and researched the four schools they began to see the opportunity before them. They knew the heart of Chi Alpha from its earliest days has always been missional, and young people from all over the world have found their way to these schools. Mia remembers feeling the need to pray with an open heart, noting, “Sometimes that next step looks a lot different than how you had always pictured it.” When Chad asked a third time, this time they said, “Yes.”
The endeavor was unique because it was a collaborative NTC effort. With Chad’s vision, multiple churches had already committed to the cause before the Van Proosdys accepted. That gave them a great foundation on which to build their support network during the pandemic. After months of fundraising primarily via Zoom, they officially launched the North Twin Cities Chi Alpha (NTCXA) last fall.
NTCXA was first officially recognized as a campus group by Anoka-Ramsey Community College (ARCC). The hope is to establish a self-sustaining campus ministry there before moving on to Anoka Tech, Hennepin Tech, and North Hennepin Community College. Since ARCC isn’t allowing groups to meet on campus this semester because of Covid, North Star Community Church in Coon Rapids has opened its doors for NTCXA to meet on Friday nights.
Isaac encourages other pastors to find ways to partner with each other saying, “Collaboration becomes easier when we broaden our measure of success. Is our definition of success big enough?” All of this was made possible by a group of kingdom-minded NTC churches who have come to measure success not just by what they can do alone, but by what they can do together.
