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It’s probably right and good for most of us to rise to the occasion of a new semester, rallying students with vigor and reminding them why they’re a part of our group. But it’s also a shame if man-made timelines (like the end of a semester and beginning of a new one) cause students to move too quickly past everything God wanted to teach them in Fall 2011.
So the Fridea is along those lines: Remind students of what God did and what He showed them last semester (or quarter).
Whether you push students to ponder this on their own OR actually recap the teaching and other impact of Fall 2011 (or, preferably, BOTH), this is a good chance to add continuity within the year… and to “give God space” to finish the good things He began only a few months ago.
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It’s been a semester since I posted the list below, originally brainstormed by my college ministry-thinkin’ buddy Mark Warrington and me. I wanted to get it up in time to use it for Finals! And it’s a bonus Frideas post – look for another one tomorrow.
For many campuses, the last week of the semester or quarter could be the PERFECT time to add something to the calendar. Have you thought about it? Even if you didn’t put it on the calendar yet? (Why do we try to plan so far ahead in college ministry, anyway?)
If you know your campus, you can figure out what will help accomplish your purposes during Finals week. Maybe some of this will fit, or maybe it’ll help you brainstorm for your own campus tribe!
- A Finals study day (with food), like Blackhawk Church in Madison does.
- A perpetual game marathon. As students need to leave, new students step in. Remember your color or your team, and we’ll announce the winning team at the end of the week. (I’ve always wanted to do this!)
- Serving your campus’s students: anything from food to free Scantrons to free tutoring to free massages…
- A few-hour Study Break (with food & games & other fun)
- Prayer – for students, with students, about students, about the world
- Holding an on-campus or off-campus respite spot all week long, open ’round the clock
- 15-minute Worship breaks within the day, held on-campus…
- …or even mid-day “chapel services” held on campus
- Simply cancel some or all of your regular ministry activities, if that helps students most
- Prepare an awesome devotional guide or other “plan” to give students as they leave or send students two weeks into summer
- Quick road trip – to study (in an interesting location) or not to study
- Print a handout on the spiritual aspects of finishing strong, studying hard, etc.
- Give students something to serve their fellow classmates (candy? extra Scantrons?)
- Hang out with other college ministers (while the mice are away, the cats will play?)
- Cheer academic excellence in obvious ways
- Midnight stress relievers (B-Movies? Campus golf?)
- Camping on campus
- Collect mailing addresses of the students who are headed home
- Spend the week getting to know some of the faculty, administration, and staff
- Spend some time serving some of the faculty, administration, and staff
- Remind students to (and how to) stay healthy
- Brainstorm how you’re going to impact local college students during the break (even if you’re a campus-based college ministry!)
- Prepare for the most amazing Senior send-off ever
- Organize a team of all your students who don’t have Finals (or whose Finals end early in the week) – either to have fun together OR to serve
- Prepare to host parents, families, and others well when they come for graduation
- Love on specific groups on campus in some of the above ways
- Moving-out help
- Tour high schoolers around campus
- Bring to campus: Local pastors, parents, youth pastors, and others who need to care more about the campus tribes. Offer a “vision experience” where they look to these busy-hurried-anxious-energetic mission fields, notice they’re white unto harvest, and help the labor to increase.
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Like yesterday’s post about how Christ impacts students’ Christmas lists, this post is a favorite from last year around this time. I know at least one college ministry that printed this out to share with their students – I encourage you to consider doing the same!
What if, this year, you issued students a Home-Bound Challenge. (This particular name has multiple layers of meaning, but you can call it whatever you want, of course.)
The idea is to challenge your students with specific spiritual activities for the Winter Break. Students face the culture-shock of being home AND the busyness of the Christmas season… so giving them an actual “goal list” or “Christmas Break Bucket List” could really help them accomplish some things.
You might even consider a night just to share testimonies of how students saw God move over the Winter Break – including through the Home-Bound Challenge.
You can include whatever goals God leads you to, but here are some that are ready for cut-and-paste:
- Discuss how you’ve grown spiritually this semester with at least one family member.
- Take one whole day alone with Jesus.
- Hang out with one person from high school that you need to reconnect with.
- Read one book of the Bible you’ve never read before.
- Plug in fully to your church – volunteering, attending, going to the college ministry – even if it’s not as “cool” as your church at college.
- Tell your parents how much you appreciate them.
- Pray regularly that God would make you the kind of student that glorifies Him best.
- Pray through your course schedule for next semester and discern whether God would have you change anything.
- Read one Christian book. (Ask your college minister if you need ideas!)
- Take at least three days in a row to fully rest.
- Contact me (your college minister) at least once to let me know how things are going and how I can pray for you.
- Help your parents in some way that surprises them.
- Prayer walk a college campus in or near your town, even if it’s not the school you go to.
- Pray for our college ministry every day (and write down anything God shows you).
- Pray for your upcoming professors. By name.
- Think up ways to serve your upcoming professors.
- Pray through your areas of campus involvement. What needs to change?
- Pray through your college ministry involvement. What needs to change?
- Go through your closets at home and donate things you know you don’t need anymore.
- Keep doing the spiritual habits you’ve developed at college – don’t skip once, or it’ll be hard to keep the habit all Break.
- Call your closest friends regularly, and keep each other on track spiritually.
- Connect with Christian youth in your town (or even their parents), and help them think about preparing for college.
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Before Thanksgiving Break, I wrote plenty about the need to prepare our students for the Break. And, whether we had the chance to do that or not, I encouraged us to work strategically to ready collegians for the long Christmas Break.
But there’s another important step a friend helped me realize last night: Debriefing.
What if this week’s small groups or Large Group Meeting was dedicated to talking through the good, the bad, and the ugly of your students’ Thanksgiving Breaks? Or what if you offered the opportunity at a special lunch or online forum? If you can’t take those steps, what if you at least encouraged students to talk to you, other adults, or student leaders about what they faced at home?
Some of your students feel like a semester’s worth of spiritual growth was unraveled in just a few days, and they’re wondering what that means or how in the world they’re going to handle Christmas. Some feel a tinge of homesickness now that they’ve returned – maybe for the first time this semester. Others were reminded – deeply – of all the reasons they were so glad to leave home for college. Some feel like they missed some opportunities to impact their friends or family.
Others had really neat times at home – and their stories would be great for other students to hear. (And some made mistakes that they can help others not repeat.)
There are all sorts of reasons why a post-break Debrief makes enormous sense. Yes, if you can’t get that together this week, then I’d definitely encourage starting that tradition in January. But as my friend pointed out, debriefing Thanksgiving is one more GREAT way to prepare students for the Christmas Break that’s coming soon.
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I’ve written several times over the past couple of weeks about preparing students for the Thanksgiving and Christmas Breaks, as well as about impacting them during those breaks (why waste so many weeks of opportunity?).
But I don’t know what this week looks like for you personally, as a college minister. It’s likely it’s a little unusual… and possibly a little lighter. And then you probably have Thanksgiving travels or parties or feasting, whether it’s local or afar.
Still, the question for us is, How are we going to use this week?
Just like students, college ministers have our usual “calendars.” They coincide with students’ calendars oftentimes – but not always. And this is a week – not just Thursday and the weekend, but perhaps the entire week – when you could accomplish some major things for yourself or your ministry.
Including rest, if that’s what you need.
The point of this post is to encourage you to decide. What are your purposes for this week? How are you going to get that thing / those things done? How will those actions fit into the (crazy) schedule of the week?
This week doesn’t have to be a throwaway; it could actually be a hinge week for you or for the ministry. The weeks between now and Christmas Break aren’t throwaway, either (or they shouldn’t be!)… so preparing for them – whatever that means in your context – is a worthy task for a Thanksgiving week.
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Yesterday, I posted many of the reasons Thanksgiving Break could be really important to prepare students for. And many of those reasons apply to Christmas Break, too. These two experiences are two of your students upcoming “hinge moments.”
So today, I just wanted to brainstorm “out loud” about ways you might teach, disciple, and otherwise prepare students for these times. Do what fits your purposes best, but I hope you’ll at least consider preparing students for the holiday Breaks.
Teaching / training areas
- Evangelism (with a special emphasis on family members and “old friends”)
- Honoring your parents
- Spiritual Disciplines
- Fighting Temptations (especially those brought on by being “back home”)
- Rest
- Decision-making (since, as noted yesterday, these are excellent times to ponder the semester / summer ahead)
Methods
- Message(s): Of course, you can always teach such things in a Large Group Meeting message or short series.
- Small groups: Use your present small group structure to talk through yesterday’s issues and/or the topics above
- Training devotionals via email or blog: In the week(s) leading up to either Break, what if you hit some of the above areas in a written format?
- Ongoing devotionals during the Breaks: Likewise, ongoing contact with students (especially over Christmas Break) could be phenomenal. Students could even contribute both teaching and testimonies of how God is using them during their Breaks.
- Booklet: Instead of (or along with) an ongoing devotional, you could produce a “Quiet Time Guide” or other resource students could take home with them.
- Establishing in-break Community: Small groups shouldn’t end at the threshold of Christmas break. Either your present groups or only-for-the-Break groups should be (remotely) providing accountability, encouragement, etc., for students while they’re away from school.
- Online Community: While less “organic” attempts at community may be necessary for students to actually use them mid-break, supplementing on Facebook, a blog, or an email list could be great.
- Personal connections: You, your staff, and your student leaders could certainly reach out to students personally during the breaks. A call on the Friday after Thanksgiving or periodic emails during Winter Break, for instance, could be more important and timely than you realize…
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Surely this is something – unless your college ministry is just enormous – that you could join other local college ministries in doing.
The idea (or Fridea, as the case may be) is a study – offered possibly each semester – for any Christian students who will head out from campus next semester. Remember, we’re not just talking about those graduating. It applies to collegians studying abroad, taking some time off, doing an internship, etc. (Although, depending on your scenario, you might have different studies or split some of those groups off once or twice to talk about issues specific to their situations.)
This week, I’ve been looking at the HUGE need to shepherd such students while they’re away – including purposely impacting students for a season after they graduate. But of course our shepherding will be even better if it starts while students are still local.
Again, I think this one might make a lot of sense as a multi-campus-ministry effort:
- The diversity of discipleship will help a lot, especially since everybody’s “real world” experiences will look so different
- Cooperation might allow y’all to get started on this sooner rather than later (since you’re sharing the load)
- Cooperation among a few college ministries will encourage other ministries to engage this vital area
- Critical mass always encourages students to take part
- Connecting MORE students to each other as they head out – some into the same places – increases their opportunities for accountability, encouragement, and community next semester
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I’m slightly uncomfortable with College Ministry’s stance toward the summer months. While individual ministries vary in summertime activities, the field of College Ministry as a whole seems to shrug off summer as either expendable, tailor-made for support-raising, or primarily for “special events” like weeks-long projects or mission trips.
Like I said, I’m only slightly uncomfortable. I understand all the reasons this happens, and I don’t have some sort of broad edict on how we need to do it better. But I can ask questions, so that’s what I’ll do for the rest of this post.
This is key: These questions are for you to ask yourself (and maybe even God) about your ministry. But many of them won’t apply at all to your ministry, and I completely understand that. Only if the shoe fits should you wear it! And there are a variety of “shoes” in the list below.
- Are our students coming out of summer closer to God than they were in May?
- Do we treat students who are called to stay home / stay local during the summer with the same honor as students who do missions, work at a camp, or work on special ministry projects?
- Do we share any responsibility for shepherding our students when they’re not in town with us?
- For the summer activities we do, are we giving local students the “B Team” when it comes to staffing, planning, purposefulness, or activities? Should we be?
- Are we ministering in light of the fact that college students often have more time to invest in spiritual activities in the summer?
- Are we fully taking advantage of the other advantages of the summer months (perhaps group size, campus accessibility, student boredom, chances to partner with other ministries, and more)?
- For campus-based college ministries: Should we be solely counting on home churches to shepherd our students (students they may not have seen for 9 months)?
- What specific purposes have we already thought through, prayed through, and written down for this summer? Did we spend as much energy and focus on planning for the summer as we did for the spring?
- Are we basing our local summer work on how many students are around? If there were 100 more students, would we be more purposeful? How should purposefulness, energy, etc., be affected by ministry size?
- Do our summer ministry activities accord with our recognition that the college years are truly a “hinge” moment in students’ lives? Are we okay with 1/4 or more of that hinge remaining largely “unshepherded”?
Again – I’m not writing assuming that all these apply to your campus ministry! (In fact, I know that some ministries have their strongest work in the summer, and some might need to ask these Qs about the school year!) But I wanted to ask questions that would challenge us to rethink our approaches and make sure we’re fulfilling our ministry in a year-round way.
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When I describe to pastors how the transition from high school to college seems to most students, I show them a picture of a pretty scary bridge.
But the truth is, many of our college students face a similarly scary bridge every single summer (and kinda during Winter Break, as well). They head into Summer Break away from the college ministry that has been so impactful and the friends that have nurtured them and held them accountable to the Lord.
So the question is: What are you doing to help bridge your students to spiritual success this summer?
I mean the students who aren’t going on a Summer Project with you, aren’t working at some Christian Camp, aren’t heading to three months of missions overseas, aren’t sticking around (if you have ministry in the summer). For many (likely most) of your students, their lives will be much more “normal” and much less “spiritually routine” – and therefore much more vulnerable to apathy, backsliding, or outright desertion from the godliness they’ve found easily habitual in their present environment.
What have you done to prepare them to pursue godliness and to get impacted by other Christians while they’re home?
How have you encouraged them to stay the course – not simply to “avoid falling” but to grow as much in these three months as they have in the last three?
What have you done to excite them about plugging back into their home church, discipling youth or younger college students, loving their families, studying their Bibles, and praying about their involvement when they return?
As their college minister, you are likely these students’ main (human) shepherd now. Yep, the sheep are roaming out a ways from their normal habitat. But you’re still their main shepherd. How have you prepared them for the sojourn?
You’ve got time. Even if they’re already gone for the summer, email, phone calls, and even mail can be beautiful things. This has to matter to us… right?
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