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Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand,
that he may lift you up in due time. (I Peter 5:6 NIV)
Perhaps my favorite thing I learned during my first year of college ministry is summed up in that verse.
[Thanks for reading this series on major things I learned in my first year of college ministry. The series will continue to be available right here, for you or your student leaders!]
Each week of that school year, I found myself in that glorious, terrible, wonderful cycle of humbling and lifting. After our Bible study would end on Thursday nights, the weekend brought me to my knees once again – begging God to show me what our group needed for the next week and asking that He might work among us.
God lovingly chose to impress me with the weight of my task, with the understanding that “not many of us should presume to be teachers,” that I would indeed – and should indeed – be judged more strictly. He mercifully revealed the magnitude of shepherding people – in this case a group of freshmen for whom I would be held accountable to some extent.
So each week, I was humbled before the fact that unless God worked among us, we would be better off taking naps in our dorm rooms. At least then, something worthwhile would be accomplished. But if God did reveal and convict and encourage and move…
So the stakes were high – always a humbling situation.
And each week, I saw God lift me and my partner up “in due time” – just long enough to glorify Him and love our students. A huge part of this was coming to understand what we needed to teach – whether the realization hit a few days before Thursday night – or a few hours before. And other “lifting” happened, too – energy, wisdom, student participation, and everything else. Certainly, we didn’t do everything right. But I can happily recall that God, in His faithfulness, lifted us up just the same.
And then Friday or Saturday or Sunday, when the time came to think about the new week’s task, we were back on our knees, begging God to move among us.
I will always treasure the memory of spending a year walking through that glorious cycle. At times, I’ve forgotten. I don’t want to.
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Today and tomorrow will probably wrap up the start-of-school series on what I learned during my first year of college ministry. But if it’s helpful, you can always point student leaders, adult volunteers, etc., to the whole series anytime at http://exploringcollegeministry.com/category/leadership-nuggets/.
You might have noticed yesterday that my first year of college ministry was pretty demanding – especially because I was taking a full load of college classes at the time. The requirements:
- Leading and teaching at the Thursday night Bible study each week
- One outside fellowship activity with our group each week
- A training meeting each week
- At least one meeting with my co-leader to plan for Thursday night
- Solo preparation
- Planning and participating in occasional “big” activities with our group
- And skipping meetings – except for class or real emergencies – wasn’t an option
Not to mention the concern for the students – serving on their behalf in person, in prayer, and in whatever power the Lord provided.
I learned my very first year that the work of college ministry will often be – and should often be – hard work.
The very nature of most college ministry activity pushes our required toil to the maximum. We are, as I’ve argued, missionaries – with a strategic component and a recruiting component and an outreach component and a contextualization component not shared with most other areas of Christian ministry.
Those required elements for getting most college ministry activity “off the ground” can be a surprise to a student leader, and they can be a surprise to older college ministers, too. But the hard work is so, so worth it. And it’s worth calling students to this kind of hard work. Yes, we must respect their schedules and recognize their limitations. It also might take years to build a culture that supports asking for this level of commitment. (Texas A&M was and is rather freakish in this respect.)
But it’s worth working hard now and aiming for an environment where hard work is the norm – just as it’s already the norm for students serving in secular clubs or fraternities or sports teams or student government or romantic relationships or all the other places students are willing to commit to the toil.
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This “leadership nuggets” series shares methods and ideas I learned in my first year of college ministry.
One thing I learned for certain during my first year of college ministry was that college students can truly function as college ministers.
Why do I know that? Because my own first year (and a half) of college ministry took place while I was still a student!
What I’ve described in this series – small group tips, spiritual lessons, community-building, teaching skills, and more – were things I learned while I was still attending Texas A&M, not as some paid, full-time adult college minister. My particular assignment was a year-long position in a freshman Bible study called Upstream: four required meetings a week, about 40 students connected to our group, weekly teaching, event-planning, and leaders I reported to. And now, after a decade of college ministry, I know that year was no less “the work of college ministry” than what has come since.
A person’s career as a college minister begins when he or she takes on the task of purposeful service to collegians. Student leaders may not be paid, but neither are plenty of other college ministers. They may not have a ministry of hundreds, but neither do most of us.
And student leaders might not have the title of Campus Minister – but certainly by definition, by calling, and by commitment, they can perform the same functions and love the same people. (And, as I’m sharing in this series, they can learn the same lessons as any other college minister, too.)
If student leaders see themselves as college ministers, they’re more likely to sense the weight of their important task. (So those who lead them should let them know!) They participate in everything more “official” college ministers do: Impacting people at a “hinge” moment in their lives, “holding back those staggering toward slaughter,” leading people to Jesus when most of their life is still ahead of them, spurring Christian students to “excel still more,” and duking it out on one of the craziest mission fields available.
This is what we do. We are college ministers.
This doesn’t mean college-age college ministers don’t need to be overseen by others. (Yet another thing I learned in my first year of college ministry!) I’m thankful for both the older students and the paid college staff at my church who commissioned me and led me that first year of ministry. As a student I certainly was not ready to serve as a college minister without major oversight.
But I did serve as a college minister. Little did I know – and little do many student leaders know today – that it was simply Year One of much more college ministry to come. And even if it’s not something a student leader pursues for a lifetime, it’s worth realizing that here, at this moment, they can be college ministers indeed.
Remember, it’s Day 16 of College Union’s 40 Days of Prayer for Campus Ministry!
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This “leadership nuggets” series looks briefly at powerful basics I learned in my first year of campus ministry. Hopefully it’s useful for you OR your student leaders / adult volunteers as a new school year begins (for most of us).
I’m extremely analytical, so I personally really enjoy diving into, discussing, and even debating the finer points of a Scripture text or even just a book. (Remember, my Master’s thesis was 100+ pages on half a verse.) But during my first year of college ministry, I realized that this wasn’t always the best path for teaching students. We had limited time to meet together. And limited attention. And there were a limited number of most important things our group needed to hear.
So it was good for us, as leaders, to determine what we believed our group most needed each week. Though there are always many things worthy of hearty discussion (especially when working through Scripture directly), we needed to pick what we would highlight MOST each week. So if we were looking at Galatians 5, for example, our main emphasis might be freedom (v. 1-11), it might be fruit (v. 22-23), or it could even just be a couple of those fruits. (Certainly, there might be some nights when working verse-by-verse evenly through the chapter was the best choice, too.)
I think I remember making sure we caught the flow of the chapter, even when our main focus was only a portion. But by narrowing our particular emphasis, we had the chance to spend time diving deeply together, with room to discuss and cross-reference and question and wrestle. This was better than simply trying to “make it through the material” and cover everything equally, or taking two hours for teaching time each week.
During that first year, “selective emphasis” was simply something we did, not something we thought about too much. As the years went on, though, I came to grasp this idea better and better. Still, there have been plenty of times when I didn’t whittle down my emphases enough. But from that very first year, I’ve at least kept in mind the fact that a group might sometimes need to process one big thing more than an hour’s worth of little ones.
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What’s your favorite pair of shoes?
[This "leadership nuggets" series gives some basic-but-lasting things I learned in my first year of college ministry. As the school year starts, they might be useful thoughts for ministers, student leaders, and volunteers!]
My first college ministry year involved shepherding a group of around 40 freshmen, with 15 to 30 showing up weekly. And week after week, we took the time to go around the circle – with each student giving their name, major, and an answer to some dumb question. A couple of old favorites are:
- What’s your favorite pair of shoes?
- If you could, what food would you swim in, and in what country? Why?
Every week. Yes, it took time. Yes, it was redundant. But yes, I think it absolutely made a difference.
We also wore nametags every week in that ministry. That helped me as a leader, and I’m sure it helped students, too. It’s always VERY tempting to avoid people just because you can’t remember a name.
So one thing I really learned that year was the value of getting to know each other through basic, recurring, purposeful little things.
It seems to me that brand-new community might be killed while it’s just a seedling, simply because students don’t remember each other’s names, haven’t found topics for conversation, don’t laugh together, or haven’t connected on the casual, fun, normal level. Even if they’ve sat through plenty of Bible studies together. Even if they’ve done big, anonymous activities together.
All because I, the leader, was too cool to go around the circle? All because we were too awesome to write our names on stickers?
[I say a little more about this kind of stuff at this post.]
Know your group; it’s conceivable these things aren’t best for your ministry. But why is it so tempting for us to be snobby? Get-to-know-you games, redundant introductions, and nametags aren’t child’s play. They’re easy and powerful opportunities to nourish community in its infancy. (And if the group is an open group – bringing in new people anytime – then community is always in its infancy for somebody!)
Remember, it’s Day 11 of College Union’s 40 Days of Prayer for Campus Ministry!
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One of the most influential teachings for my ministry came from Gregg Matte at the Breakaway Bible study my freshman year.
[This "leadership nuggets" series started yesterday and looks briefly at powerful basics I learned in my first year of college ministry. Hopefully it's edifying as the school year starts - and it might be useful for other leaders in your ministry, too!]
Gregg noted that people regularly make their spiritual walk simply an overflow of their ministry.
So a daily walk with God comes only as a result of (and only connected to) their ministry opportunities. Ministry becomes the reason for and the topic for all prayer, time in God’s word, and other spiritual disciplines.
Instead, he said, the opposite should be true. Our ministry should always be an overflow of our walk.
I immediately got to apply that truth in my first year of college ministry. So I tried to make sure my prayer times weren’t dedicated simply to praying for my ministry. Scripture couldn’t just be a place to find teaching points. It even meant that if I was going to teach something to my group, I had better be real sure I had let God speak to me on that issue – either in the past, or at the very least in the days or weeks before I would be teaching that subject. If that teaching point wasn’t a part of my own walk – to some extent – how dare I try to “overflow” when I have no “flow” in the first place?
I needed plenty of “extracurricular” relationship with the Lord taking place beyond my ministry – even as intense as the commitment was – which certainly wasn’t easy for a task-oriented fella like myself. But my relationship with God had to overshadow my ministry work. ON PURPOSE. The walk was to be the reservoir; the ministry was to be the overflow.
It might be unwise to mandate absolute rules for ourselves or our student leaders (like “Don’t ever use the ministry text for your personal Quiet Time” or “Spend at least one day each week not thinking about your ministry at all”). But many of us we will need to take measures and make personal commitments along those kinds of lines. Because it’s incredibly easy for ministry activity to creep slowly but surely from being an overflow to being the reservoir.
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As I mentioned yesterday, I’ll be briefly noting fundamental truths and methods I learned in my first year of college ministry – that continue to bear fruit in my ministry today. One or two a day. Quick, because I know these are busy days.
(Remember, if you think it might be helpful, tell your student leaders to tune in for the next week or two. These should be really applicable for them!)
[The whole series can now be seen right here.]
12 seconds
In one of my psychology classes, we learned that teachers need to wait at least 12 seconds for a group to answer a question. Twelve seconds! Now, I don’t have the source for that statistic, but I took his word for it. And when I had the chance to use that “rule” in my first year of ministry, I saw how much it mattered.
Twelve seconds can feel like forever (go ahead, pause 12 seconds right now). But it takes a long time for your group to formulate answers! And the better the answer, the longer it may take! I’ve definitely noticed that I nearly always get a response to questions I ask groups of students – if I’m willing to wait for it.
We should always be okay with silence. But my prof also said it was okay to ask the question and then fill some of the remaining 12 seconds, while people think about answers. My favorite ways to do that are:
- Tell them about how my college professor told them I should wait twelve whole seconds
- Happily let them know that I can outlast them in the silence and that I’m okay with the awkwardness
- Restate the question in a helpful way
partners
In my first year of college ministry, I had a co-leader – and I’ve had the opportunity to have a couple more full ministry partners since then. Though it adds to the messiness, adds a potential for conflict, and adds time to the schedule… it has been SO worth it. Those partners have been some of the biggest blessings in my life; my partner from that first year is even named on the dedication page of my book.
If you don’t have an official ministry partner, you might think about gathering around yourself unofficial partners: collaborators, co-leaders, student leaders, thinkin’-buddies, spouses – including a person or people with viewpoints that will sometimes differ from your own.
Trust God and share some of the planning – if not some of the authority – for your ministry. Or at least consider it!
For those who do have a partner – including student leaders with partners – know that this has the potential for real glory in your life… EVEN if right at this very moment, it’s not the partner you woulda picked. Trust God, and serve that person. Be excited about how God will use them in your life, too. You might just be surprised!
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