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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 wrote Tuesday on the need for us to consider those who have, up until this semester, been a part of our community. Maybe they graduated in the Spring or Summer, or maybe they’re just temporarily gone – on an internship, perhaps, or studying abroad.
If we’re willing to consider doing this – and I beg you to consider doing this – I would also encourage a strategy, like a program or a team, to get this done.
Because while we love to think that our students will receive that kind of encouragement and exhortation “organically,” it’s tough. Honestly, we can’t really expect people thrown into the “real world” (whether permanently or temporarily) for the first time to be good at navigating this, can we? They haven’t had to navigate this world before, so they’re unlikely to seek out all the community they need. And their friends are either in the same boat (if they, too, have left college behind) or those friends don’t know how to deal with people who aren’t still in their world.
And we’d like to think we – their college ministers – will be good – naturally, organically – at contacting those students who have left our community. Chances are, the realities of our local ministry will override the desire to shepherd those away from us.
Unless we plan for it. Unless we plan for helping these students, either directly or by organizing others to do it.
And we can, right?
- We can calendar it.
- We can train students for post-college spirituality before they leave.
- We can train other students to be good friends to those who leave.
- We can help parents who – like their students – are figuring out something new.
- We can organize a student ministry team – for real – meant to help all of this happen better.
What else?
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So in keeping with yesterday’s theme…
How confident are you that your upcoming December graduates will find – and commit well to – a strong community of believers within three months of graduation?
Go ahead – think of someone specific who’s graduating in December (or in May). But not just somebody staying around town. Not even somebody going back to their hometown. Someone going to a new environment altogether, who will have to start pretty much from scratch on the whole “Christian community” thing.
How likely are they – really – to find a solid, strong community? How likely are they to jump right in, plugging in well from the outset?
If this isn’t a strong aspect of how we send them into the world, then what case do we have against parents and youth pastors who don’t prepare students to find solid churches and solid campus ministries when they “release them into the wild” of college?
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This is something I’ve mentioned before, although it bears repeating. And repeating some more. Because it might just be one question that college ministries MOST need to hear.
Are you building students in such a way that they’ll be amazing God-followers in 10 years?
What if this was our key evaluation? What if this question directed nearly everything we did? If this question were to resonate in your brain – day after day, week after week – it would, in all likelihood, affect your campus ministry greatly. It might require some additions; it might change your entire ministry; it might mean different leaders or different events or even drawing fewer students… and better impacting them for the long-run.
If the students who stick with us during college aren’t being impacted for good, if they’re not awesome when they’re 32 – in fact, if they’re not a decade’s worth of more-awesome – then something is wrong with what we’re producing. These are hinge years. They should be changed forever.
It’s not our job – ultimately – to change people. And it’s students’ fault when they fall away or mess up or back out. I know all that.
But we do have a solemn charge to watch over souls today – and the assessment of our charge certainly doesn’t end when they graduate.
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Last night I got to attend an annual event at my church from high school, a sort of “reunion concert” for current and former members of our youth choir. I’m quick to point out: I am no singer; it was a big choir. But it was a really neat part of my life, so the memories were great.
On Saturday, I got to hang out with a girl I’ve known since I was the leader of her freshman Bible study (I was a sophomore at the time). She later went on to be a leader in the same freshman Bible study a couple of years later, and we – as always – had fun reminiscing about those awesome days. I’ve even shared that same bond with people far younger than I am, who ended up leading in that same Bible study eventually, too.
Except for the occasional exception, college ministries don’t seem to do a lot with “tradition” or “nostalgia.” But instituting tradition and celebrating nostalgia can seriously benefit our ministries.
It’s a way to build community, for sure. It’s a way to build reminders – which God can use in people’s lives long past their college years. It can also invigorate current students, as they realize they’re part of something much bigger, much longer-lasting than the current campus ministry. It allows students’ own impact to last long beyond their few years with you. In a way, it adds a true depth to a college ministry that can’t be achieved another way.
If you’re interested in adding a dash of tradition to your college ministry, here are a few ideas to start brainstorming with.
- Celebrate the memories of each semester or year, as that “era” comes to a close. Encourage individual groups – like small group Bible studies – to do the same with their own groups. (Lists of memories make great T-shirts!)
- “Institute” traditions from the teaching points, favorite songs, or inside jokes that naturally arise within the ministry. Purposely use them in a regular way (as long as they’re useful.)
- Construct an ongoing “family tree” of small group leaders, ministry team leaders, or other positions in your ministry, letting new leaders realize the heritage they’re taking part in.
- Have present leaders write encouraging / exhorting notes to those who follow them in those positions.
- Have Seniors speak to the group before graduation each semester.
- Build actual or symbolic “ebenezers” (stones of remembrance) to remember what God taught and/or did in certain seasons of the ministry.
- Write out a history of your college ministry (or have students do it – they might even be able to do it for some school project!). I bet you even find out some exciting new stuff…
- Bring back alumni / former staff to speak to students.
- Hold reunions for alumni.
- Build alumni “clubs” – for encouragement, connection, and even fundraising.
- Get testimonies from alumni of how God used the ministry in their lives. Share some of these with supporters, overseers, and current students.
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I wrote earlier this week on the need to raise up students who will accept and even revel in the unsettled, “sojourny” experience they’ll likely have after college – if indeed they’re open to the preparation and adventure God has for them.
Two helpful thoughts from recent books that could help here:
1. The 10,000 Hour “Rule.” In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell famously presents a notion that to be truly great at something may just require 10,000 hours of work. You can read more about the idea in the book (which is phenomenal, by the way), or catch the Wikipedia take on it in the Outliers article.
And while there’s no sense in applying this sort of thing in a legalistic way, it’s at least a good principle to help our students understand that they’re probably looking at a long time of nose-to-the-grindstone work before things “feel” more “concrete.” (10 years at 20 hours a week would cover that “rule.”)
2. The Dip. Perhaps even more useful, get your students to read Seth Godin’s The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick), or read it yourself and help them understand the principles. (Really, this incredibly quick read could change the way you approach projects within your college ministry. It’s fantastic for us AND our students.)
Like Outliers, this is a secular book, but there still isn’t a better go-to book I’ve found for helping anybody who’s considering undertaking any sort of project.
And here, Seth Godin helpful compares and contrasts the 10,000 Hour Rule with The Dip.
I honestly believe that either or both of these books / ideas could help fuel your preparation for students’ long-term success – including a realistic understanding of the road ahead of them. They don’t replace the biblical wisdom, to be sure, but I do think there’s real wisdom here.
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Ten years ago this month, I began my sojourn of sorts. I’m still very much within that trip, yet to find out where (or when, or if) I’ll “land.”
I had graduated from Texas A&M in the middle of the expected collegiate career, leaving behind what I would later realize was the most flourishing college ministry climate in the country. That last semester was my best semester, and it came on the heels of perhaps the most formative year of my whole life. That last semester, Fall 2000, was the last time life was “normal” or “expected,” you might say, and beyond that it was genuinely fun.
But in January 2001 I followed God up to Abilene, Texas, to minister to college students among three Christian schools out there in West Texas. Five and half hard, interesting, good years were spent in Abilene, filled with seminary papers and paper routes and bookstore-creation and random large road trips that I stumbled upon (little knowing they were only forerunners of much longer treks). Those pictures remind me just how elusive I found stability and normalcy to be.
Then a year in Dallas and another college ministry gig. Abilene had always felt “sojourny”; Dallas seemed like it might provide a chance to land. But that comfort didn’t last long.
God adjusted my call after that year to serving the entire field of college ministry, and off I went on a yearlong road trip to 44 states, Mexico, and Canada by accident. That amazing year has been followed by two-and-a-half more, happily aiming to lay down my life for our cause among the campus tribes.
For someone like me – not your natural adventure-seeker – this decade without “my ducks in a row” isn’t the most comfortable proposition, even in hindsight. But God has stretched me and taught me to enjoy this wandering. Truly. Usually.
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A year or two after I graduated from college, I happened to visit my alma mater and sit in on a church’s weekend conference for college students.
At one point, the speaker shared something that (I’m sure) those students and (I know) one semi-recent college grad didn’t want to hear. He told us we shouldn’t assume that the entire span of God’s preparation will be contained in the four or five years of college. Instead, he said, God often uses ten years or more .
Ten years of preparation. Ten years of sharpening. Ten years of becoming useful for a person’s major life purpose.
The point came home (at least to me); we shouldn’t assume we’ll step from graduation stage to centerstage. In fact, we might find ourselves seemingly sojourning in this sense for many years after the glories of our college years fade.
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I celebrate these past ten years, and I’m happy to share it with you guys. But my main reason for writing this is to encourage us to remember that we’re raising up wanderers. Our strong, mature, awesome students may very well spend the next several years still preparing to be used in the ways God wants to use them.
And of the biggest temptations they’ll face is the temptation to choose stability over sojourn.
Though each person’s spirituality certainly isn’t evaluated by just how “awkward” his or her adventure happens to be, I pray we’re raising up lots of students who are at least willing to wander, and to wander well.
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I noted yesterday one of the major resources we have for determining how best to grow the college students we’ve been called to shepherd. Those resources are the Singles Ministers, Young Adult Ministers, and really anybody else who works somewhat up-close with post-collegians.
(Add this area to the list of research projects somebody needs to pursue for our field of ministry. But for now, you’ve got plenty of people in your town you could talk to!)
While I would urge us to “go to the source” and observe our students’ future through the eyes of these ministers, I figured it might be edifying to note what I’ve observed myself. ‘Cause I am indeed a “single young adult,” and I’m involved in a church with a pretty thriving young adult crowd. So after spending a Labor Day retreat with 4 or 500 fellow young adults, this topic is rather on my mind.
What do we as college ministers need to do better to prepare students for their young adult lives?
Again, to be clear, I’m just pondering this one. This is not an area of particular expertise (which is why we need to consult those who actually work in this area!). But I was interested to see the list I’d come up with, and I’m interested to see if you – or even your young adult minister buddies – might have anything to add.
Here are some areas that may deserve a little more suitcase-packing:
- understanding the power of intimate Christian community and getting over the roadblocks to participating in it
- being great in the basics of the Christian walk
- watching out for the legalism and Gnosticism-lite that descends on college students and young adults alike
- learning and using spiritual disciplines (of various sorts)
- learning and using their personal spiritual gifts (of various sorts)
- the wonders of intergenerational connections
- having a battle-plan for the post-graduation disillusionment & other difficulties
- biblical literacy
- reading through the entire Bible by the time they’ve finished college
- shining the light of what God’s doing in their lives – both among non-Christians and among Christians
- knowing that God is calling them into a great, personal, impactful adventure…
- …but realizing that they were never, ever meant to “choose their own adventure” based simply on passions, hopes, desires, or circumstances
- understanding church
- finding a church
- singleness and its glorious opportunities
- servanthood and its glorious opportunities
- doing something cross-cultural (or even outside the country) by the time they graduate
- a realistic understanding of the various waits, slowdowns, and other patience-trying years that may await them in their 20s and 30s
- glorifying God via their vocations
- the amazing opportunity to give away much of what they earn, and everything else that it can mean to glorify God with finances
This honestly came off the top of my head, but it was interesting to ponder. What might you add? What do we college ministers need to be better about packing in our students’ post-graduation suitcases?
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A while back, I had the opportunity to attend a panel discussion by leaders in the field of Youth Ministry at a seminary. The panel was very well attended and really informative… plus, it even showcased an impromptu debate between two really well known communicators about the value of home schooling.
There was space for Q&A, and I got to head to the front and ask a pretty simple question, along the lines of, “In what ways have you been able to get wisdom from college ministers about how high school students should be trained?”
Crickets would have chirped, had there been crickets in the room. Tumbleweeds would have tumbled, too (it was Texas, after all). They clearly had nothing to offer; my question was met with an agreeable response: “That’s a great question, but we really haven’t had opportunity to look at that,” basically.
I think most (or all) of those reading this would agree: Youth Ministers absolutely must seek the thoughts of College Ministers as they strategize the shepherding of their students. If those on the receiving end aren’t consulted about what students will need, what they generally seem to be missing when they get out of youth group, and the general climate into which they’re being thrown, then aren’t Youth Ministers missing an enormous opportunity for wisdom?
Of course they are.
But that’s not what this blog post is about.
Because if you agree with me… and I kinda bet you do… then there’s one more question that needs to be asked: When’s the last time you (as a College Minister) talked with a Young Adult Minister, a Singles Minister, a Young Marrieds Minister, a Premarital Counselor, or any other adult-area minster-type about
what young adults will need,
what they generally seem to be missing when they get out of college,
and the general climate into which they’re being thrown?
You can at least start with the locals, right? Couldn’t you grab coffee this week with somebody on a local church staff?
Tomorrow, I’ll post some thoughts after spending a whole weekend with the (fellow) young adults at my church. [Here's that post!] But don’t wait for me – there’s better wisdom from the people who actually serve full-time in ministering to the future versions of your present college students!
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If you’re new to the blog, you’ll notice that while I’m on a big Road Trip, I happily springboard from what I’m learning along the way. Not every day – but plenty. Today is one such day.
Occasionally I run across “Special Topics” connected to the world of college ministry which, if addressed, could make a huge impact on our field. And of course, anything that impacts our field impacts the whole world.
Because our field, the field (or “profession” or “vocation”) of college ministry impacts the whole world. (That goes without saying, right?)
Here are two such field-changing, world-changing areas:
1. Helping churches see the immediate usefulness of the “products” we’re turning out.
Ryan Lindsey, Christian Challenge director at CSU-Pueblo, got me thinking about this yesterday. He described actually approaching local pastors and explaining to them something along the lines of,
Since these young adults served on my ministry team, they’ve been well-trained in several key tasks. Now that they’ve graduated college and are in your church, please don’t simply assume you should stick them in the Youth department or Childrens’ ministry, or wait ’til they have gray hair to let them serve as Deacons. They have done solid, committed ministry work… they’ll be disillusioned quickly if you now ask them simply to sit in a pew ’til they’re 35.
If that idea somehow spread like wildfire among the churches of our country, then (1) they would more highly value our work, (2) the Transition Out of students to the “real world” would go better, and (3) the number of younger leaders in our churches would increase drastically, which leads to all sorts of other benefits!
2. Building a better understanding of what Christian Unity means within the campus ministry community on a given campus.
As I discussed some at the Blogference and as I’ve discussed not once but three times with college ministers I’ve met in the last two days, a practical understanding of unity-among-college-ministries largely alludes us. From what I’ve seen, “overshooting” or “undershooting” on this score is far more prevalent than finding unity in ways that actually turn out well. If someone did the hard work of investigating that problem, researching the highs and lows of individual campus histories in that regard, or gathering data from those who have learned in similar contexts (foreign missions, for example)… any of those steps would drastically impact our field.
Any takers? Anybody want to write a paper, start a project, or otherwise change the world in one of these ways?
Posted from the Lees’ house (my host home for the Ascent Conference), Longmont, CO
Road Trip 14 recap, Day 2
new states: Colorado (#3)
new campuses: Colorado State University – Pueblo (#4), Air Force Academy (#5)
yesterday: great visits to the above campuses, as well as a personal tour of the Navigators HQ; then night one of the Ascent Conference for (mostly) church-based college ministers
today: all day at the Ascent Conference!
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