But if someone treated generational guidelines with slavish devotion, carrying them out the same for each individual person, they would indeed be breaking #7. As a group, though, any audience of Millennials would generally skew toward the characteristics he’s described.

Isn’t this exactly what the list is doing? Here are twenty standard ways to apply and reach out to this generation? :)

I wanted to add to Benson’s responses a little and share from my experience. Hope this helps you. My ministry is #3 on the list above. I serve mostly at SMU in a church-based college ministry role and have been here a year and a half.

As Benson described, when we talked last Spring I had come to the realization that SMU has many good ministries and I wasn’t sure my place. Our ministry was small and graduating 3/4 of our students. All reasons for discouragement or questioning my place in ministry at SMU. But at the same time, I saw a campus that while heavily saturated with ministries, still was over 90% unreached (not hard numbers but adding up attendance of weekly large group meetings). If a student was looking for a mid-week large group with teaching and singing and announcements, they had many varieties to choose from. So as much as the “Sing and Speak” large group gathering is a college ministry staple and an unquestioned first step in establishing a ministry, we don’t do one and have no plans for one.

We are still figuring out what it looks like and how it works to have a de-centralized ministry but that is what we are aiming for. In other words, I don’t expect that we will ever gather all our students together at one time. Because I hope many of these students may not realize they are “in” a campus ministry. They may know myself or a student we’re mentoring. They may come with others from other “pods” to serve the campus or community, but it will not feel like a traditional campus ministry where everyone meets in the Union on Tuesdays at 8 pm.

I’ll be a little more specific with our strategy (hope this helps). Some of our potential “pods” or “niches” are Greek houses, dorms, student groups, or a specific nationality of international students. We actually have a “base” pod too. In essence it’s a more traditional looking college ministry in a lot of ways, but our goal is to keep this always smaller and leaner (less programs) so that our leaders are really being trained not to run the ministry so much as be sent out to start pods in the places on campus they have relationships.

So the pods could be nothing more than a student in a club who decides to intentionally invest time in relationships there and prayer specifically for them. Maybe from this a Bible study starts with a few students over time.

Right now, any activity here is staff-led. We are truly only getting this ball rolling. I think it will take 2 years on this vision before it will really take shape and by year 3 hopefully students are starting pods. I actually want to start a program basically to train and support students for this goal (including a small stipend and ministry expenses). We think we can have a greater impact on our campuses this way rather than by following a more traditional model.

I know many ministries are already doing things like this (I went to school at UT-Austin and saw many ministries approach the campus as a large collection of “people-groups”–a missiological approach to college ministry). I think Steve Lutz’s new book “College Ministry in a Post-Christian Culture” talks about this as well.

I also want to say that I think other ministries keep a more traditional structure and do what I described as an extension of it.

Ok, I’ve already written too much. Really grateful for Benson’s blog and his efforts to create conversations like this one (and for our strategy session last Spring).

But I’ve definitely been a champion of collaboration throughout the years – even in that post you quoted from. In fact, I’d suggest that while looking at only 10-20 other ministries could definitely be great for the early stages (especially if most of them are from outside our own organization or denomination), but hopefully any ministry would continue to look at more ministries each year.

It would also be vital within early collaboration that each of those consulted ministries fill us in on their own mission fields (and not just their methods), because a practice isn’t “a good method” because God uses it somewhere, a practice is good because it’s a best fit for that particular context. Collaboration without context seems more than a little careless.

But I’d just argue that better college ministries will arise when we place a major primacy on learning the mission field. How else does a missionary know what to aim for, what God’s version of “success” is for that campus, and even what questions to focus on when he collaborates? If I want to disciple someone personally, I’d always want to choose the methods, the timing, the structure, and any materials based on what the student needs – so while (of course) I’ll be asking people for ideas of “great discipleship materials,” woe to me if I choose materials before getting to know the student!

I’d say the more we treat college ministry like that, the better. I was heavily impacted in my thinking here by Eugene Peterson’s Under the Unpredictable Plant, and I can’t encourage college ministers enough to read it and share it.

Of course, collaboration can help with even the original process of decoding a campus – it helps us consider broader and broader ideas for what we might want to do. And then once you know what you’re aiming for and have discerned the general (and some specific) structures that will reach a campus best, you can go about the task of collaborating with gusto – like you said, it will certainly accelerate the process by helping do those methods you’ve decided to do really, really well.

One last thought: For some of us with established ministries, it’s hard to swallow the idea that we could have started better or could, even now, become more contextual – especially if we’ve seen God bring AMAZING fruit. But I believe many of us would argue that any NEW ministry to campus would work this exact way! We’d encourage them to work slowly, to get to know the mission field well, and to discern very wisely how that ministry can best impact (or even if they’re needed here at all!). Some present college ministries will see their impact shrink over the next five years because some well-meaning but hard-charging national organization (or big local church) will plant first and ask questions later. And because they haven’t learned the context well before planting, it’s impossible for them even to realize the damage they’ll cause (even while they’re also seeing cool fruit).

But my argument isn’t fundamentally about avoiding a “basic building block” mentality so we avoid damaging the mission field (though that does happen plenty). It’s about building college ministries that radically impact in bigger and stronger ways than we’ve ever seen before. Campuses are different enough from each other that template-based ministry just doesn’t make sense.