Missio Dei Suburbia

Making Choices: Campus Ministry or the Local Church

JD Greear lays out a very helpful path for college students trying to figure out whether to focus their time and energy on campus ministry or the local church:

Some students will, from the beginning, know they want to minister to kids, seniors, the poor, etc., and that being involved in the ministries of their church will be a better fit for that. That should not be discouraged or looked down upon! On the other hand, some students are designed and called by God to focus more of their ministry on their peers. They may always keep their Bible study and ministry focus on campus and this is fine as well. This is how i was: not only for all my years of college, but several years afterward as well, I led Bible studies and ministry on campus. Students should be given freedom to explore their ministry callings and plug into the ministries that best fit them.

Read the rest of the post here.

On Campus: Working Together, Jesus and the Gospel, 6 Essentials

Benson Hines begins a series on different perspectives related to campus ministry, leading off with a discussion about partnership and independence among campus ministries.

Scot McKnight writes:

Emerging adults (those between 18 and 30) form a generation that is largely insensitive to the potency of God's holiness, and are therefore insensitive to the magnificence of his grace, the shocking nature of his love, and that gratitude forms the core of the Christian life. Some today complain about these matters. But I doubt very much that ramping up moral exhortations and warning about an endless hell are the proper places to begin with emerging adults. Paul was sensitive to his audience; we need to be as well.

The entire article can be found here.

Justin Holcomb lays out six essentials for campus ministry:

1. Don't confuse the gospel with religion;
2. Learn about sexual assault;
3. Teach students how to read and interpret the Bible for themselves;
4. Be prepared to comfort students because of divorce and death;
5. Study apologetics;
6. Be prepared to counsel students about what they're really facing.

On Campus - Leadership Nuggets

Benson Hines has put together a list of 'leadership nuggets' based on what he learned and experienced during his first year working in campus ministry. Definitely worth a look if your mission is on campus - as ministry staff or a student.

Dance Steps

I've been heavily involved in or around campus ministries since 1993 - Arsenio Hall was still on TV and Beavis and Butthead were a cultural phenomenon. So I've seen a few things change since then - but one thing that hasn't changed is the annual tension that flares up between churches and campus ministries in university settings as a new semester begins.

Last month, Steve Lutz laid out the primary issues that feed this tension:

• Are church and parachurch partners, or should they have “sphere sovereignty”?
• Regarding parachurch, is there something inherently illegitimate about its existence?
• Regarding church, should it defer to parachurch’s unique calling and equipping for on-campus ministry?
• How can the local church most effectively serve and reach out to students?
• How actively should parachurch ministries be making local church involvement a priority?
• In the age of house churches, what IS a church, anyway?

Steve's entire post on ecclesiology is helpful - and at the end he lays out this perspective: A missional campus ministry approach utilizes the strengths of parachurch ministries to empower the local church to take its place on the missional edge.

There are two things that keep this kind of partnership from happening:

• Churches who insist on creating a rhythm of life for students that consistently pulls them off of the campus and out of their mission.
• Campus ministries who insist they have the same authority in the lives of students as the local church.

One way forward - and we're seeing this happen through our relationship with Campus Outreach at The University of Georgia - looks like this:

• Churches who encourage and equip campus ministries to do what they do best - incarnating gospel, community and mission in a context where most people in a church do not fit and honestly don't belong (I'm talking to you, Mr. I'm-45-and-wear-my-Auburn-War-Tigers-jersey-every-Saturday).
• Campus ministries who structure their missional rhythms to move students into the life of the local church. Figure out how the church trying to grow students and grace and don't hamstring the church by scheduling events that overlap with those events (NOTE: it helps if churches have a clear and simple pathway of corporate discipleship for students).

I love being able to encourage and equip the men and women who have shaped their entire lives around the mission of Jesus on campus. And as we continually wrap our collective gray matter around these central themes of gospel, community and mission, we're finding a great deal of overlap and the opportunity to give up control and free up students to live out a healthy pattern of life involved in both the local church and the particular work of campus ministry.

In the end, students belong neither to the church nor campus ministry XYZ. They belong to Jesus - and Jesus loves the local church and the local church can join him in his mission on the university campus by raising up and releasing missional tribes on campus.

It's all about learning to dance, boys and girls.

Reaching College Tribes Around Athens

Just finished Benson Hines' Reaching The College Tribes - if you care about college students, the contemporary university culture, and/or mission(s) then you should check it out (for free) here.

One of the concepts that I found most helpful in the book is the idea of Aggressive Progress - 'a lifetime of strategic modifications in response to changing students, a changing campus, a growing understanding of the tribe, and God's work within the ministry and its leaders' (52). Such progress isn't measured by numeric growth per se, choosing instead to take a much broader view of the ever-expanding work of God, including:

• impacting students more deeply
• becoming a healthier ministry
• more creatively impacting the campus
• better reaching the entire mission field (including under‐reached student groups, faculty, administration members, and even the surrounding community)
• better preparing students for life after college
• better helping freshmen transition into college
• better complementing and cooperating with other campus ministries

In addition, the book furthered some thoughts/ideas/dreams I've had about missional ministry to students in and around Athens:

• Capturing and casting a regional vision that includes UGA but also includes other campuses such as Gainesville State College in Watkinsville (more than 2,300 students)
• Collaborative network among existing campus ministries and churches that serve the campus
• Focus on contextualized, incarnational mission
• Framed by helping students transition into school and out into post-grad life
• Cutting edge, creative, communal, gospel-saturated
• Emphasizing a patient yet persistent process of holistic spiritual formation

Now comes the fun part - prayer and conversations to shape and move this thing forward.

Engaging the University

Very helpful post by John Stackhouse on how the church - and by extension, campus ministries - should seek to engage students on the university campus.

From the conclusion:

Much campus ministry over the last century has merely been an extension the local church work of basic disciple-making onto a nearby campus. Should it continue? Perhaps it should, especially with international students and others who might need extra time to integrate into local churches. But to offer a “spiritual kindergarten,” I suggest, is not the central mission of campus ministry. It is the main responsibility of the local church, and campus ministries instead should do what they are peculiarly situated and, I trust, equipped to do.

Evangelism on campus? Of course that should continue. That’s “on the job evangelism,” which every Christian ought to do. And with a special “people group” in view—namely, university students and professors—one can tailor apologetical and evangelistic initiatives to their distinctive needs. When people do respond positively to such initiatives, then campus ministries must connect them with local churches and their helpful programs in basic Christian life: with Alpha programs, small groups, Sunday School classes, and the like.

Without this clear sense of what they are to do versus what the local church is to do, campus ministries neglect their particular work. Thus they compound the problem by competing with local churches: “Why even go to a local church? It’s so much less interesting than this student group”—which in the nature of the case is tailored to and includes only this nicely homogeneous demographic! Thus campus ministries in effect train students in a “non-local-church” paradigm, which devastates them upon graduation as they must, in fact, make their way into local churches or flounder alone.

I'm thankful for the students and the campus ministries we're connected to on the University of Georgia campus. We're engaged in some really fruitful discussion about how the church can partner with these ministries to help students grow and thrive as missionaries to the campus, living in community, empowered by the gospel.

Audio: College Students and the Local Church

Mark Dever interviews Aaron Messner, chaplain of Covenant College, about the role of the local church in discipling college and university students.

How'd All These Students Get Here?

This article by Stetzer and Jason Hayes pretty much sums up what we hear from the 18-25 year olds that are connecting with us at Christ Church. What we say:

• Embraces the reality of doubts and struggles;
• Owns up to our individual and collective junk;
• Leaves us with great hope in Jesus.

There are other reasons why people are driving 20+ minutes and passing by lots of other churches on Sundays but this one's the most counterintuitive and most consistent response we hear from students and other men and women in their 20s.

Of College Students and the Local Church

I've had several people ask me about our philosophy about the role of college students in the local church. Here's the short version:

• Students need to be involved in a multi-generational church, not just a campus ministry - and by involved, I mean they should plug into the local church as a member/owner/partner.
• Because the church is just as much a missional community as it is a worshiping and caring community, students should be freed up to remain relationally active on campus. While affirming the critical importance of worship gatherings and community groups, we want to minimize the amount of time we're pulling students off of the campus in order to get them 'to church.'
• We want to equip students to live out 'the gospel of the kingdom' - to join Jesus in his mission of making God known by putting broken people and a broken world back together.
• We want to encourage students to take advantage of opportunities to engage in God's mission in ways that will become more difficult once they graduate.

We're All Selfish Until Jesus Changes Us

The new issue of Relevant Magazine showed up in my mailbox today - the same mailbox with the holes in the roof that makes things soggy on rainy days - and their cover story is entitled, 'Laying it Down: Learning to Live with Less in a Culture of Excess.' The article's pretty well written - Don Miller, Shane Clairborne and Tony Campolo get alot of airplay and Miller and Clairborne painted a particularly biblical and gospel-centered perspective on issues surrounding money and finances in our consumer-glutted culture.

I'm not going to recap the article (and its not up on the Relevant website) but it begins by talking about the backlash that Bono and his RED campaign has received after spending hundreds of millions in marketing while bringing in less than $20 in profits (for more on this, check out the very good article/blog post by Ryan Anderson over at First Things entitled, 'Bono Still Hasn't Found What He's Looking For'). The criticism is that for all of the good intended by the RED campaign, the reality is that it pandered more to our consumerism than it did to cut against it. A pragmatist might be content with this approach and proclaim that the end justifies the means - but what does it say when the end isn't reached. Why are such obvious needs like the AIDS crisis in Africa seemingly ignored in terms of money and resources flowing out of areas of affluence?

Would it surprise us that the answer comes down to the gospel? The apostle Paul found himself in a similar situation as the U2 frontman - trying to connect the resources of one group to the needs of another. Yet rather than appeal to their conscience or will via emotionally manipulative stories or shaming them into giving by appealing to statistics about consumption and waste, Paul takes a different approach. In 2 Corinthians 8:9 he tells the people of this church  to remember 'the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.' He is not calling them to be nice or to think about the starving children in Jerusalem - he simply says, 'Remember what Jesus has done for you.' Paul's conviction was that true philanthropy and mercy takes place when the earth-shattering love of Christ becomes real and satisfying.

Rodney Stark writes this in Cities of God:

In a letter to a prominent pagan priest, [Roman Emperor] Julian wrote: I think that when the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the [pagan] priests, the impious Galileans [Christians] obvserved this and devoted themselves to benevolence...[They] support not only their poor but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.' But his challenge to the temples to match Christian benevolence asked the impossible. Paganism was utterly incapable of generating the commitment needed to motivate such behavior (emphasis mine). Not only were many of its gods and goddesses of dubious character, but they offered nothing that could motivate humans to go beyond self-interested acts of propitiation (emphasis mine) (page 31).

As our church struggles financially as we continue to find ourselves within this community, we're convinced that guilt and focusing on people's wills (Just Do It!) will not bring about the total transformation that God has planned and that we so desperately need.