It’s October!
Fall is in the air — and mid-terms are just around the corner.
I hope that the start to your new year has been a good one; and that your finding your way into a healthy and sustainable pace for the rest of your year.
Remember, ministry is a marathon — and not a sprint.
Now, on to this month’s Top 10 most viewed posts at FaithONCampus.com!
We had a visitor on campus last week — of the “street preacher” variety.
He stood at the edge of campus (where it’s legal for him to be), and shouted at students as the passed by, that they were going to hell — for a whole host of reasons.
Have you experienced this where you serve? I imagine some have.
It’s troubling on a number of levels.
How big is the “front porch” of your ministry?
It’s another way of asking if your ministry creates space for students to belong — before they believe.
If the house, in this metaphor, represents the “inside” of your ministry — the place where believers go to be fed and nurtured spiritually — then the front porch represents an important place of gathering that is both inviting and inclusive.
And although we’d all like to believe that our ministries do, in fact, offer this… How do you know for sure?
Two months from today, most of our students will have their very first chance to vote in a Presidential election.
This is one of many “firsts” that they’ll have the chance to experience while on campus — away from home, and away from those who have been their most trusted voices and advisers for much of their lives.
With such a big decision looming, who will step in and offer some assistance in the decision-making process?
Happy Labor Day!
For most of us — a new academic year is now well underway.
For some of us — it’s just about to begin.
Either way — I hope that this extended weekend serves as a great chance for you to refuel and recharge as we prepare to push on into a fall of ministry with college students.
Below are the Top 10 most viewed posts from the month of August!
As a way of kicking off my 16th year of ministry with college students (which also marks 20 years since I entered the college world as a freshman myself — Biology major to boot), I thought I’d share 15 of the most important lessons I’ve learned about ministry with college students.
I know that this list could be much longer, but these are some of the things that have shaped my life and ministry the most over the course of the last 15 years — and served to shape my current trajectory.
My guess is that most of these things will not be new to you — but hopefully seeing them all in one place (as a new year begins) will serve to encourage, inspire, or challenge you as you launch out in service of college students — for the glory of God.
So here goes:
They’re here, but are we ready for them?
And what I mean by “ready” is — have we sufficiently done our homework in order to know who, exactly, the students that make up the Class of 2016 are?
If your answer to that question is “no,” — know that you’re not alone.
And thankfully there’s a resource that can help to quickly get us up to speed on this year’s incoming class of college students.
It’s known as The Mindset List and is put out yearly by Beloit College.
A College Student, A Homeless Man, And A Rabbi Walk Into A Coffee Shop.
That may sound like the opening line of a bad joke, but it actually describes an experiment I started last semester at the University of Delaware.
A couple volunteers and I were discussing the example we have in Jesus and his disciples, who were intentional about sharing their faith with friends “friendship evangelism” and with strangers “initiative evangelism”. When we scrolled through our phone contacts to count how many friends we actually had who weren’t Christians, we realized something had to change.
I’ve been asked to contribute a few suggestions for resources that can be used to equip those who do campus ministry so that we might do the job well, insightfully, profoundly.
I love that simple verse in 1 Chronicles 12:32 that names the reputation of the “sons of Issachar” who “understood the times and knew what God’s people should do.”
Reading widely can help us become Issacharian, helping us understand our context and how best to serve.
About 925,000 people go to bed hungry every night. Food insecurity plagues one in seven people on the planet. Around 25,000 people die every twenty-four hours from hunger or hunger related disease – more than those who succumb to malaria, TB and AIDS combined. Most of them are children – ten children die every minute.
What makes these statistics not only staggering but sinful are these two additional facts. There is enough food produced for each person on the planet to consume 4.3 pounds of food per day – that’s equivalent to seventeen quarter pounders. Even college students don’t eat that much food! And this: nearly 3 trillion pounds of food goes to waste every year.