Greetings Campus Ministers…my students are heading your way!

Last Saturday I had the privilege of watching a half-dozen students I had only met that morning at 8am dive in and get dirty doing flood relief work here in Franklin, TN (the greater Nashville area). You see they were invited by a friend who only months before had begun attending our youth ministry at the invitation of another friend who no longer attends. Sounds complicated, eh? That’s because it is. Student ministry in the world today [at least in my neck of it] is two things: organic and pragmatic.

Organic…living…breathing. That’s a good thing, right? Sure. We’re talking about people and their lives. There is an ebb and flow to student ministry. Homegrown kids are fewer and farther between. Many of the students we funnel toward college ministries today lack the typical Sunday School, Bible Drill, VBS experiences that typical youth ministries build on. Students don’t participate in student ministry [generally speaking of course] because their parents encourage [read: push] them to do so or because it’s the only hang out atmosphere in town. Students have enough options and for the most part, student ministry can’t [or honestly shouldn’t try] to compete with those environments. Students become part of youth ministries because of relationships. While they may check it out once for a myriad of reasons, they’ll only dive in and stick it out if they have friends. You can create an environment where relationships are forged and strengthened but you can’t make it happen. It’s natural. Relationships…that’s the organic part.

Pragmatic…practical…realistic…utilitarian. These aren’t words typically assumed characteristic of today’s post-modern teen. We spend so much of our generation-gap thinking trying to understand the post-modern relativist that we have to a degree neglected the post-modern realist.  The social theorists forgot to text teens today to tell them that they are “post-modern.”  None of them use that phrase or quite grasp any of its concepts. They are unapologetically empirical. Seeing is believing. They are unwaveringly hopeful. If something is broke, let’s fix it. They want desperately to be part of something, anything that validates the reason they were put on the planet in the first place and regardless of what level of Judeo-Christian rearing they’ve endured, they’ll look for it anywhere! They want life and everything about it to mean something…that’s the pragmatic part.

Amidst the many homes we had the chance to work in last Saturday, we also worked in a small Catholic Chapel. We stumbled upon it when the homeowner we were looking to help next door wasn’t home. One of the girls made the following comment. “How sad! I can’t believe this happened to their church. What if this had been the WareHouse [our church building]? Then we’d be so busy working there, none of us would be able to help out in the community!”  She was the friend who has been coming for several months and on Saturday she invited four more of her friends to help. To her, something was broken and needed attention. A flood happened and people are in need. So let’s help. It doesn’t get more practical than that. It’s like she woke up that morning and decided to do something important…and to invite her friends to come along.  Someone should author a book in student ministry about just that.

While I sometimes imagine collegiate ministry as the greener grass over the proverbial fence, ultimately I’m inclined to view it as not much different from my work with high school students. Organic and pragmatic.  “I’m gonna do something important today and I think I’ll invite my friends to come along!”