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.
I started this blog — in it’s original form — three years ago.
On January 11, 2011 I wrote I post entitled Is Sex Before Marriage Really A Sin? for the 1st Annual Sex & the Soul Blogathon.
Since that post went live, it has far and away received the most traffic on my site — accounting for 13,000 views.
Daily — DAILY — I’ll get numerous visits to my blog from people who have used the following terms in search engine searches:
Yesterday was our day of campus-wide leadership training.
It’s a time when we bring together all of the students leaders of varying student groups across campus for some shared training and team building.
For the day, we set aside the planning and preparation for our specific areas to recognize that we — as leaders — are not alone on campus. There are others who aspire to similar heights, and face many of the same challenges that we do.
From year to year it’s never quite the same — and I think this year might have been one of our best efforts!
Personally, I had the chance to co-present to our student leadership population of 350+ about the lies many leaders believe. Many of these lies were identified by different student leaders who have seen them — in some shape or fashion — played on within the student leadership culture on our campus.
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.
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.
“What are your plans now?” This question tortures most soon-to-be college graduates.
High School Seniors are barraged as well, “Where are you going to college?” They are asked over and over again.
I hear it when my friends ask, “When are you getting back into your Doctor of Ministry program?”
Even my seven-year old twins aren’t immune to our culture’s obsession with the future. “What grade will you be in next year?” What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Truly, middle class North Americans love planning for the future. Perhaps no sub-culture is more future-oriented than that of higher education. Faculty and staff are planning for their upcoming semester or their tenure applications, students are planning for the next week, for the rest of the semester, for next semester, for after graduation, etc.
[This is an excerpt from an article I wrote for Threads Media on the impact of the hook-up culture.]
The hookup culture — this “no strings attached” paradigm toward casual sexual encounters — has become the new normal among many Christian collegiates in America. According to Relevant magazine, “Eighty percent of young, unmarried Christians have had sex. Two-thirds have been sexually active in the last year. Even though, according to a recent Gallup poll, 76 percent of evangelicals believe sex outside of marriage is morally wrong.”1
Yes, college students are having sex at alarmingly high rates, but truth be told, everyone is not doing it. One out of five young Christians have never had sex. One out of three haven’t had sex in the past year. If you haven’t had sex … you’re not alone. If you have, and you’re ready for a fresh start, now’s the time!
How big of an issue is cheating for your students?
Now let me rephrase that — how many of your students would say that cheating is a big deal?
In a culture that esteems success and achievement, while having little to say about character and integrity, some of the statistics featured in the infographic below may not be all that surprising.
And although this infographic focuses on the (relatively small) differences between cheating that occurs in online classes vs. on campus classrooms, without any regard for religious or moral underpinnings, we must believe that the students in our ministries fit all-to-comfortably within these statistics.
As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I’ve got a second book in the works…
The first book is geared towards Mentors — really anyone who might speak into the lives of college students (including, but not limited to: parents, pastors, professors, coaches, directors, et al). I hope it will serve as a guide for having important and timely conversations with students during their formative college years.
The second book will be geared towards college students and will examine some of the things that are literally “killing their souls.”
I ran across this collection of statistics and wanted to make sure I shared with you — in case you hadn’t run across it in your own online reading.
There’s a lot here.
And the good folks at Gallup did a great job of covering a broad range of “moral” topics.
What we don’t know about those who were polled for this data is what religious affiliation (if any) the respondents claim. Likely, it’s a pretty accurate cross-section of the American population, and therefore, it would be safe to say that these are the dominant “beliefs” of American culture.