Initial Qualifications and Continuities

“Nothing ages so quickly as yesterday’s vision of the future” quipped Richard Corliss, film editor for TIME. And he’s right. Just when we think we have a fair view of what the future holds, something unexpected and unforeseen arises. Our projections of the future tend to reveal more about our present than they tell us about what is to come. And despite changes, the central aims of campus ministry will remain the same: to point others to Jesus and model a life of following him; to facilitate relationships of authenticity and accountability; to mentor others in seeking the Kingdom through all their activities and learning the discipline of membership in Christ’s body. Still, imagining the future of campus ministry may be a worthwhile exercise – provided we are ready to laugh at ourselves.

College students are changing as are the institutions that serve them. The changes will make themselves felt in large and small ways in campus ministry over the next ten years. This piece will take a look in four different directions to anticipate what some of these changes might be.

Changing Demographics: With whom will campus ministers work?

29-year-old Latinas in the Southwest. Or at least a growing number of students will look this way. Not that sophomore males in Boston will suddenly morph into J-Lo (dream on) but shifting demographics do suggest that while the Northeast experiences a decrease in the number of high school graduates and college students, the Southwest is experiencing a boom in college enrollment. Currently, whites make up about two-thirds of post-secondary enrollment, but the growing edge has a distinct Latin feel: the Census Bureau projects that the Hispanic population will rise from 22.5 million in 1990 to just under 90 million by 2050 – the vast majority of this growth in the desert states. (U.S. Census Bureau, 2007. American Fact Finder) Of this increase, it is those of the female persuasion that are most interested in pursuing higher education.

More than half of college students will attend community colleges and the average age of those attending college will increase. Former ‘non-traditional’ students – 26 to 30somethings who attend part-time and divide attention between work, family and study, will become the new normal.

Changing Institutions: Who will support campus ministers?

Over the next 10 years, economic pressures will impact the institutions that employ and support campus ministers, changing the way campus ministry is done.

As state funding for public institutions decreases, many schools, adjusting to the changing interests and needs of their changing student bodies, will cut back on student services, including religious programming and campus chaplains. My guess is that while career services and academic support offices will receive increased funding, chaplaincy and ministry offices will have to make due with less – even in the face of a growing acknowledgement of the role of spirituality in personal growth. Likewise, increasing costs and a difficult development environment will lead established private institutions to bolster enrollments through non-traditional degree programs while keeping level – or decreasing – funding for enrichment programming. Denominationally affiliated schools, too, will feel the pinch as decreased church membership translates to reduced support for some or all of their campuses. It is likely that the next ten years will see the close of some small private schools. There will, of course, be those private schools that see an infusion of cash in the form of large gifts as the new rich give to their Alma Matters or pet projects.

Para-church organizations (Intervarsity, navigators, CCO, Campus Crusade and the like) will experience some growth in their ranks – many being second and third career folks interested in serving the next generation – but a significant number of these new ministers will struggle to raise full support. As the gap between the rich and poor deepens, it will be easier to fund staff positions at prestigious private schools and large research universities with high wage-earning graduates, than at community colleges and smaller public schools. To those who have, more will be given; and those who have little, even what they have will be taken away!

On another note, local congregations will become a hub of ministry to emerging adults. Churches headed by pastors in their late 20’s and early 30’s leading congregations of 19-29 year-olds will become more common as ‘emergent adult’ ministry replaces ‘campus ministry’.

Internal landscapes

An increasing number of college students will need help with detoxification, disconnection and integration. Detoxification: A steady diet of pop entertainment will increase the need for emerging adults to purge their minds. Imagine being raised by Tina Faye and Neil Patrick Harris. As entertainment and advertising converge with ‘smart,’ individualized marketing stratagems, for many young it will become increasingly easy to avoid the ‘world as it is’ for the ‘world-as-I-like-it’ and coming generations of college students will need greater assistance in recovering from having normative reality defined by what they consume. St. Anthony went to the desert because of the distractions in his 3rd century, rural, North African town; what type of retreat will be necessary for us to hear more clearly the call of the Spirit?

Disconnection: It is not only what is consumed that has impact, but how it is consumed. A recent study out of Stanford University suggest that young people who make a habit of multitasking with digital media – who experience what Linda Stone, a former Microsoft exec calls ‘continuous partial attention’ – have a decreased ability for sustained, ‘top down’ thinking – the kind necessary for solving difficult problems and critical reflection on one’s life. Consciousness is shaped by what we attend to; brains are shaped by how we attend. The work of MIT professor Sherry Turkle is well worth paying attention to on how technology impacts psycho-social relationships (See her 2011 Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other).

Integration: Students have always needed help in seeing the big picture and connecting the dots between what’s true, who they are and how they live their lives; this need will only increase. Navigating one’s way towards personal integrity and responsible adulthood will be complicated by changing social realities: among them decades of exposure of sexual expression without personal intimacy; non-traditional family systems; growing global inequalities (the world is not as flat as Thomas Friedman seems to think it is); the advent of personal pharmaceutical enhancements & computers that are smarter than us; the rise of non-liberal democracies and the spread of Islam, to name a few.

The Mirror

We professional disciple-makers have a habit of attracting others who look a lot like us, and making them more so. For good or for ill, those doing campus ministry ten years from now are likely to imitate those who are doing it now. Are you modeling just social relationships in your quest after righteousness? Affection-shaping Spiritual disciplines? Theologically informed critical reflection on the culture around us? Does your circle of influence represent some of the diversity of the Body of Christ, or are you reproducing clones like the willowy artisans of Kemono?

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