I have a pastor friend who reads Acts 17, Paul’s “Mars Hill” encounter, a bit differently than many of us. He sees it as Paul’s least effective ministry endeavor, even as a failure and a negative example.  I see Mars Hill as a success. One purpose of Acts is to tell the story of how the Gospel went to everyone and everywhere in the known world, and so in that sense it’s part of the successful story. But I think it’s a success in more ways than that.

As someone who spends a good time up on the ‘Mars Hill’ of Penn State University with students who like to debate all the latest ideas, I’m keenly aware of the challenges Paul faced. One aspect of my ministry has been to militant atheists, agnostics, and pagan students. It’s a challenge to redemptively engage with them, particularly during the last couple years when the New Atheist movement has been throwing its weight around.

At the root, my friend’s discomfort with Acts 17 is this: not many people come to faith (Paul’s day at Mars Hill would still be a really good day for most of us, right?) Isn’t this, when compared with the rest of Acts, a failure? I think stories like Mars Hill cause us to reevaluate our grid for what constitutes success. Not every day will be Pentecost, and Paul never gets the instant results like Peter does, but that doesn’t mean he’s a failure, right?

Alan Hirsch in The Forgotten Ways and elsewhere.  Wagner’s scale places everyone on a scale, ranging from “m0” which would be little to no cultural distance, all the way to “m4,” which would be huge cultural, racial, ethnic, religious, and sociological obstacles, such as a devoted Muslim in Saudia Arabia. Mars Hill probably falls in the “m3” range.

What constitutes success for Paul at Mars Hill, and throughout Acts, is that he is able to penetrate any and every people group that he comes across, no matter how far they are from the Gospel, and “by all possible means, save some.” If Paul ever crunches the numbers, he’s not counting heads so much as counting churches he’s established and tribes that he’s penetrated. He’s looking forward to the day when “people from every tribe, tongue and nation” are at the throne.

The challenge of moving beyond the m0-m1 crowd is that, because of the cultural distance, seeing the Gospel take root is a longer, harder process. If we have m0 expectations for an m3 group, we’ll be disappointed. If you expect to hit .325 in the major leagues because you hit .350 in single-A ball, you’ll likely be disappointed too. Given those obstacles, Paul seeing anyone at Mars Hill convert is a wild success! And I believe he was hopeful about the future of the churches that were eventually established there.

What I’m saying is that we have to take into account 1) the degree of difficulty, 2) the long-range process, and 3) the scope and variety of people-groups on our campuses. It takes time to become established in cultural contexts different from ours, so that we can speak incarnationally and with integrity from within them. As ministers embedded in a rapidly shifting cultural campus context here in North America, we need to see that most people are NOT right on the doorstep of belief, and we need to do something about that.

At Penn State, we estimate that there are approximately 1500 students actively engaged in evangelical ministries, out of 44,000. They are almost all drawn from the m0, maybe m1 crowd. So we have a large number of ministries competing for a very small piece of the pie, despite our best (and stated) intentions. But what about m2-m4? It’s not exaggerating to say that probably less than 10% of overall ministry effort and resources is expended on over 90% of the student population. If the overall college student population wasn’t at an all-time high, we’d all be seeing big declines and be up in arms. As it is, we’re strangely passive.

The need and the cultural distance led me two years ago to start “The Sojourn Forum” for “questioning faith and doubt.” We just wrapped our fourth semester, with 20 godless heathen students coming to my house for an all-Vegan cookout. In the group, we’ve hit all the big apologetic, philosophical, and theological issues common in new atheist and interfaith discussions. Each semester, we’ve had multiple officers from the atheist-agnostic student association attend. In fact, they’re my most “faithful” students (pun intended). This past semester, we started the “Skeptics’ Bible Study” spin-off group, for looking at specific verses and passages dealing with common objections to Christianity.

I have great relationships with these unbelieving students. I’m genuinely friends with many of them. I have their ears in ways that very few other Christians–if any–do. And they’ve confided things to me, like the militant atheist who admitted that he still prays “God, if you’re real, reveal yourself to me.” Still, in two years, I haven’t seen one of these Sojourn students come to faith as a direct result of my ministry. Is this a failure?

Two weeks ago, the morning after that godless-heathen-vegan cookout, I got a Facebook message from a student I had met with LAST academic year. I had lost track of him this year. Back then, he was a very heady & intellectual skeptic. He told me that he had become a Christian in the last couple months, and that my “Jesus Group”–a more informal variation of Sojourn–had played a part in that! This wasn’t a kid I had been investing in for a year, but God saw fit to take the seeds that had been planted, and bring them to fruition. While I would like to see more instant fruit from my Sojourn Forum and Skeptics’ Bible Study this year, in many ways I can look back at the “wins” from this year, and trust God for the future fruit.

It was an encouragement I needed, because while it’s tempting to chase the easier results of culturally close students, the future of college ministry is in what Hirsch calls the “missional-incarnational impulse,” going both out in mission and down in incarnational depth-or we could say “down and out.” It’s in taking a long-range, process view, and “becoming all things to all people, so that by all possible means, I might save some” (1 Cor. 9:22)

What are the implications for you and your ministry? What people-groups do you need to go down and out to?