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Fight or flight. These are the basic human tendencies in the face of stress. Some choose to rear up and become aggressive. They want to fight their way out of difficult situations. Others tend to tuck and run, fleeing from engagement and tension.
These age-old responses to stress are applicable to us in campus ministry as well. In the face of stressful engagement with the university culture, some aggressively seek battle by heavily emphasizing baptism and “conversion” at all cost. This tendency can become an anti-intellectual, anti-institutional bent, focused on forcibly removing people from the world of university life. This “fight” reaction creates an alternative sphere of reality separated from campus. Connecting to campus occurs only for the utilitarian purpose of attempting to guilt people into disengaging from the university life.
An opposite yet related response to the stress of engagement is to hide out from any meaningful interaction. One can have a sentimental attachment to the university, yet only passively invite people to come to a ministry that is separated from the campus world. This style of ministry tends to hope that someone will be drawn in by some advertisement or some previous connection to our church.
Healthy campus ministry seeks creative interaction with the campus community. Rather than removing students from their networks of friends and acquaintances, a vibrant ministry tries to transform lives from within the context of the university, not by extracting collegians out of the campus. Vigorous campus ministry finds ways to stream across the bridges of existing relationships and networks. Certainly, Christian students need to involve themselves in church life. Yet their involvement in church should not disconnect them from the place they are needed most – the campus! Jesus said, “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18). Campus ministry should provide students with tools to be salt and light to people who need Jesus.
We in campus ministry could all use a good dose of humility. I am convinced that there is no perfect way to minister to college students. Every context is different. Each campus work is bounded by place and time. What works in Delaware may not work in Oregon. And what is successful in Alabama may completely bomb in Oklahoma. Things that worked in the 1970s probably won’t work in 2008, and vice versa. You could have two different ministries at the same university at the same time doing different works, both with potentially positive results.
Good campus ministries can take many forms. The Bible chair movement – that tended to emphasize education and training – was not a “flight” response. It was a unique way of engaging the university. The Crossroads movement – that focused on converting the lost – was not purely a “fight” reaction. Each had positive emphases, but both devolved into methods that created separation from the university rather than active and healthy interaction with it.
Today, we again face two temptations that threaten to lead us down familiar paths. These temptations are kind of like old friends who want to make us revisit haunts that we should how know to avoid. As campus ministers, though, our memories are short and our optimism is boundless. We don’t feel limited by the past – even if we actually know something about it – because we believe that God wouldn’t want us to fail. But a failure to learn from the past will doom us to repeating avoidable mistakes.
Less than 4% of the student body here at West Virginia University has any active involvement with a Christian group on campus. Perhaps your university has similar numbers. This is a crisis of epic proportions! We have entered a new era where church attendance is largely extraneous for almost all Western young people.
But how should we react at this crossroads? Should we pour our energies into ecumenism? Should campus ministers seek to expand our job descriptions to encompass more tasks at our local church? Should we go after more of the 4% who aren’t our form of Christian and teach them how to follow scripture our way? Or should we aggressively create exciting substitute realities that draw them out of campus life and into our church world?
I would suggest that the way forward is far more complex than any of these simplistic paths. We can and should learn from pioneers who navigated their own journey to find a place of meaningful engagement with their universities. But we should humbly realize that there is no single method, no simple formula that will recreate others’ success. Neither fight, nor flight will win the day. We must follow the Incarnational model of Jesus who sends us to the campus, just as He was in the world – realizing that this path does not always yield happy endings or results worthy of headlines.
Jason Locke served as Student Director of the University Christian Student Center at Tennessee Tech University while completing his B.S. Mechanical Engineering (1989). Then was a missionary to Prague, Czech Republic before returning to the U.S. to marry Julie Anderson (1992) and to complete a M.S. in Missions and an M. Div. from ACU. Since 2001, Jason has served as campus minister to West Virginia University (Mountaineers for Christ), in Morgantown, WV. He also serves on the Campus CrossWalk board as directory and news editor.
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