I have attempted to give campus ministers a number of different principles to apply to their specific contexts with the understanding that each context will breed unique models for ministry while employing a basic set of principles. Head these words from Steve Lutz, a fellow campus minister at Penn State University (University Park) as a warning or better yet a call to change:
“Though serving in academia, an arena further down the road to a post-Christian society, many campus ministries have operated in denial and failed to develop a missiology for the post-Christian university. They have done this because they can still draw a crowd among students who are already churched and converted, or inclined to be traditional and conservative. Instead of being lights to the world around them, many campus ministries appear to be more like ghettos, squatter faith communities. Michael Green has described this ghetto tendency in the church in a vivid fashion: “a community of immigrants in a foreign country, clinging together for warmth and understanding, and surrounded by a society that does not understand or seem to care.Sadly, this is just as true of many Christian campus groups as it is of the church at large.”[1]
If things continue as they are, if we continue to put worn out practices that used to be effective ahead of the underlying principles of missional ministry, our campus ministries won’t be much more than ghettos.
I am sure I have missed some things a log the way, but my intent as I mentioned in the beginning was never to be exhaustive. It is my prayer that this will be useful to someone involved in working with college students in some way. Developing disciples on a college campus can be a difficult business, but I believe with these underlying principles a campus minister can design models of ministry in an ever changing culture that can be used to create disciples in a university setting that will move on after graduating and take what they have learned and apply it in their professions, in their families, in their communities, and in their churches.
[1] This comes from an article written by Steve Lutz that he is currently adapting to a book on missional campus ministry
c2wvu 