“White Paper” for Educational Mission in Home Missions
Peter Schuurman, January 6, 2005
The university is a clear-cut fulcrum with which to move the world. The problem here is for the church to realize that no greater service can it render both itself and the cause of the gospel with which it is entrusted, than to try to recapture the universities for Christ on whom they were all originally founded.
- Charles Malik, former president of General Assembly United Nations
The academy is a place of leadership formation, cultural innovation, and worldview dissemination, and the Church has always invested in its life and future. Dr. Joel Nederhood said already in The Church’s Mission to the Educated American (1960): “If the Church fails to enter into a mission relationship with the educated, it will actually fail to touch the nerve of American life.”
All is not well in the intellectual corridors of the nation. George Marsden, in his provocative book The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford, 1997) sadly states: “The contemporary university is hollow at its core. Not only does it lack a spiritual center, but it is also without any real alternative.” Brian Walsh, CRC campus minister at the University of Toronto goes so far to say that the university is an “outpost of the empire” comparable to pagan Rome of the early Church. “The ethos of the whole institution,” explains Walsh, “seems committed to an ideology of humanist autonomy, economic growth, technological supremacy and a careerism that knows nothing of commitment beyond the next step up the institutional or corporate ladder." 1 The underside of this competitive scramble are the casualties of burnt-out souls and hollow professional lives.
A modest-sized incarnation of the body of Christ, the Christian Reformed Church, seeks to join God’s mission in the world through missional partnerships. Church plants, small groups and prayer groups, and ordinary local congregations 2 are all links in this Reformed expression of God’s mission web. With this network of gathering, discipling and sending souls, our church approaches the post-Christian world of learning with a certain penchant. As one historian said, “Something there is about Calvinism that likes a college.”3 We have been gifted with thoughtfulness in curriculum and pedagogy and we have a philosophically robust theological heritage that suits us well for academic mission. Additionally, the depth of Reformed confidence in God’s preserving grace prevents us from seeing the university 4 as solely the territory of idolatry and empire, and we hear God summoning us to join him its redemption. 5 In short, God calls us to overflow in love for the whole of the university.
Unfortunately, there is scant literature on such a relatively recent vocation, and campus ministers are often at a loss when describing their calling to the Church and to each other. Suggested images of the campus minister have ranged from an academic street person to the Daniels and Esthers of the kings court. Similarly, the vicissitudes of campus ministries have been likened to white water rafting, serendipitous “chariot church” movements, and an academic version of Tolkien’s “fellowship of the ring.” 6 This paper plays with two more images of campus ministry: ambassadors and laboratories. These two unrelated images are useful not only because they provide another means for campus fellowships to imagine their own labours, but because they pay special attention to the connection between campus ministry and the Church.
This document is more descriptive than directive. It is setting the stage for a vision to be birthed. Campus ministries, as an integrated mission partner of the church, still feels fresh in the Home Missions inner circle. As a previous generation of campus ministers retire, new and greater numbers of faces grace our small band, and the new Educational Mission Leader engages conversational partners across the continent, the vision becomes clearer. This paper is intended to help us imagine the posture of campus ministries toward the university and the Church within the framework of a new day of mission partnerships and increased attention to contextualization.
An Ever-Widening Gulf
A crooked fault line runs down the length of modern culture dividing university and Church. This gulf reflects not only the separation of learning and worship, reason and faith, experimentation and conservation. It also reveals an increasing antagonism over the last few centuries.
It was not always thus. Most older universities have their roots as seminary training schools, and most university presidents were trained clergy. While a few such integrated institutions exist today, by far the majority of academies in North America are self-identified as secular or pluralistic communities. In this respect they are not only divorced from any Christian roots, but are now rival religious institutions with respect to Christ’s Church. 7 On some campuses this rivalry is mildly perceived, while on others it clearly demarcated. 8 This does not assume all-out war, but it does suggest an estrangement that finds it basis in increasingly divergent worldviews.
This is the campus ministry mission field--the post-Christian academic world. In this light it seems appropriate to consider the Biblical image of ambassadors of reconciliation named in 2 Corinthians 5. Paul says God is reconciling the world to himself through Christ, and Paul has become an ambassador of that divine gift to the Corinthians. If this can be translated to suggest that the Church is Christ’s ambassador, campus ministries are the ambassadors of Christ that are sent to public institutions of higher learning. Campus ministers and their fellowship are sent as a mission of the Church to embody this great reconciling project in the educational realm. In other words, this is one way to understand their commissioning: they are ambassadors of reconciliation to the estranged academic community, demonstrating God’s loving reign and his Spirit-led reconstruction of the whole creation.
Sent to a Neighbouring Culture
The ambassador metaphor invites some playful expansion. A few implications that might arise from the metaphor are described below.
- Ambassadors are foreign guests, and learn the rules and language of the host in order to contextualize their mission. 9
Campus ministers come neither as tourist, merchant, dilettante nor conqueror, but as a qualified delegate to represent a foreign authority, if not an unrecognized King. They learn to love the people and their ways, while seeking boldly and diplomatically to make the claims of their King respected and addressed in the campus setting. With respect to the more harshly secular university settings, some put it even more starkly: “we are ambassadors for Christ proclaiming an alternative lordship in the midst of the idolatrous structures that are known as the university.” 10
Like any ambassador, a campus vocation can be a lonely sojourn. Enduring ministry requires daily spiritual disciplines to keep faith, hope, and love strong. Additionally, contact and collegiality with the home country is vital in order to be faithful to one’s diplomatic mission.
2. Ambassadors demonstrate a healthy respect for their host.
The university is neither an employer nor head master of Christ’s ambassadors, and is expected to honour the delegate sent to their community as one sent by an outside authority. This is by no means universal policy, as some universities do not acknowledge campus ministers who serve on their campus. 11 Nevertheless, the campus minister as ambassador should expect a certain level of dignity to be accorded to their office, and needs to negotiate areas of conflict with civility and grace. 12 Ambassadors are not civil servants, but neither are they institutional insurgents. 13
- Ambassadors are bridge builders and cultural interpreters.
Rather than unnecessarily exacerbate the rivalry that exists between church and academy, campus ministries, in seeking to reconcile all things to God, pursues a right relationships between the two. Campus fellowships can demonstrate and promulgate the Church’s mission to the university and in turn translate the enterprise of higher education--and broader cultural shifts--to the Church. They will be agents of cultural discernment in the Church, and agents of religious and spiritual discernment for the university, increasing the “flow of goods” across the divide. 14 Ideally, we imagine a church where student questions and university issues are naturally integrated in church life, and conversely, gospel passions are welcome on university territory. The realization of this dream requires a cultural shift in both communities.
Reformed campus ministries are never a solitary Christian presence on the campus. They partner with whoever shares a similar vision for Christian influence in higher education. This includes not only other denominationally-affiliated campus ministers, but also para-church organizations, local Christian communities, and other faith and justice-seeking agencies. These partnerships are often adhoc, and are handled on a case by case basis, although Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, to name one organization, has been a stalwart companion in more formal ways through the decades.
4. Ambassadors come with a rich particularity.
Campus ministries are first and forever ambassadors of Christ to the campus.Yet they are never generic ambassadors. Reformed campus ministries bring a gospel accent that draws deeply from the Scripture, nurtures a covenant-shaped piety, and promulgates a full-orbed Christian world and life view that speaks to every discipline of the university.
Similar to an embassy, Reformed campus ministries will be attentive to the needs of people in the university community that identify with the Reformed tradition. This loosely-knit group of denominationally affiliated "ex-patriots" together support, shape, and celebrate the ministry. The expression of this particularity is an invitation to affinity with those who are different, and offers rich possibilities for dialogue and friendship. It also models an integrity that is secure within the diversity of a campus.
- Ambassadors are dedicated to lives of rich hospitality.
Campus ministries offices and homes are places in which to entertain, teach, and offer refuge. Like ambassadors, they are often the bearers of desperately needed foreign aid and can help initiate reconciliation movements--whether it is with regards to the tensions of race relations, faculty and department rivalries, inter-denominational and inter-faith frictions, or the relational healing necessary in pastoral counseling. Similarly, poverty and brokenness haunt every campus, and relief workers are vital. Food, clothes and a place to cry are provisions that bring hope and healing to an often lonely, impersonal institutional setting. Compartmentalized programs and lives, as well as fragmented relationships, leave many students and faculty in a state of anomie. Stable, well-resourced church congregations are well-situated to partner in this aid mission of bringing shalom to the campus.
In conclusion, according to this analogy, a good campus ministry is known by its credibility and integrity on a campus and by its sensitivity to context. 15 It is respected as a place of faith that demonstrates a love for the university, and represents its faith tradition with humble boldness and grace. This connotes not only a high quality of academic content, but a consistent winsome attitude. It is the face of God’s movement to the campus, and relates as one kingdom to another. The campus minister is not an autonomous agent, a congregation’s employee, or a para-church organization. Together with the campus fellowship, she or he is the Church on campus.
For this reason it is vital that the campus ministry committee be composed of persons with a love for learning, eager to immerse themselves in campus language and projects. They can nurture and participate in the ministry, seeking to guard its vision, support its personnel, and administrate its operations with stewardly skill. This requires not only academic interest, but a global awareness, cultural discernment, and a deep compassion for the poor. Together, campus minister, campus fellowship, and campus committee negotiate the vicissitudes of this cross-cultural ministry as Church.
A Laboratory of the Kingdom
While the bifurcation of faith and intellectual activity is a result of sin, the separation of the academy and the Church is not necessarily a conundrum. The differentiation of society can enable a richer unfolding of creation’s latent possibilities. This differentiating of cultural spheres comes with the formation of unique sub-cultures.
University culture is animated by a passion for learning, teaching, and researching. It is a place of experimentation, creativity, and lively conversation. It is a place of test tubes, textbooks, and time-honoured traditions. On the university campuses across our nations, young people are socialized, opened to a numerous worldviews, and sent out into broader culture. Here people explore and make critical decisions regarding vocation, marriage, and faith.
If campus ministries are seen as ambassadors of reconciliation to the university community, they do so as an incarnation of Christ in this particular sub-culture. Guided by God’s Spirit, they will be the flesh of Christ in an academic context, eschewing the idolatries of autonomy and careerism, but embracing all that lives as an icon of divine presence and action in higher education. They will, in themselves and the community they shape, holistically embody a life of faithful learning and teachable faith.
Education is never a neutral enterprise. Jerome Bruner says in his book The Culture of Education (Harvard, 1996) that “Any choice of pedagogical practice implies a conception of the learner and may, in time, be adopted by him or her as the appropriate way of thinking about the learning process. A choice of pedagogy inevitably communicates a conception of the learning process and the learner. Pedagogy is never innocent. It is a medium that carries its own message.” It is not only that pedagogy is shaped by worldview, but athletics, student life, administration, and convocation. Students take on the worldviews of their professors, subconsciously or otherwise. They are inevitably shaped by the culture of their learning community.
In this post-Christian context, campus ministry communities can be envisioned as faith laboratories. Like a band of disciples, a prophet school, or a miniature Christian college, they are a learning community where faith is tested and nurtured. This can be expanded in a number of ways.
- Laboratories are environments of difficult and intricate work.
The word “laboratory” is rooted in the word “labour.” Campus ministries, as a faith laboratory, labours to translate kingdom life into campus culture with skill and grace. This requires double the amount of work for the average student or faculty member. The authors of At Work and Play call this “double study”, maintaining that “the task of the Christian student is not finished until he or she has mastered the material from the dominant world view and then properly critiqued it in light of the uniquely Christian perspective… [they must] master both the truth and the lie.” 16 This requires more time, energy, and collaboration than simply “getting by” with platitudes or clever apologetics. We must know the Biblical story so well, we breathe it naturally, even in hostile environments.
This requires a deliberate leisure or schola that grinds against the harried life of most university inhabitants. Christians in the university are thus urged to take a smaller course load and consider an extra year or two above the average time-line for educational projects. 17
2. Laboratories require supportive sponsoring bodies.
It is useful here to remember that Jesus sends his disciples out into the world as labourers (Matthew 9 and 10). He says that there is a kingdom harvest that awaits, but the labourers are few. Christ instructs the disciples to pray for more labourers, for the work is dangerous and the harvest is abundant. When ministering in an environment where the competition is perversely intense, the God-cursing rhetoric at times pervasive, and promiscuity is the taken-for-granted way of life, the faith laboratories of campus can feel small and vulnerable. Campus ministries covets the prayers and support of all God’s people, so that these laboratories will be faithful, fruitful, and flourish. Without interested and informed congregations, campus ministries are fleeting and fragile.
Additionally, like other laboratories, failed experiments need not be seen as futile endeavours. Everything that happens in the laboratory is an indicator of what can happen outside its boundaries. Thus reports to sponsors are fruitful even when the results are not as they hoped to be. 18
3. Laboratories are creative, imaginative communities.
It is useful to note that the verb “labour” can be traced back to the Old French root, labour, meaning to plough. To plough is to dig up what is old, turn it over, and let it fall anew on the ground. It involves adding fertilizers of various sorts and planting new seeds in between the rows. All this is done with the hope of facilitating a better harvest.
A laboratory is thus a place of intense labour, where what is already known is examined anew, turned over, and brought together with fresh, if not foreign insight. The intention is not to destroy what is already known, but to build on it, apply it in new ways, and to come to a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of all creation. Labs thrive in a culture that is always reforming—shifting from old paradigms to new. An experiment yields fruitful results when it gives birth to lively discussion and further research. And good research enables varying degrees of prediction.
Campus ministry is a similar labour of love. It seeks to understand what God’s Spirit is doing in the university and the culture and to point students, staff and faculty towards it. It is a cultural ploughing that turns over the soil of past languages and lessons, and earnestly, if not also playfully, searches for new ways to bring the gospel to bear on the whole activity of the campus. New ideas in the academy require creative theological responses if they are to be faithful. New ventures in local student and administrative life call for fresh comment and participation by campus ministries. Thus we are always seeking a new language to borrow, imaginative ways to live and tell the old, old story for the transient crowds of the academy. 19
If this research is conducted with careful attention and spiritual discernment, it should be fruitful in shaping the Church’s overall mission to the broader culture, especially perhaps, with regards to church plants. Moreover, students are the cultural carriers of institutions of higher learning, and what happens on campus shows itself in various ways and degrees in broader society a few years later. 20
Henri Nouwen, commenting on the brutally competitive culture of the university, suggests a laboratory environment is normative for learning. “Schools are not training camps to prepare people to enter into a violent society but places where redemptive forms of society can be experimented with and offered to the modern world as alternative styles of life.” 21 This is a means of unfolding God’s multi-splendored glory in his world, as well as a service to both Church and academy. Without the call to faith and fear of God, the academy is not only poor but subject to idolatry and spiritual death. Without being challenged by scholarly wit and wisdom, not to mention the vagaries of unbelief, churches can become luke-warm, rigid and lose touch with the world to which they were sent.
- Laboratories are mentoring communities.
Similarly, campus ministry is a mentoring movement of the Church, instructing young leaders in theological reflection on the nexus of faith and culture. Student and minister experiment together through the different waves of cultural change and so learn together how to be a faithful labourer in God’s kingdom. The Church receives these young souls as Kingdom workers trained in all the fields of academy—medicine, law, art, engineering, music and philosophy. The campus brings the world and its wounds before the student, and global issues are interpreted in fellowship. Their laboratory experience not only enriches the Church, but presses the Kingdom further into broader culture. This discipling of new leaders is campus ministry “harvest.”
Laboratories are small groups nurturing a culture of leadership development. Mentors are always “spotting” gifted students and channeling them towards more intense study and service. 22 Laboratories offer a structured, bounded, and mentored environment in which to examine volatile issues and even make some mistakes. Similarly, campus ministries is not an individual’s enterprise. It is a community of faith and learning always scouting out children of God for kingdom service.
The student years are a time for exploring one’s gifts and wounds. The campus fellowship can be a place where gifts are discovered and nurtured and wounds are named and healed. Sometimes giftedness leads to a calling, and other times woundedness inspires a new passion. The ministry community can be a place for such vocational discernment. It can be a place to ‘try on’ different roles and responsibilities. For many, it is the home of their first leadership position before positions of responsibility in church and society.
In sum, a good campus ministry is not a youth group that happens to be on a university campus. It will be vibrantly engaged with the conversations of the campus and bringing the faith tradition to bear on current issues, and boldly challenging the idols of our time. Colloquia, panel discussions, and newspaper articles will demonstrate this life-giving interaction. Additionally, a harvest of kingdom leaders can always be mentioned by name as part of the circle of influence of this learning community. Its Bible studies, book studies, retreats and dinners nurtured them for holistic learning. These students, faculty and staff are so named not because they were extracted from academic life, but because they engaged it faithfully and persistently. To use the new HM tag line, they were following Christ in mission together—on university campus.
In Mission Together
Higher learning is a divinely sanctioned enterprise, but the situation of the academy today is desperate. “Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American universities,” prophesies Jane Jacob in her new book Dark Age Ahead. With a “gypsy faculty” and quantifiable exam questions that are “fit for robots to answer and to rate, rather than stimulants and assessments of critical thinking and depth of understanding” the future does seem bleak. 23 Similarly, Margret Visser explains how Western civilization, under modernity’s tutelage, has lost the vital freedom that came with Christian influence. “We are falling back into fate,” she warns. 24
Cultural forces like consumerism and the despair of modern and pagan fatalisms can seem overwhelming from a campus ministry outpost on this side of Christendom. Campus ministries are always a “small group” beneath the ivy pillars of modern suspicion and post-modern deconstruction. But God’s providential power, Christ’s redeeming activity, and the Spirits dynamic presence remain active in all libraries, classrooms, and dormitories, for God has not abandoned any corner of his creation. We co-labour with God in his educational mission, and long for the day when his kingdom fully comes.
There is a Brazilian proverb that says, “When I dream, it is but a dream; but when we are many dreaming the same thing, it can be the start of tomorrow’s reality.” 25 When we dream together Christ’s kingdom dream, the kingdom appears not far from each one of us. For when we imagine it rather than the idols our of time, God’s alternative reality comes near. Can you imagine it in your ministry region?
1 “Which Day? Whose Glory?” sermon by Brian J. Walsh on the occasion of Geoff Wichert's licensing for ministry, December 7, 2003. Text: Philippians 1.3-11 Available on web.
2 Dan Ackerman, White Paper. “Outbursts of God’s Grace and the Leading Edge of Mission: A Vision for Mission Focused Churches in the CRC.” 2004.
3 James Bratt “Reformed Tradition and the Mission of Reformed Colleges,” unpublished, 1993 but quoted in Cornelius Plantinga Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002, p. x.
4 The terms college, university, learning community, higher education are used interchangeably for this paper.
5 Queens University campus minister Phil Apol suggests that common grace is one of the “tools that have made their way to the top shelf of my theological toolbox,” and names campus ministries as an example of what Richard Mouw calls a “common grace ministry.” Unpublished review of Richard Mouw He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace. Eerdmans, 2001.
6 These images comes from CRCMA discussions, Bill VanGroningen talks, Anastasis journal, and Phil Apol’s unpublished document “Curiouser and Curiouser.”
7 Sam Portaro and Gary Peluso. Inquiring and Discerning Hearts: Vocation and Ministry with Young Adults on Campus Scholar’s Press, 1993. “How are we to explain the distance between the church and the academy in our present experience? …for some in our culture the pursuit of knowledge has itself become a religion. If this observation is correct, then the antipathies and apathies generated between church and academy are those of rivals.” (xi). Huston Smith, in Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief. (New York: Harper, 2001) echoes the idea: “Having won autonomy from the churches, the university has become the church’s rival for the minds of our times.” (p. 98) Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat suggest the rival religion that infests the university is the Market, or McWorld, where the illusion of choice and open options precludes any kingdom commitment. Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire. (IVP, 2004), p. 28.
8 “Vatican Seek Action on Anti-Christian Sentiment: Christianophobia,” National Post, Tuesday, December 7, 2004. Stephen Webb. Taking Religion to School: Christian Theology and Secular Education. Brazos Press, 2000.
9 “While we live in a culture that is disinterested in claims to Truth and is often estranged from traditional religious constructs, we also live in a culture that is spiritually thirsty. The question that needs to be asked is how do we give testimony to our faith with integrity and conviction when someone else sets the terms?” Amanda Benckhuysen, “What Language Shall I Borrow? A Theology of Evangelism for the New Millenium,” unpublished CRCMA paper, March, 2000.
10 Brian J. Walsh, in private electronic correspondence.
11 It is important to note the variety of relationships that campus ministers have with their host. Some provide well-equipped offices, personnel, and equipment, while others, like Shiao Chong at York University, as of the time of this writing, lack even official recognition and legitimacy on campus.
12 Richard Mouw. Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in An Uncivil World. IVP, 1992. Mouw quotes Hebrews 12:14, “pursue peace with everyone, and be holy”, paraphrasing it to say, “convicted civility can help us become more mature Christians.” (18) With a term similar to ambassadors, “agents of righteousness,” Mouw says Christians ought to cultivate such virtues as empathy, curiosity, and teachability, as well as the different faces of patience: flexibility, tentativeness, humility, awe, modesty, and an openness to God’s surprises. Civility, he insists, “means a willingness to be changed in our efforts at leadership… civility is a commitment to keep the conversation going.” (112, 129)
13 “We are chastened lovers of the Way. . . and as a gathering of forgiven sinners, we reject the pretensions of triumphalism and acknowledge that we are implicated in the brokenness of the world. We think of ourselves as 'one beggar telling another beggar where to find some bread.'” From CRCMA Vision Statement, 1989.
14 CRCMA Vision Statement 1989: “In obedience to Christ we shall take up this ministry, being present on campus: because Christ through his Spirit is already there extending the Reign of God to the academic enterprises of men and women; because people and their institutions need to see and hear the Word of God in order to be redeemed; because the Church itself needs to see and hear the word of the campuses in order to be faithful to Christ’s own mission in the world.”
15 Says Rolf Bouma of Jason Chen, U of Iowa, at his retirement ceremony: “As I spoke with Jason and heard about the ups and downs of his ministry through some 30 years, it became evident that his personal integrity and open demeanor were the foundation of the Geneva ministry and its success.” Notes Karen Haslett of United Campus Ministry. "Jason's life-work demonstrates the importance of integrating one's faith into every aspect of her or his life. That's an important message to be reminded of--especially today, when our lives often seem compartmentalized and disjointed."
16 Frey, Bradshaw L. et al. At Work and Play: Biblical Insight for Daily Obedience. Paideia Press, 1986, p. 9.
17 The Septuagint of Psalm 46:10 reads: “Have leisure and know that I am God.”
18 Malik maintains that critiquing the university is always instructive: “When the Christian critique of the university is elaborated, it will inevitably turn out to be a full Christian critique of the world as well.” A Christian Critique of the University, IVP, 1982, p. 100.
19 This makes a “one size fits all” model for campus ministries restrictive and inauthentic. See Shiao Chong, “Let All Models Be.” Paper given at CRCMA conference, 2004.
20 This is Bill VanGronigen’s thesis, unpublished.
21Henri Nouwen. Creative Ministry. New York: Image, 1978, p. 14.
22 See Jim Osterhouse’s white paper: “A Call to Leader Development.” (2004)
23 Jane Jacobs. Dark Age Ahead. New York: Random House, 2004, p.46. On a similar note, the motto at Brock University where I was campus minister was “Your Career Begins Here!”
24 Margaret Visser. Beyond Fate. CBC Massey Lecture, Toronto: Anansi Press, 2002, p. 1.
25 Ministry Development (HM) vision 2004 begins with imagination, and Diana Klungel’s white paper “Small Group Discipleship and Prayer,” ends with a call to dream. It reminds me of Margret Mead’s famous quote (paraphrased): “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed [Spirit-led dreamers] can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." See also James Davison Hunter’s essay “To Change the World.”
