Over the past few weeks, I have attended orientation events at the university. At those events, various groups from the campus and larger community set up tables, hoping to attract the attention of students and their families as they pass by. The event is designed to introduce the new students to the opportunities for fellowship, service, and fun while attending college in Cullowhee. While standing at my table, I have spoken to students from New Hampshire to Florida. I have spoken to students and parents, grandparents, and younger siblings, tagging along. While these events are about distributing and accumulating information, I have come to see then not so much as a time to get the Wesley Foundation’s name into students’ heads and their names into my database. Rather, this time is more about making connections. And, that is what ministry with college students is. It is about making connections. It is about connections between students and the college community. It is about connections between those students and the church. It is about connections between those students and other students. It is about connections between students and Christ. It is about connections between the past and present and the future. Ministry with college students is about making connections.
We do our best, those of us who minister with students, to create places and occasions for those connections happen. By that I mean to say that ministry with college students is a means of grace. It is a sacramental ministry of the church. Ministry with college students is sacramental because it provides the opportunity and space for the students at our state and private institutions to remain connected to their home church when they leave home, to other students also struggling to live out their faith, and to the God connected to us in Jesus Christ. This campus place is an incarnational place, and this kind of incarnational connection-making is the very definition of what it means to be sacramental. If sacraments are those acts of worship that link the divine to the human and provide a conduit for God’s loving grace to wash over us and sustain us, then those places and habits that make such connecting possible are sacrament-related things. They are sacramental things. Ministry with college students is just such a sacramental thing.
In our ministries with college students, students worship and serve and struggle and laugh and dance and risk and hope and cry and care and sing and play and rest and eat and study and learn and grow and deepen and mature and meet and encounter. They do this with each other, alone in prayer, and with God. In this way, the campus becomes a place of meeting, making, and remaking. It is a holy place. It is an essential place. It is a sacramental place. It is God’s place.
The ministry that occurs in these sacred places does not happen by accident. It is made possible through the grace of generations past who decided college students were important enough to include in the ministry of God’s love and transformative care. It is a place made possible through the commitment of students who long to care for each other and to be transformed by their God as they strive to live faithfully at a time when such faithful living isn’t easy. It is a place that remains possible only when local congregations and church members decide students are still important enough to include in the ministry of God’s love and transformative care.
Ministry with college students is a God-connecting place. It is a church-connecting place. It is a grace-connecting place. It is an incarnational place. It must be such a place because, after all, isn’t that what the Christian faith is all about, making connections with God and each other and the whole of creation.
Help us make connections. If you have a student from your family or church family that will be returning or leaving for college this fall, please connect that student with the campus minister or chaplain serving that campus and to a local church in the area. A list of the college chaplains and campus ministers may be found below.
Help us connect the grace of God to another generation of the church.
Campus Minister/Chaplain School/Ministry E-mail
Brad Farington ASU brad@CHARTERINTERNET.COM
Shelly Webb Brevard College webbsf@brevard.edu
Natalie McLean Bennett College nmclean@bennett.edu
Dan Herrin CPCC Dan.Herrin@cpcc.edu
Robert Brewer Greensboro College rbrewer@gborocollege.edu
Hal Warlick High Point Univ. hwarlic@highpoint.edu
Lynne Lepley Mitchell CC lmlepley@aol.com
Sadye Joyner-Milton NCA&T smilton3@triad.rr.com
Chris Hughes Pfeiffer Univ. chughes@pfeiffer.edu
Jennifer Martin UNC-A umcm@BULLDOG.UNCA.EDU
Steve Cheyney UNC-C scheyney@email.uncc.edu
Amy Rio-Anderson UNC-G ajrioand@UNCG.EDU
Tim Moore WCU tim@wcuwesley.com
Pam Blackstock WSSU pamelablackstock@YAHOO.COM
Larry Jones Winston-Salem joneslv@WFU.EDU
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