Comments on: The 5 Big Issues in Campus Ministry | Theological Foundations

By: The 5 Big Issues in Campus Ministry | Innovation « Ethereal Thought Train

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 17:04:57 +0000

[...] My thoughts are here: Missiology 1, Missiology 2, Missiology 3, and Theological Foundations. [...]

By: Benson Hines

Benson Hines — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:43:03 +0000

I don’t think I do, although The College “Y” and Daws should be easy to find on Amazon. Same with Baptist Campus Ministry at Crossroads (a history of Southern Baptist campus-based ministry). InterVarsity has some books listed in the bibliography of its Wikipedia page. I’m guessing Crusade has a few good sources, but it’ll take some digging.

I look forward to connecting, too.

By: Todd Engstrom

Todd Engstrom — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:10:28 +0000

Thanks so much for those resources…do you have anything linked online? I’ll go digging around when I return from vacation to find some of this material.

Hope to connect with you at some point soon bro!

By: Benson Hines

Benson Hines — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:59:17 +0000

Just a couple of thoughts:

First, thank you for sounding the call to application of theology (and Bible) to college students’ actual lives. I’m concerned that those college ministries (in churches or otherwise) that focus on biblical / theological exposition can often do little by way of integrating those truths with their college ministry attendees. If I’m not connecting Bible to Benson, then I’m not sure I’m really learning Bible.

As for a college ministry history, I think it could be awhile before a strong one could be produced. Besides the fact that college ministry is undervalued so finding a publisher would be tough, the field is also so underdeveloped that it would take too much legwork to be accurate. And ultimately, I’m not sure we’ve left “Phase One” of college ministry – even if that phase is a century old – yet. It seems hard to write a history that has one major chapter.

The day will come. For now, there are individual histories within organizations. My professor buddy David Setran from Wheaton wrote The College “Y,” which actually looks at one of the first college ministries in the U.S., the YMCA. (Yep, it was a college ministry!) And there are presumably historical records for any of the most major campus-based organizations (I know of a couple, but I bet they all have ‘em somewhere.) Daws is probably the best-known college ministry biography (out of probably very few) – about Dawson Trotman, the founder of the Navigators.