Steve Lutz at The Sentinel has a great post on 5 major issues in campus ministry. Below is a summary, and I’ll definitely be writing some responses to this soon.
1. MISSIOLOGY: We need more work on a missiology of our people-group, including information on sociology, demographics, psychology, and worldview of college students.
We also need a missiology of our context: higher ed/academia.
2. HISTORY: Campus ministry has an interesting history, and a rich one. A quick survey of the history of awakenings/revivals, and of world missions, reveals that college students have played vital roles in ALL of them. We need more critical interactions with the history of campus ministry, which can affirm the contributions of people like Bill Bright, yet also draw out the unhelpful trajectories they’ve put us on.
3. ECCLESIOLOGY: What ought to be the relationship between church and parachurch? What’s our theology of each entity? What do we all need to work together on, and what should we do separately? How can the local church most effectively serve and reach out to students? Do we aim for age-and-stage program, or full integration? Do we plant college churches, or bus them into regular ones? In the age of house churches, what IS a church, anyway? These are all ecclesiological questions, and people have many different ways of answering them. Will we get closer to a consensus?
4. INNOVATION: How can we foster innovation in campus ministry? The world is rapidly changing, and yet much of campus ministry seems stale and stultified.
5. SUSTAINABILITY: This quote from Tim Keller serves as a good statement for what we need to address:
“A looming crisis for all American evangelical churches [and campus ministries] is that they cannot thrive outside of the shrinking enclaves of conservative and traditional people and culture. We have not created the new ministry and communication… models that will flourish and grow in the coming post-Christian very secular Western world. Our vision should be to develop campus ministries, new churches, [and] Christian education/discipleship systems that are effective in those fields in North America.” – Tim Keller
Chime in on the conversation at The Sentinel, and check out my thoughts!
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