This is part three of "extras", the parts of my interview with Dave Embree that didn't make it into the final version as published in the August issue of Christian Standard magazine.
This final post features some random quotes and comments based on Tim's 41 years in the campus ministry.
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The need for campus ministers
We currently, among the associated college ministries associated with Christian Churches, have roughly a hundred fifty ministries. If those were evenly dispersed, which they are not, that would be three per state in the U.S. And in the two states with most college students, California and Texas, we have virtually nothing in the way of campus ministry.We have some new plans, I think, going on in those states, but nothing much.
Right now I’m not aware of any Christian Church schools offering a specific program in campus ministry. Even if it’s only one occasionally traveled, there could be a concentration of classes that I would be happy to help set up with anybody, just with existing offerings at a particular school.
Reaching college students today vs. 40 yeas ago
Some things we do really differently, some things we don’t.
A while back I came across a copy of one of the newsletters we used to photocopy and hand out to students, whereas now we do it digitally. I went through the whole thing – it was from 25 or 30 years ago – a lot of the events we do are very similar.
We do a lot of back to school stuff. Students now are used to professional looking stuff and if it doesn’t look professional they won’t give it the time of day. We put a lot more emphasis on design because students get thousands of messages online every day, and trying to distinguish one message as being relevant to you among all that noise, is really different.So we try to be professional, we try to be present.
Over the years, one of the benefits of being here along time is that we have sort of a favored status. We have the benefit of getting to do some things on campus that other groups don’t. I’m not gloating against them, but we’ve proved ourselves to be good partners with the community.
We want to be present with the students every place where we can. We’ve always wanted that, it’s just harder now because, again, they stay in their rooms.
We try to do electronic marketing, which is difficult. We provide of lots of venues for people to connect with us, via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.
But one of the things that’s really changed, we have to put a lot more really personal appeal on things. Broadcasting is almost worthless. Narrow-casting works.
We used to put out clipboards for people sign up for stuff. That hardly happens anymore, even for things like mission trips. We took a group to Kenya last summer. I think every single person who went on that trip went because I asked that person if they would go with us.
In years past we had exciting mission trips where we had people turn in applications and we really went through the applications and some people didn’t get to go. But now that’s not happening, even with Kenya – how exciting is that – people want to be asked, they want know that’s relevant to my life.
When I first started in campus ministry, a guy told me three sure ways to gain attention on campus: sex, alcohol, and food, and since we could pretty well eliminate the first two, we had to focus on the food.
Food isn’t a draw anymore. Universities have recognized that if students were complaining about the food, they needed to make the cafeterias really good. In the dining halls students usually have about 10 different options. Always have burgers, always have pizza. Last time I ate there, I had Moroccan food.
We had a freshman outreach program that was really successful for about 10 years and then it just faded out in a matter of two years. It involved a meal on a Wednesday night, building a freshman community. We talked to them about freshman stuff. When we investigated why this went from boom to bust, the respond we got was, 'Well we can go there and kind of hang out, but you’re only going to give us one option for food. Sometimes we don’t like that option. Over here at the dining hall we get 10 options. So Thanks, but we’d rather have options.'
Which is also one of the things that has reduced participation in out Spring mission trips. 'If we go with you, you’re driving. You decide when we stop, we don’t. Over the course of the week, if we decide we’d just rather not work today, you’re still going to want us to work. So we’d just rather go home.'
And I talk to good kids in our ministry who didn’t go on our Spring Break trip, kids who love Jesus. I asked them what they did for Spring Break. 'Oh, you know, I went home and just chillaxed for the week.'
You know, you could have gone down with us to the border and spend time in Mexico. 'Yeah, maybe I’ll do that next time, I don’t know.'
We ask people to pretty much go social media free. They hate it. We’re asking them to leave their 'home town', which is their online community.
We do more pop up events on campus. Last week we did a Make Your Own Slime event on campus. I asked the guys who did it, how do you think it went in terms of real outreach? Most of the people just made their slime and left. We had CCH info taped to every bag, but about three people wanted to talk to us about why we’re doing this and so on. So it was get what I want and get out of here, rather than I want to get to know you guys and what you're about.
Our students are growing smaller and smaller worlds for themselves instead of bigger ones. One of the corollaries of social media is people will say, I’ve got friends all over the world. But because of the metrics of social media, which are primarily binary, over time you expand your connections to more and more people who believe exactly what you do. And so you have more connections but less choice, less options. Those things are very age, socio-economic, to a certain extent, socio-political and ethnically stratified. And so you have 5000 Facebook friends, but the majority of them look like you, watch the same things, listen to Taylor Swift or hate her, just like you, and shop at the same stores.
Preparing students to be leaders in the church
The students who will get engaged in our ministry or any other campus minsitry are going to know way more scripture than you think they might otherwise know.
That’s another big change. Students in the mid 70's to the 80's at lest had a modicum of biblical knowledge. The students now in many cases have had very little exposure to the Bible. In many cases they’ve had more exposure through Veggie Tales than anything else. And whereas I think VeggieTales are marvelously cleaver and hysterical, that’s not a great way to teach the bible.
But students who come out of a campus ministry are going to know more about the bible that you might think. They’re going to know more about serving than you might think , and as a matter of fact they're going to see how integral serving others is to the Gospel. They’re probably going to have a much better view of of their responsibility to the rest of the world, in the United States and beyond. Some of them are going to have really particular leadership skills.
I’m taking roughly ten students through our small group leadership program called Pipeline this semester. I do usually five to ten per semester. Those guys are going to be really valuable to local churches and they’re going to be better trained than you might think.
But we need a whole lot more leaders than we’re producing, and we need a whole lot more leaders from among our churches who can be getting that training through campus minsitry, but who don’t know about campus ministry, so they’re not going to get trained.
One of the best things one of our alums said, was, 'When I came to the university it was to get a degree, so I’d know my way around the classroom and know how to be a teacher. What I didn’t expect was, I figured out my way around the church and I figured out how to serve there. I figured out what it’s about and how effective I can be. This is the most important thing I learned in college.
We want to produce as many people like that as we can.
Years ago IVCF advocated that churches should work towards not just trying to prepare students to survive the university campus, but to prepare them to go there with the goal of making a difference themselves, to see themselves as campus missionaries. And Intervarsity even encouraged churches to have a commissioning service where they would essentially set aside their recently graduated high school seniors who were heading off to college as that church’s missionaries to the campus where they would be studying.
I love that
Staying excited about campus minsitry
Here are some really good characteristics of students these days: they are innovative; they have remarkable (and remarkably useful) tech skills.
When they catch a vision, they are capable of great investment and sacrifice and impact.
They are capable of great compassion, especially when they encounter real pain in real lives.
What does it take to engage them? You've got to start with the "why" regarding anything. If they become convinced of the validity of an idea, or ministry, or spiritual path, they will go all out, and though they tend to have short attention spans, they really do value the sort of longer-term relationships with older believers who can keep them pointed the right direction.
As with all believers since the original disciples, they often figure out the truth through serving others, though they have to learn the difference between serving in love and "mandatory volunteer hours".
I speak often of how all the great awakenings in American history have happened at times when the "nones" were in the ascendency, and I have great hopes that this generation will get really excited about Jesus as have previous generations when other pursuits turned out to have no real glory.
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