The University Campus: My Mission Field

[nightbringer]

Hey all, I'm an undergraduate studying Philosophy with Creative Writing at Staffordshire University in the UK and I'm the Evangelism Co-ordinator on their Christian Union committee. As I'm guessing a fair few people here have had a university experience, I was wondering what advice any of you might have for conducting student-relevant mission.

Our mission strategy for the upcoming academic year focusses primarily on two areas of change. One is to change the CU socially, encouraging our members to become more and more comfortable in mixing our friendship groups as we socialise in our free time. We do not wish to keep our christian friends in one world and our non-christian friends in another. Involving our friends in our community will hopefully help our non-christian friends to witness the love of Christ's church in our day to day lives and also in our meetings should they start to attend them.

The second aspect of our strategy is to make our evangelism generally more apologetics fused across the board. We have a number of talks and also a debate planned across the year addressing the primary subject fields of apologetic interest (science, history, philosophy etc). In addition we plan to make time during our weekly main meetings for honest questioning and discussion for christians and non-christians. We don't want to just rely on specialists, we want our own members' knowledge to grow. There are also a number of other events going on which will take this kind of approach.

In your experience, do you have any advice as what helps in facilitating these kinds of changes in attitude? What hard lessons have you learned in campus evangelism? What can we do to help people come to trust Christ?! Seriously, anything you think might be useful, I wanna hear it. We want our university to not know what's hit it next year. England may be a "post-Christian" country, but we want a pro-Christian campus.

If you have any questions, let me know. Please, pray for us.

[D. Medvedev Fan]

Are you looking more for suggestions of things you can do or more what approach to take with people?

[nightbringer]

Well it's all helpful, but say start with the first. Activities/events.

[D. Medvedev Fan]

Here are some things I have seen in my experience.

Balance evangelism with community. Some people want to be involved in a Christian group but might be afraid to rely on a booklet to do evangelism with random people at lunchtime. It’s also less intimidating to be in a club that invites someone into a strong community without feeling like there is a strong push right away to bring others into the community.

At my campus, Campus Crusade uses booklets to go out sharing in pairs during university hour one day a week (no one is in class at this time). I have never done this because I'm not sure how to use the booklet and continue the conversation if the person says anything beyond the booklet that just has a four-point gospel message. There was a class once on how to share like this, but I didn't get much out of it beyond follow the booklet and give it a try. Hearing about people's experiences and what sort of questions or comments they might receive might have helped. It's hard to feel like you can join in being gung-ho right away if you don't feel equipped, though I'm sure experience in sharing also helps, but this is part of my experience as a member there. Also, I think it can be easy to become lost in numbers and lose sight of the individual value of a person in the group unless that person is highly highly active in it.

Spiritual surveys are another tool that Campus Crusade uses to find out what the student body thinks about God and religion. This can also be a way that they also gain contact info for future members. They are the largest Christian club. Please be careful about how you handle growth if you get to see this club grow huge. A large crowd of strangers has the capacity to be intimidating to newcomers.

Have events that are about having fun (like a games night or broomball), as well as events that are about worship with speakers and music. This helps a group to share their lives together, and that really appeals more to me than a group that only seems to care about adding numbers. It also opens up the doors to opportunities to show that Christians can have fun too and real people and provides opportunities to build trusting relationships within the group.

Diff clubs including the one I am in have tables set up at popular areas with fliers about God, the club, and maybe even a local church that they are connected to. This makes them visible. One club had such a table where they also offered prayer to anyone who wanted prayer. Can't hurt? My club and this other one gave out food before. We have a pizza even before finals, where all the students in the area can line up to get a free slice of pizza. Makes us a positive presence in the site of the student body, especially around this lunch time.

My group (the Assemblies of God group I am a member of) does games nights (board games/card games/video games) and diff clubs do various fun activities such as broomball which anyone can come to. The other club that gave out food and did the prayer booth was founded by a group that really likes video games, so they did a video game tournament that any student at the school could participate in. This might be a fun way to introduce non-believers to a community. Eating together after events is a way to strengthen a community.

Once we had a discussion at my school with reps from several different sorts of religious groups, campus crusade, Mormons, Catholics, etc. Muslims might have been there. It was like a panel about who God is or something like that. There were two towers on campus that discussed the event and left places and writing impliments for people to answer who they thought God was. I think there was a different debate event where a formerly Muslim Christian and a formerly Catholic Muslim discussed why they believed what they did. There was also some sort of event where a theologian sort of person discusses the Catholic perspective on the anti-God arguments that were recently coming out in books. I wasn’t able to attend these. I think they were in the evenings and I worked into part of the way through, but I did attend part of a Catholic club meeting with a testimony by a guy who grew up nominally Protestant, because agnostic, and then became a devout Catholic which is really inspiring at the time.

Way back, there was that girl at Columbine who said that she believed in God before she was killed. Campus Crusade advertised an event that did something with a speaker talking about faith and how she lived hers. They put ribbons around trees on campus and had t-shirts that students could buy and wear prior to the event to advertise it. I thought that was a cool and interesting way of getting attention for the event.

I have some comments about small group structuring, but I'm not sure that is what you are looking for. I hope I gave some useful information.

[nightbringer]

Here are some things I have seen in my experience.

Balance evangelism with community. Some people want to be involved in a Christian group but might be afraid to rely on a booklet to do evangelism with random people at lunchtime. It’s also less intimidating to be in a club that invites someone into a strong community without feeling like there is a strong push right away to bring others into the community.

Yeah I agree. Thankfully I'd say that currently the biggest strength of our CU is the community vibe. We are a small group (25ish students) and we're all friends. We're planning to meet up with our freshers come September frequently for socials and also for one-on-one studies, and just cook them a meal or something. We wanna invest in them as people.

At my campus, Campus Crusade uses booklets to go out sharing in pairs during university hour one day a week (no one is in class at this time). I have never done this because I'm not sure how to use the booklet and continue the conversation if the person says anything beyond the booklet that just has a four-point gospel message. There was a class once on how to share like this, but I didn't get much out of it beyond follow the booklet and give it a try. Hearing about people's experiences and what sort of questions or comments they might receive might have helped. It's hard to feel like you can join in being gung-ho right away if you don't feel equipped, though I'm sure experience in sharing also helps, but this is part of my experience as a member there. Also, I think it can be easy to become lost in numbers and lose sight of the individual value of a person in the group unless that person is highly highly active in it.

We don't really do leaflet related stuff. Our evangelistic focus is more to aid our members in their personal relationships with their seeking friends. We do "on campus outreach" occassionally though and you're probably right to suggest discussing properly how it all works and stuff. The numbers issues currently isn't a problem as like I said we are pretty small.

Spiritual surveys are another tool that Campus Crusade uses to find out what the student body thinks about God and religion. This can also be a way that they also gain contact info for future members. They are the largest Christian club. Please be careful about how you handle growth if you get to see this club grow huge. A large crowd of strangers has the capacity to be intimidating to newcomers.

Surveys are something we've done in the past though with our few members we've found it hard to get a decent sample population from our efforts. And yeah watching how any growth affects us is a good point. It would be a shame to loose our community atmos.

Have events that are about having fun (like a games night or broomball), as well as events that are about worship with speakers and music. This helps a group to share their lives together, and that really appeals more to me than a group that only seems to care about adding numbers. It also opens up the doors to opportunities to show that Christians can have fun too and real people and provides opportunities to build trusting relationships within the group.

Very much agreed. In freshers week none of our events have an evangelistic presentation. We also do semi-frequent socials where we go ice sakting or something. As I said in my OP part of our approach this year is just to get people mixing their christian and non-christian friends together in their daily social lives.

Diff clubs including the one I am in have tables set up at popular areas with fliers about God, the club, and maybe even a local church that they are connected to. This makes them visible. One club had such a table where they also offered prayer to anyone who wanted prayer. Can't hurt? My club and this other one gave out food before. We have a pizza even before finals, where all the students in the area can line up to get a free slice of pizza. Makes us a positive presence in the site of the student body, especially around this lunch time.

An information desk so to speak would be cool though I'm not sure if my university would have that kind of option. A prayer table is an interesting idea. We have a similar thing to the pizza, we hand out water outside the student bar every wednesday and friday night. Get a lot of talks going some nights.

My group (the Assemblies of God group I am a member of) does games nights (board games/card games/video games) and diff clubs do various fun activities such as broomball which anyone can come to. The other club that gave out food and did the prayer booth was founded by a group that really likes video games, so they did a video game tournament that any student at the school could participate in. This might be a fun way to introduce non-believers to a community. Eating together after events is a way to strengthen a community.

After our main meetings we always go to the student bar/lounge and hang out. As you say it does really help build the community.

Once we had a discussion at my school with reps from several different sorts of religious groups, campus crusade, Mormons, Catholics, etc. Muslims might have been there. It was like a panel about who God is or something like that. There were two towers on campus that discussed the event and left places and writing impliments for people to answer who they thought God was. I think there was a different debate event where a formerly Muslim Christian and a formerly Catholic Muslim discussed why they believed what they did. There was also some sort of event where a theologian sort of person discusses the Catholic perspective on the anti-God arguments that were recently coming out in books. I wasn’t able to attend these. I think they were in the evenings and I worked into part of the way through, but I did attend part of a Catholic club meeting with a testimony by a guy who grew up nominally Protestant, because agnostic, and then became a devout Catholic which is really inspiring at the time.

We are looking to hold more events that are partnered with other groups. Though we don't have as many groups as you seem to have. There would pretty much the Christian Union, the Islamic Society, The Sikh Society and the Spiritualist Society.

I have some comments about small group structuring, but I'm not sure that is what you are looking for. I hope I gave some useful information.

Yes, thanks for your comments =) Cheers.

If you're willing to share ideas about small groups I can pass them on to our small group co-ordinator.

[CodewordConduit]

nightbringer - why not encourage people of differing perspectives to come in via some friendly debate events? Everyone can go for a pint afterwards, play some pool or whatever, and friendly discussions and such should naturally flow.

ETA: Yeah this is pretty much a condensed version of what D Medvedev Fan said... I agree with her!

[nightbringer]

Yeah debates are good. We're linking up with the philosophy society to do a few events over a three day period which should be cool. We're also running some apologetics events throughout the year which while not debate based as such, will allow room for discussion and hopefully some social time afterwards. Thanks for your input CodewordConduit.

[D. Medvedev Fan]

Yeah I agree. Thankfully I'd say that currently the biggest strength of our CU is the community vibe. We are a small group (25ish students) and we're all friends. We're planning to meet up with our freshers come September frequently for socials and also for one-on-one studies, and just cook them a meal or something. We wanna invest in them as people.
The meal part reminds me of another club I knew when I first started college. The club that was related the Local Church movement had a professor who opened her home for meals for a girls small group and cooked for us. I still brought cookies some time. It was really nice. We started with prayer, ate, sang, and did a little bible study. I got a ride from someone else who worked for the church as I didn't have a car at the time, and we met even over summer break. The lady who would give me a ride also gave a couple of us a ride to their church on Sunday when we wanted to go to their church. I don't know if you have a big dorm community, but in Campus Crusade, a group of people would carpool to a local Baptist church and then eat together in the dorms. Other than the occasional on-campus mass, these are the ways that I got to church during the school year, my first two years in college.

We don't really do leaflet related stuff. Our evangelistic focus is more to aid our members in their personal relationships with their seeking friends. We do "on campus outreach" occassionally though and you're probably right to suggest discussing properly how it all works and stuff. The numbers issues currently isn't a problem as like I said we are pretty small.
I'm actually sort of glad about that. Sometimes leaflets are not what people who have heard the message before need.

Surveys are something we've done in the past though with our few members we've found it hard to get a decent sample population from our efforts. And yeah watching how any growth affects us is a good point. It would be a shame to loose our community atmos.
Another thing that Campus Crusade did once was a barbeque on campus in one of the grassy areas. A small band played. They surved hotdogs or hamburgers or something. I don't remember if it was free or cost a couple dollars. It might meke sense that they would have charged a couple dollars for food, but not a lot. This was something where they welcomed freshmen to the club, did a little announcement, probably had a table with info and a place to collect contact info. You probably thought of something like this before, but I remember it because I had just recently seen the band that play at a local church maybe two weeks before. It was also a place where the band could get more publicity and have their stickers and stuff around.

Very much agreed. In freshers week none of our events have an evangelistic presentation. We also do semi-frequent socials where we go ice sakting or something. As I said in my OP part of our approach this year is just to get people mixing their christian and non-christian friends together in their daily social lives.
:thumb:

An information desk so to speak would be cool though I'm not sure if my university would have that kind of option. A prayer table is an interesting idea. We have a similar thing to the pizza, we hand out water outside the student bar every wednesday and friday night. Get a lot of talks going some nights.
Interesting. We don't have a campus bar. The closest thing we have a pizza place that sells beer. This isn't an area with much drinking there, so we don't have quite the same ministry opportunities. Therefore, we do the demonstration that we are there to serve others in our campus community by feeding them before finals, however your water idea sounds like a great evangelism opportunity. I like your thinking.

You can do a prayer table just as a prayer table or also as an information table with a few fliers and maybe a sign up sheet for interested parties. If your school does a club fair at some point, this could be a good opportunity for an info booth. At my school, we also have a table up doing orientation club fairs. At my old community college, we had a table up with the other clubs, since it was a general club fair every semester.

After our main meetings we always go to the student bar/lounge and hang out. As you say it does really help build the community.
The third thing that I remember hearing about the group I'm in now were the magic words our campus minister said "food" and "community."

We are looking to hold more events that are partnered with other groups. Though we don't have as many groups as you seem to have. There would pretty much the Christian Union, the Islamic Society, The Sikh Society and the Spiritualist Society.
Ooh, that has some interesting possibilities. We don't have a Sikh or Spiritualist club. We have more diversity within related groups, but you definately have some comparative religions opportunities I would guess.

Yes, thanks for your comments =) Cheers.
Your welcome.

If you're willing to share ideas about small groups I can pass them on to our small group co-ordinator.
Well, I don't know how you will set up the small groups, but I've been around a couple campus ministry arrangements. I'm sorry this is not very condensed. I'll try to mention one thing that I think would be a key point I want to make.

Respect the diversity of background and familiarity your audience has, instead of just being happy with what could be a shallow "Good, Christian" answer in Bible study. This might challenge some to grow more. Your members may have no familarity, or they may have grown up around Christian education.
In Campus Crusade, they kept people together by year, I forgot if this was in college or in year by involvment with Crusade. (Crusade was not as popular of a name with a Muslim I talked with from a physics club.) Bible studies were also arranged by pairs of dorms or for commuters. In the freshmen bible study, it was arranged to deal with people who maybe hadn't read anything of the bible and knew little of what Christianity really was. It felt more like a hangout time than serious study to me. This might be because I came into it after growing up going to sunday school and stuff. This was an introductory Bible study, and I learned more doctrine debating the Catholic campus minister at the Newman club.

Don't try to build a sense of community and then expect the person want to rely on someone who is not as close to get them to and from a Bible study of people where they don't know who will be there unless that person knows that he/she has some say in their coming and going and will get something out of it.
Sophmore year, they tried to keep us in groups by year again. The only Bible study that Crusade had that I knew of to go to meant I would have to get a ride from someone else I was acquainted with who was my year but in a different freshman Bible study (different dorms) and I had rarely hung out with her outside of the Crusade table at dinner. I didn't feel like I had gotten much learning out of the first one, which I had semi-regularly attended for a while, and I didn't want to give up my freedom to come and go as I wanted during a busy time of my life (as I was involved in a variety of things at the time) to someone else to go to an appartment of someone I didn't really know well, I never went to this Bible study. It bothered me that this was the only option I got for a Bible study with this group. Near the end of the year, I found out that I could go to the commuter bible study, which was held on campus, and I liked this a lot better than my freshman study because it was more serious and less "fun" "hang out" "Jesus loves us" "We should be good" basic Christian stuff. Unfortunately, it also meant I didn't help with the signs for the general meetings that I and my roommate did when we finally got to help with something. I would have been able to go to the freshman Bible study in my dorm this year, and went a couple times, but it was similar to the one I went to my freshman year, and I felt I should be doing more as a sophmore, but did not know how to contribute differently from when I was a freshman.

You are already getting people involved through different activities and good leadership, and I guess I would add from this experience that outside resources might help the community grow. In my community college club, we didn't have a large group. As I understand, our club died off and was re-charted by different people with a different advisor. I think that one of the things that would have helped us as a club would be to have had more outside help. Our advisor had a lot on her plate that year and had been the advirsor for years. If we had had more help finding out how to do certain sorts of events or at least fundraise until we could afford these sorts of events, we might have had more campus involvement. It was basically student led my last year there, except one time when a campus crusade person brought some stuff to a table for us one day. We didn't have litlte bible, much handouts, any concerts, fliers for a local church, or much in the way of formal events. Our small groups were basically our club meetings. We did have to change rooms mid year at least once, which I think at a university is not a good idea, because poeple start to identify a time/place with the club activity. The experience of being involved did help us form a closer friendship because one of our members still invited us over for a Christmas party and people still wanted to go out for lunch for birthdays. This was the first time I'd really become familiar with people taking the birthday person out for lunch. Great idea, btw. Chi Alpha people sometimes do the same thing but with dinner.

While a journal might seem like a lot of work, and when I was most regular about my reading was also a time when I rarely journaled, I think there is value to having a list of the day's reading to check off and not also worry about catching up on the previous day's reading if for some reason I missed it. Also, multiple times available for joining a group can be a blessing, and location can be a strategic benefit.

I've been involved in Chi Alpha for two years. The first year, one of the girl small groups had grown very large and did not split up. This became a main girl bible study with members from different years getting together in the middle of the week around lunch time. We used life-journals, but you weren't totally at a loss if you didn't have one or didn't do the reading. The life journals have a reading schedule and use the SOAP method for journaling. I'd never heard of this before, but it stands for scripture, observation, application, and prayer. We basically read the previous day's scripture reading and talked about it, plus an opening and closing prayer time. A couple times we had snacks. Two girls sort of lead the meetings. At least one time that year, we did prayer walks, which I'd never heard of. You walk around the campus somewhere in prayer, and I guess pray for a person if they standout to you. The journals were made by our affiliated church, which was advertised at the table, and the journals coupld be purchased for $5 if someone wanted to buy one. There was also a co-ed group-and sometimes guys still have insights that girls might find interesting, so I thought that was fine, but I never made it because I had another club meeting.

Apparently what was intended but had grown more without dividing were small groups of about 3 people. Three people would get together, decided what they were going to read, and follow that reading schedule. Members of the group would invited friends to come, and when the group had doubled in size on a regular basis, then the group would split into to groups. Mine last year never quite did, but we met in a cafeteria, which is cool, becasue you can invite a person who is looking for a place to sit to join you. We did that once, and she was a Christian who came a couple more times.

[nightbringer]

Hey sorry for a very late reply to what clearly involved a lot of effort on your part! Thanks for the suggestions once again. There are some things less relevant as we don't have the logistic issues a journal thing might not be a bad idea though our group seems to fail a lot at that kind of commitment hah.

As a general update however, things at my university are going really well =)! The philosophy society continues to express interest in partnering with us, our seeker bible study group is growing every week and one of my friends is beginning to put her faith in God.

[Country Preacher]

I served as "College Minister" at Sam Houston University in Huntsville, TX for 5 years in the mid 80's. We did several things that were received very well....

At the beginning each semester, there were two days where all students came to lock down class assignments, visit counselors, and basically show up on campus for "first day". Our Church (I was the College Minister for a local Baptist Church) would always be there with "free cokes".. we rented a "Coke Wagon", and parked it outside the main arena where the students came to register - we made sure that they understood there were NO STRINGS attached - we had brochures about our Church, but they were not required to sign up or take a brochure, or commit to anything .. "free Coke - no strings attached". This gave us some visibility, and many students would ask us about our Church, and we got many prospects from those "registration days". (I realize a lot of registrations are done online now, but anything you can do on campus for visibility is good)

We discovered that the Campus "meal plan" included all meals EXCEPT SUNDAY NIGHT! I don't know WHY they did that, but that was how it went. SO, we started having a "FREE STUDENT MEAL" at our Church (1/4 mile from Campus) on Sunday Nights with no strings attached. We would have pizza or frito pie, or sandwiches or tortilla soup or "whatever" we could make a lot of for a little money. Afterward, we would have a group bible study / Q&A and I would stress this is NOT a "Baptist" bible study - but anybody is welcome, and all viewpoints will be entertained. It WORKED! Word got out that they could come eat a free meal, and were NOT required to stay for the bible study, but most did stay. And we had some really great discussions, including just simple "get to know you" stuff. Sometimes some icebreakers, sometimes ... who knows.. just a good evening of "get to know you" and Q&A.

After the Sunday Night crowd grew to about 90 to 110 "regulars", we decided to try a Sunday Morning "Preaching Service" just for College kids. While our Church was having "Sunday School" (9:30 - 10:45 AM) our College kids met in the Auditorium for a worship service. THEN, while the "regular folks" were going to Worship service from 11 to Noon, our College kids went to their choice of 4 different Sunday School Classes for college kids. It worked out great. On our very first Sunday, we had 175 College kids in the College Preaching Service!

Wednesday Commuter Lunch. We found out that there were a lot of students on Campus on Wednesdays ONLY, and did not have a "meal plan", so the local BSU (Baptist Student Union) would host a free lunch for the commuters (and anybody else who wanted to come) and the local churches would take turns providing the food. Our church volunteered to take the place of any church who could not make their time of service, PLUS our own 2 or 3 times per semester. Instead of having "chicken spaghetti" or "sandwiches", we would go all out and have a full Texas BBQ meal with Beef, chicken, pork, beans, cole slaw... etc.... it was a hit.

Basically, we looked for opportunities to meet needs where there were "holes", and we filled them. That 5 years of ministry was some of the most fun ministry of my life!