CCO Campus Ministry

Jubilee 2009: Learning to be the solution

This article first appeared in the summer 2009 issue of On Campus magazine.

The thousands of college students who attended the Jubilee conference this year caught a vision of what God could do with the enormous potential available in that Pittsburgh Convention Center ballroom. Many of them left ready to make a difference in the world.

“I want to be more involved in my community to help bring Christ’s love and restoration to those who are often overlooked by society,” said one student.

Andy Crouch, keynote speaker and author of Culture Making, emphasized that, as Christians, students need to cultivate and create culture, not just copy and criticize it.

“I realized that I am a culture maker,” said another student. “I spend so much timeÂ Â stuck in the rut of life that I rarely spend time imagining the possible. That is my goal, to spend more time letting God into my imagination to show me where the possible is.”

This is what makes college ministry so powerful. Traditional college students are at a stage in their lives where the possibilities are endless. They are still making decisions about what kinds of people they will choose to be. They are culture makers, today on their campuses and tomorrow in their workplaces and communities.

Bill Strickland, another keynote speaker and founder of the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, an arts and job-training center for the poor, is a culture transformer himself. His work in Pittsburgh’s economically-challenged North Side neighborhood has made a tremendous impact on the people and culture of an entire community and is even now being replicated in similar settings around the country. Students were electrified by his presentation.

“I loved Mr. Strickland’s talk. It inspired me to see what is possible. I feel that I am being called to start something that is new, something that will solve a problem creatively. [Jubilee] encouraged me to take a step back and look at the bigger picture of God’s kingdom rather than just focusing on my own life.”

Jubilee 2009 set the stage to unleash the imaginations of these energetic college students, giving them concrete examples of how they might contribute positive change to a broken world. Jubilee challenges students not just to talk about solutions. It equips them to be the solution.

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