“Every group I’ve studied has followed roughly the same pattern.  In fact, with only two exceptions, I have never seen a campus ministry grow after the first month of the year.”

Three weeks into the Fall quarter finds most students in a rut.  They’ve picked their classes, joined their clubs and scheduled every waking minute between now and Thanksgiving.  Some have carved out time for “significant others,” most will have set aside entire weekends for football, pizza and parties, and a few will even have blocked out an hour or two for class.  But by the end of the first month it’s all in stone.  And if attending your large group meeting isn’t in their schedule by then, there is little hope it will be there come May.

During my 8 years with a church-based campus ministry in Washington State, I watched student involvement at our large group meetings climb from 150 to 700.  With the exception of one small hiccup up, all of that growth occurred in the Fall.  If we ended Spring quarter with 200 students, we started back in September with 350.  That May we’d be down around 300-far from growing, every group seems to lose numbers over the year-but by the next Fall we started with 450.  We grew by starting strong.  Every other group I’ve studied has followed roughly the same pattern.  In fact, with only two exceptions, I have never seen a campus ministry grow after the first month of the year.  And that means that if you’re serious about expanding your influence you need to begin with a shout.  If ever there was a time for a home run, it’s the first meeting of the Fall quarter.

Be Ready: Of course, starting strong is hard to do because first meetings are full of early season mistakes. The worship team is rusty, the microphones are lost and no one can find a three-prong adaptor to plug in the overhead.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.  Use the summer to jump start the Fall.  Put summer students to work preparing publicity and drama.  Work on your first message during June and July so it’s one of the strongest you give.  Ask the worship team to come back to campus a few days early for a planning and preparation retreat.  Or hire the worship band from a local church to help you begin with a bang.  Hold a dress rehearsal the night before.  Make it a party and buy pizza for the whole team.

Additionally, apply the popular business philosophy of continuous improvement. Keep a separate file folder just for the events that occur during the first few weeks of the Fall quarter, and as those events unfold critique them.  What could we do next year?  How could we have reached out more effectively to freshman?  Should we have started the meeting earlier? Later? Gone shorter? Longer? By continually updating this file-technically called an After Action Report-you can insure that your kick-offs get better and better.

Be Visible: If you normally meet in a church or a room that is the least bit hard to find move your first meeting.  We picked one of the most visible buildings in the middle of campus even though that meant competing with a back-to-school kick off dance right outside the door. If your school has an activity fair where you can advertise, set up the best booth and offer the most free food. I’d suggest spending up to seventy-five percent of your advertising budget for the entire year on your first couple of meetings-and be creative.  Anybody can do posters.  Try banners, balloons, sandwich boards, flyers, blackboard blitzes and, of course, personal invitations. We sent out letters to all returning students welcoming them back to school and inviting them to our first meeting.  The invitation includes the who, what, where, when, and why of every event we have planned during the first week, and ends with me egging them to invite anyone and everyone they know to our very first meeting.  If they will send me the name of someone they’d like invited, I’ll send them a letter or give them a call.  We also make a special effort to reach freshman by handing out lots of flyers around the freshman dorms and in their registration lines. I know several Christian groups whose members come back to campus early just so they can help freshman move into the dorms.  They find that by being one of the first friendly faces a freshman meets it’s easy to form friendships that might later lead to a chance to share the Gospel or invite someone to a meeting.

The Sardine Effect: During the 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy’s advance man picked small high school gymnasiums for their political rallies.  He didn’t want the nicest auditorium to meet in; he wanted a place they could pack.  We’ve done the same. In fact, the room we now use seats 150 fewer students than we expect.  The fire marshal hates us, but the energy we create is incredible.

Pray, pray and pray. But not right before the meeting.  The last place you want your leaders just before the start of the first meeting is locked up in a room with you.  They should be out inviting friends, greeting early arrivals or picking up newcomers who need a ride.  Hold your prayer meeting earlier in the week or earlier in the day. That frees everyone up to deal with last minute headaches and mingle with people.

Force Fellowship: Helping freshmen feel welcome is one of the biggest challenges you’ll face; especially since upper-class students all gravitate to friends they haven’t seen in three months.  Place greeters at the door, plead with your Bible study leaders to befriend lost freshmen and end the meeting by asking people to find two people they don’t know and introduce themselves. I also explained that everyone-including our staff-feels like everybody here knows everybody else-except them.  The bigger the group the more of an issue this becomes and the more proactively you need to deal with it.

The Meeting: First meetings are not for regular attendees.  Serve food, skip inside jokes, explain all terms, don’t sing any songs that you do not have the words for and otherwise bend over backwards to make visitors feel welcome.  Screen all announcements and any drama to be certain they are done well.  Seekers and nominal Christians are more likely to check you out at the beginning of the year-actually, most everyone is there to check out the opposite sex.  This is a point I make during the beginning of my talk because it’s guaranteed to prompt lots of nervous laughter-so adjust worship and your first message. Be light. Be user friendly. Be funny. Be short. Your goal is to get them to sign up for a Bible study and come back next week, not explain the finer points of the hypostatic union.

“… the first 168 hours after a student sets foot on campus represents the most strategic time for them to get plugged into your fellowship.”

Follow Up: Life long friendships are often formed in the first few days of college, so cram as many opportunities for bonding into that week as you can.  We held a picnic the afternoon after our first meeting and sponsored a social event that weekend. Additionally, our staff worked around the clock placing people in small group Bible studies.  Our goal was that everyone who signed up for a study was contacted within twenty-four hours by his or her study leader.  That means at least one all-nighter for our staff, but it was worth it.  We wanted Bible Study leaders to be able to spend time with the members of their study during the first week.  They could meet with them at the weekend social, walk with them to church that first Sunday and sit with them at the next large group meeting.

Was all of this work easy?  Not hardly.  Trying to jump-start a college ministry is a lot like trying to kick start an aircraft carrier.  At least two or three people will nearly die of exhaustion.  But someone has to do it and without question the first 168 hours after a student sets foot on campus represent the most strategic time for them to get plugged into your fellowship.  Plan now to begin with a bang.

All the details you need, as well as links to invite your friends to your local Launch Party are at www.jubileeconference.com.

This year, we are offering an exclusive student T-shirt for Jubilee 2011. These shirts can only be ordered online—they won’t be available anywhere else.

The shirt is a light gray, American Apparel, 100% comfy cotton T featuring the Jubilee 2011 design. These shirts are $11 each. Click here to order yours!

If you order your T-shirt by September 13th, it will be available for pick-up at the Jubilee Launch Party near you.  We can also deliver shirts to your CCO campus minister in October or, for $2 extra, ship it directly to you. Perfect for student leaders who want to help other students hear about Jubilee.

As I sit here at my desk, sipping a cup of really strong coffee, listening to Tom Petty, what I’m thinking I’d really like to do is pour you a cup and just chat about how college is going. But since you aren’t here and I’m not there, we’ll have to make do with this note.

If you’re like most students I know, when you got your acceptance to your college and started sharing the news, you heard something like this from lots of middle-aged and elderly people: “Oh my—what wonderful news! I’m so very happy for you. This is going to be a wonderful time. You know, the college years are the best years of your life!” I’ve shared this story hundreds of time with collegians, and have almost never met a college student who hasn’t heard this line—and heard it a bunch of times! When I ask, “How does it make you feel?” it starts out fine. At first it’s pretty terrific. “Wow—college is going to be so cool!” Then I ask, “Is that all?” Then it starts to dawn on them. “Maybe this isn’t so terrific. I mean, if these are the best years and they end when I’m like twenty-two . . . then what!?” The people saying this to you are forty-five or fifty-eight or seventy-two and they still believe the college years were the best years of their lives!? Are they saying that life looks like the picture at the top of this article? Am I destined to half a century of boredom and decline after I graduate? These are mature people who love me—they must know, right?

I don’t think so. The college years are indeed wonderful. They’re unique years for most people in terms of the learning, the lifestyle, the friendships, and the constant variety (which most people call “freedom,” by which they usually just mean “lack of routine”). College is great, but it’s just one important chapter of life. And that’s the point—it’s part of a complete life.

Choose life
It turns out that what you think life is all about, what it’s for, how it’s to grow and evolve over time are among the most important ideas in your head. How you make decisions about what to do with your life, and how you assess how your life is going, all depend on the picture that you’ve chosen for what life is supposed to be. Now is a great time to be choosing those ideas carefully, as the wise teacher suggests in the Bible’s Book of Ecclesiastes, chapter twelve. Most people choose in their twenties how they’re going to feel about their lives in their fifties and sixties, and never realize that they’re doing it. There may be no more important thing that happens in the college years than how you begin the task of thinking about how to think about what your life means. It takes work and intention. If you don’t choose your ideas, others will be happy to select them for you.

The purpose of life is to grow and to increase all our life long. Paul assures us that he is “sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1). Moses’s final word to God’s people as they entered the promised land was “choose life,” which Jesus affirmed in his coming that we might “have life and have it abundantly” (Deuteronomy 30 and John 10). So, what’s up with this “college is the best years of your life” thing? Well, I suggest the best thing to do is to go find someone who’s twenty or thirty years out of college and is saying that their best years are now. She might say, “Wow, college is great. I hope you have a good experience there. I loved it. I mean, I sure wouldn’t trade being fifty-eight for being twenty again. Fifty-eight is the best! I’ve worked really hard to earn the privilege of being this old and the benefits are so worth the wait. Be sure and enjoy your twenties. Pay attention to this time you’re entering, but rest assured—the best is yet to come.”

Go find that person. Find a handful of them if you can. You may have to probe a bit, because most of them won’t be noisy about it, but they’re out there. Find out what makes her tick. Find out what he thought about when he was your age and how that’s changed. Figure out how different people grow their view of “life” and notice how that view informs the way they choose, and act, and experience their lives. Plant life-giving, nourishing ideas in that brain of yours and your heart will be ever-grateful.

Expand your worldview and find a point of view, and don’t settle for one that anticipates years of decline beyond your youth. Dream not only big but long as you imagine what you’ll do with your one wild and precious life. And try these books written specifically to your situation: Sharon Parks’s Big Questions, Worthy Dreams, and Steve Garber’s Fabric of Faithfulness.

Get a new arrow—get out, not in
Most new college students have worked awfully hard to get in. Just get in to a good school and all will be well. Life has been focused inbound—just get in—but eventually that has to change. At some point, life is not about getting in, it’s about getting out. Thinking about life beyond college (actually, thinking about life, period) is much different than being focused on the singular goal of college entrance. Sure, you can renew the “just get in” approach by focusing on grad school (or the job, or getting married, or whatever), but that’s just a delaying action. Put the pointy part on the other end of the arrow.

Point out to life, not in to college. During college, don’t live like you’re still applying to get in. Live like you’re there and you’re preparing to head out. Life is like live television: this is it, now. What I’m suggesting is actually a huge shift in perspective, and it can make a world of difference. (Check out the animated cartoon to Alan Watts’ sage counsel on this matter at http://www.neticons.net/music_life/).

Ask people about what they do and why
I spend a lot of time talking to people about what they’re going to do with their lives—their vocation, their calling. The religious term for it is discernment. There’s nowhere near enough room here to go into discernment adequately (you might start with the book Listening Hearts, by Suzanne Farnham et al.), but I do have one suggestion. Talk to people in careers and lifestyles which interest you. I am constantly amazed at how rarely students do this. Here’s a conversation I had with a bright, engaging, faithful young woman during her junior year in college:

So, what are you thinking about after college?
I’m really torn between being a lawyer and a teacher.
Really—those are pretty different. How’s that decision going for you?
Terrible! I’m just not getting anywhere!!
Wow—how long has that been going on?
Three years—the whole time I’ve been here at school.
Well, when you talk to lawyers, what are you hearing, and when you talk to teachers, what stands out to you?
I haven’t really talked to any.

She was talking to her friends and getting lots of sympathy but almost no help. Oh, and did I mention that her dad is a lawyer and her mother is a teacher? I’ve had similar conversations countless times, and it breaks my heart. There is so much indecision that really has no real chance of progress because there is no meaningful data. Artful discernment depends on finding a grounding in the issues, and the more embodied and real that grounding is the better. That means talking to people. Ask them to tell you their story and what it’s like in their work. Sometimes this process is called information interviewing, but don’t let that term throw you—it’s just talking to people.

In order to make the kinds of decisions you need to make in college, like selecting your major and what initial direction you want to take in your career, you have to get off campus. You can’t address all of college’s questions in college. It’s not that hard to talk to people; it’s just hard to get started. The good news is that you’ve got a cell phone and so does everyone else, so call and ask someone out for lunch.

There’s so much more to talk about, like when your major matters to your career and when it doesn’t (lots of times it actually doesn’t), or whether taking classes is a good way to discover your interests (is your personal epistemological style of discovery cognitive?), or why you ought to pick electives more for great teachers than great topics (great learning is better than the right curriculum), but we’re out of time. I guess we’ll just have to have another cup of coffee another day.

Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.

College is a time for falling in love, reading great books, and asking big questions. It is a time for adventure and exploration, discovery and delight—for “tensed leisure,” as Calvin Seerveld sometimes calls it. While our deepest loves may take root in childhood, it is in our young adult years that we are most likely to begin to articulate the implications of what we love for how we hope to live. For those of us privileged to spend time at college, the provocations offered by books and movies, paintings and songs, teachers and friends encountered during these years bring us to question the answers we have inherited from our parents. Sometimes we appropriate those answers for ourselves with deepened conviction, and sometimes—wrenchingly—we reach for other more convincing and more coherent answers. It is a time in which we can try out different ideas, ways of life, kinds of work, with a little more wiggle-room in the face of destiny, and a little more tolerance from others for backing out of options we find to be cul-de-sacs. For some of us, there is a little less pressure to put food on the table by the sweat of our brows and, therefore, a little more of Seerveld’s classical leisure for reading, visiting art galleries, staying up late over beer or coffee to talk through things, wrestling with writing in which we bring our selves to bear on concerns common to humanity through the ages or peculiar to our own time and place.

I remember with great fondness long hours spent in the library of the University of Cape Town in the early months of 1990 when, unexpectedly released from conscripted work, I briefly laboured as a full-time graduate student. It is in those months that I fell in love with the New York Intellectuals through their opinion journalism—one of the great loves of my life—and for the first time began struggling with the big questions raised by African poverty in an honestly post-utopian way. Compared to the preceding five years of doing a full-time day job as a conscript and doing a full load of undergraduate and graduate studies at night, it was leisure indeed. But it truly was “tensed leisure”—filled with effort and potential, like an archer’s bent bow. My reading started early in the morning and ended late at night, and I spent long laborious hours trying to think and write through the perplexing troubles of postcolonial Africa, and the questions they raised about being human, living together in a society, and trying to change the way things are in a world bent out of shape. The questions I considered in those months were genuinely academic—that is, informed by the long traditions and stringent standards of scholarship, while simultaneously being urgently connected to the salient issues in late apartheid-era South Africa. My intellectual forays were prompted by curiosity, but sustained by a near-irresistible insistence that rose up out of both the times and my own life stage of young adulthood: to choose a life, to take a stand, to decide what is to be done.

I am convinced that any attentive, thoughtful young adult will find big questions rising up within themselves. The following seven questions are important for all of life—and the college years offer a uniquely privileged setting in which to seriously consider them.

1. What do I love?
The most basic question anyone can ask themselves is, “What do I love?” Steven Garber writes in The Fabric of Faithfulness that “It is in that question and the spiritual dynamics implicit in its answer that belief and behavior are woven together.”

We love a great many things. I enjoy asking people to write down a list of fifty things they love. Making such a list is an illuminating exercise. I review my own list several times a year—usually in preparation of a class or workshop in which I am planning to use the exercise. I encourage people to list items that range from the sublime (for example, their love for their spouse) to the ridiculous (for example, my love for Stabilo Sensor pens), in random order, to share their lists with others, and to amend their lists whenever they wish. Once they have a provisionally complete list, I suggest that they circle the four to six items on the list that they love most deeply, and that they write down a few notes on the relationships between these four to six.

The list of my own four to six deepest loves includes God, Angela (my wife), Tala and Hannah (my daughters), reading, and neocalvinism. I have learned a great deal about myself in the last three or so years as I have considered the relationships among my deepest loves. For example, I have realized that there is a close and perhaps inextricable connection between my love for Angela and my love for God. It was Angela who was instrumental in introducing me to the love of God, when in 1982 she bought me a previously owned copy of The Good News New Testament at a street market in Cape Town—and it is my love of God that ultimately anchors me to a faithful and trusting marriage with Angela, despite my vigorous appreciation of feminine beauty at large. As my love of God is nurtured, so is my love for Angela—and vice versa.

Human loves are not rhizomatic but, instead, exist in a hierarchy, with all of our loves being ultimately rooted in a single, deepest love, an ultimate commitment that enables and at the same time relativizes all of our other loves—a love that serves as a god. When asking the question, “What do I love?”, during the college years, our answers include matters of taste—in clothes and music, food and poetry, coffee and beer—and intimate relationships—a man or woman with whom, maybe, to partner for life or a circle of friends—but all of these emerging loves derive their deepest meaning from the decisions we make about the god we will love and who will root, centre, and encompass all of our lives.

2. What do I believe?
Our most sincere convictions grow out of our deepest loves. Our ultimate commitment to something that is radical, central, total—something that roots, holds, and encompasses all of our lives, as one of my college mentors, Danie Strauss (no relation), taught—is expressed in our beliefs about the relation between the world and the divine.

Everyone understands the world to be somehow dependent upon something that is itself independent—something self-existent, as Roy Clouser calls it in his Myth of Religious Neutrality, something that can therefore be defined as “divine.” Sometimes we identify some part or aspect of the world as self-existent, as the very early Greek philosopher Thales did water. Clouser calls such divinity beliefs pagan. Sometimes we identify the world as a whole to be a part or aspect of that which is self-existent, as is the case in Hindu philosophies. Clouser calls such divinity beliefs pantheist. The teaching of the Bible is that God is not part of the world, and the world is not part of God, but that the whole world is entirely dependent on God for its existence—it is a creation of God. The truth of creation and its surprising focus in the incarnate Jesus is expressed best, I think, by the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Colossians when he writes:

“[Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col 1:15-20, ESV).

Our ultimate commitment finds expression in divinity beliefs, which themselves most often ground the big stories—the grand narratives—we tell as truth about the genesis, coherent structure, and purposeful meaning (in the face of evil) of reality.

In seeking to answer the question, “What do I believe?”, perhaps a good way to go about it is to ask: “What stories do I believe to be true to the reality of things?” Much has been written in recent years about the importance of stories to the ways in which we humans make sense of the world—the narrative ethics of Stanley Hauerwas and the narrative theology of N. T. Wright being prime examples. “Story” in this sense is a metaphor, and there are certainly other warranted metaphors for the ways in which we try to make sense of the world and our lives. We can think of the world and our lives in terms of maps and journeys, as lists, as logical arguments, as prospects and perspectives (like the popular metaphor of a worldview), or in the terms of number of other metaphors. But stories are the most common and profound ways in which we try to understand the world. Stories are dynamic and coherent. They have a plot with a beginning, a dramatic climax in the middle, and a conclusive and meaningful end. They have characters and a conflict, so that it makes imaginative sense to trace the trajectory of a human life from birth through the travails of life to death in terms of a story. Stories have protagonists and antagonists—heroes and villains. We understand our own stories in those terms.

In wondering what stories are true, young adulthood can unfold as years of imaginative flourishing if they include the pleasures of being educated by novels, plays and movies. While I cannot say with Joseph Epstein that “novels … have been the most decisive in forming my character,” I do believe that digging into novels—and in particular the greatest novels, by Austen and Bellow, Cervantes and Dostoyevsky, Eliot and Flaubert—and the list goes on—is a necessary part of the education of our imaginations, necessary to a discovery of the stories we believe to tell the most truth. My own daughters, while not quite young adults yet, have come to profound conclusions about the nature of love and justice, wit and honesty, through their watching and reading of Shakespeare’s plays—perhaps, the most imaginative and thought-provoking set of stories in English literature. Similarly, we can discover what we believe by asking questions of the movies we watch, if to a lesser degree. Denis Haack writes that some of the best storytellers of our time are using the medium of film to tell their stories, so that if we want to understand the stories that people of our own time believe to be true to reality, we have to watch and consider movies.

The greatest stories challenge us most deeply with their possible truth. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; Shakespeare; the Bible. I do not see how a young adult, seeking to make sense of the world, can get around reading these stories, with critical humility, trying to understand if they tell the truth, or not.

Deciding what we believe is not only about the stories told by others. It is also about the stories we tell ourselves, and most significantly, the story we tell of our own lives. A grand narrative only gains meaning for us as it intersects with our personal narratives. Telling our own stories and being listened to attentively and with care, by friends, is one of the most profound—while often unsettling—experiences available to us at any time of our lives. It is as we tell our own stories, and imaginatively weave it onto the grand narrative we believe to be true of the whole world, that we begin to make sense of who we are. It is as we explain where we started, where we come from, as we articulate the coherent plot lines of our lives, despite many detours, highs and lows, and reach for a sense of personal meaning and purpose, in particular as we face up to the evil around and within us, that we discover—and to a significant extent forge—our individual identities. Through our stories we make sense of what it is we are living for.

3. Where do I belong?
The confessional tradition into which I am adopted has as one of its biggest and most familiar big questions this: “What is your only comfort in life and death?” The historical answer to the question is, “That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.”

One of the things this interrogatory gets right is the link between our deep need for comfort and the necessity of its being met in a complete belonging. While the deepest sense of belonging can only be met by being rooted in a relationship with the divine, we humans are neighbourly creatures. We also need the comfort of belonging to and among other human beings.

Abraham Maslow correctly identified the need for belonging as a basic human need. While I am not a wholesale social constructionist, I think Kenneth Gergen, and perhaps more so Peter Berger, are on to something when they suggest that our sense of identity is derived from our social relationships. I am to a large extent who I am—or at least who I understand myself to be—because of the people among whom I belong.

For most people, the close relationships of the family provide us with our earliest and most immediate sense of belonging. For many people, a faith community provides perhaps the deepest and most enduring sense of belonging. Today, perhaps most obviously, our work communities loom largest in giving us a less profound but more consuming sense of belonging. Perhaps, less than before but still significantly for many people—including my family—our neighbourhood provides us with a familiar place and community.

Among young adults, at least since the advent of modern popular culture, the friendship of peers is the most decisive matrix for developing a sense of belonging. In recent years the importance of friendship has been a leading theme in popular culture, as in the television series Friends. It is a great gift if we are able to cultivate friendships in our youth and young adulthood that can persist throughout our adult lives, and if these friends can challenge and encourage us to live lives true to our deepest commitments and most sincere convictions. As Greg Veltman writes in “Making friends for life,” “Friendship shows us that it is possible to know and be known, to love and be loved.”

4. Who am I?
Our character, and with it our sense of personal identity, is rooted in our commitments, nourished by our communities, and articulated in terms of our convictions. I best understand myself in terms of what I love, with whom I am friends, and by what I believe. As Steven Garber writes in The Fabric of Faithfulness, our character is additionally shaped in relation to more experienced mentors who in their lives embody the commitments and convictions we share.

Mentors whom we know face-to-face and heroes whom we know mostly through our readings of history, literature, and sacred scriptures serve as models for our own development of character. The question, “Who am I?”, is answered in part when we ask “Like whom am I?” Young adults in college have the double privilege of developing relationships with mentors and of immersing themselves in great books inhabited by a great variety of heroes against whom to consider their own lives and aspirations.
Consider, for example, some of the questions raised by Shakespeare’s heroes. Is enduring historical fame worth the sacrifice of everything else? Is passionate romantic love worth civic disturbance and family honour? When is a mentor a millstone, and what is to be done in that event? Is revenge possible and necessary? Do we forge our own personalities, or is it shaped by forces beyond ourselves?

My own sense of identity has been shaped by several heroes and mentors, but in no case have I tried to emulate someone else comprehensively. For example, one of my mentors during my teens was an Anglican monk in South Africa, Anthony Perry, whose monastery was the only site we could find in our province for a multi-racial youth camp. I strive to be like Anthony in his relentlessly living his convictions in the face of political censure, in his commitment to building institutions, in his combination of thorough scholarship with passionate (but quiet, below-the-radar) activism. I do not, however, seek to live a life of monastic poverty, celibacy, and obedience. Especially not the celibacy! As another example, Angela and I seek to live a life like that of Edith and Francis Schaeffer, in nurturing a home and family life characterized by generous hospitality, thoughtful conversation, and thoroughgoing trust in the care of God. But we do not seek for our home to be an exotic pilgrimage destination, and we do not see our primary vocation as a couple to be that of missionaries.

5. What hurt needs healing in the world?
Perhaps the most often quoted sentence by novelist and essayist Frederick Buechner reads, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” The question of calling or vocation—obtaining a sense of personal purpose or mission in the world, in particular with regard to our work—is one of the most burning questions facing college-age people. It is partly in paying attention to the world’s hunger, pain, and brokenness that we begin to discover our own answers to this question.

Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase translated as “repairing the world.” While it refers in the first place to the work of God in returning the world to its original purposes, it is also a call to us to participate in that work. It is a phrase popularly used by Jewish social activists (reflected in the name of the journal of opinion Tikkun) and by followers of the currently fashionable mystical kabbalah tradition in Judaism. Without succumbing to the mystical panentheism of the kabbalah, this phrase does point us to the need for people belonging to God to be involved in God’s repair of the world.

Finding our task in the world, our mission in life, requires attending to the pain, the brokenness in the world. Abraham Kuyper—another of my heroes—said in a famous speech in 1891, on the “social problem”—the problem of urban poverty in the wake of the industrial revolution—that

Only one thing is necessary if the social question is to exist for you: you must realize the untenability of the present state of affairs, and you must account for this untenability not by incidental causes but by a fault in the very foundation of our society’s organization. If you do not acknowledge this and think that social evil can be exorcised through an increase in piety, or through friendlier treatment or more generous charity, then you may believe that we face a religious question or possibly a philanthropic question, but you will not recognize the social question. This question does not exist for you until you exercise an architectonic critique of human society, which leads to the desire for a different arrangement of the social order.

Finding our vocation requires exercising an architectonic critique, also in our age. The college years offer a wonderful opportunity to hear, read and view insightful social criticism that exposes the evil in the world and in our own hearts, and its consequences in the oppression, exploitation, injustice, poverty, anger, fear, pain, and loss suffered around the world and in our own neighbourhoods. There are faults in the very architecture of society, and if we do not know where the faultlines lie we cannot know where to insert ourselves as healers and bringers of hope.

But answering this question requires more than listening, reading and watching. It also requires that our hearts be broken.

6. What potential waits to be realized?
The world is not only broken—it also . . . no, primarily . . . continues to be God’s good creation, with all of the possibilities embedded in it by God at the beginning of time. The world is pregnant with potential, waiting to be disclosed through human care, stewardship, and cultivation.

God enfolded the patterns of possibility into the world—the poetry of human-making lies in the imaginative unfolding, opening up of these possibilities.

The vocational quest of the college student demands more than critique—it requires reflection on the patterns embedded in the structure of reality, patterns that provide a template in terms of which critique is possible, and that offer a matrix within which discovery and invention flourishes. I remember the deep delight of such reflection, in catching glimpses of the wisdom that shapes the world, the awe and wonder that arise in the process of discovery, and the subsequent pleasure of invention and organization, as we enjoy the entrepreneurial pleasure of educated prudence brought to bear on professional and institutional tasks and challenges.

College is a time for cultivating a sense of wonder that can feed a lifetime of opening up the possibilities in the world, be it in taking care of a small backyard vegetable garden or restructuring global commodity markets, writing laws or raising a family, singing songs or teaching students.

7. What is to be done?
The question raised by Lenin draws young adults out of the appropriate reflection and “tensed leisure” of the college years into the responsibilities of a lifetime.

Love, brokenheartedness, and wonder are necessary elements of college life, but by themselves, insufficient. Critique and discovery must translate into responsible action. And action requires strategic vision and tactical skill.

As I have written elsewhere, young adults need college cafeteria alcoves in which to passionately “argue the world,” figuring out what is to be done. One of my favourite examples of college students arguing over what is to be done is Alcove No. 1 at the City College of New York, in the 1930s, as described by Irving Kristol:

It provided serious conversation, even heated debate, around big questions as they connected with public life. It provided options and nuances on current affairs, but in conscious interaction with a grand encompassing tradition (in this case, marxism and its nearest neighbourhood, especially as mediated by an immediately preceding generation). It offered companionship around shared concerns, but also over and against a common adversary (stalinism, and in particular the stalinism of the alcove next door!). It was a place where books and magazine articles could be enthusiastically shared and vigorously discussed.

The college years, in offering a space for heartbreak and wonder, and strategic argument, offers a space in which to begin to realize and answer calling. To make the most of that space, it is necessary to do more than read—provided one does read! It is necessary to acquire certain kinds of experience: the experience of travel, finding an understanding of places different from one’s home town, sharing the wonder of new landscapes and the pain of foreign shanty towns, and the experience of volunteer service, in which a certain generosity at work and humility in leadership can begin to be cultivated.

* * *

There are big questions that only become urgent later in life. After some years of adult work, most of us begin asking, “How am I doing?” What expertise have I developed during my years of apprenticeship? It is good to cultivate an attitude of reflective practice: open to learning from failure, engaged in relentless incrementalism but not stubborn foolhardiness, regularly stepping back to consider our work by means of a journal, a retreat, and morning prayer. In time, some of us begin to wonder, “Who can I tell?” Out of our own experiences grows a desire to mentor and teach others, to share our expertise, to testify to our discoveries, to pass on the torch to someone who can carry on a tradition and steward a legacy. And for those who take on the responsibility of leadership, in time the question arises, “How do I say thank you?” The business leader and thinker Max De Pree famously wrote that “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant and a debtor. That sums up the progress of an artful leader.” Saying thank you is one expression of the ethics of gratitude: an approach to life that grows out of the realization that we receive all of life, including our own work, as a gift, and that the best we have to offer is the expression of gratitude, also by giving away our efforts as gifts, even when we are getting paid to do a job.

It is good to “party.” It is necessary to learn skills that can be traded in the job market. But a college education limited to beer and business skills is the prelude to a life wasted. So I beseech my student readers . . . Fall in love! Read beyond the requirements! And . . . Ask big questions!

Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.

Joe was looking for Christian fellowship when he arrived as a freshman at Kent State University, and he connected to the CCO’s ministry almost immediately. It wasn’t long before he was serving on the student leadership team for Late Night Christian Fellowship, and during his junior year, he lived in the CCO-sponsored discipleship community, called Kairos House. He spent two summers working as a camp counselor at Ligonier Camp & Conference Center, and he regularly attended the Jubilee conference.

“Jubilee had a great impact on me and really taught me how to embrace whole-life discipleship,” Joe says. “It also gave me some great insights into how my future career and faith intertwined.”

Joe graduated from Kent State in 2000 with a degree in business finance, and today, he and his wife, Jodi, continue to live in Kent. Joe serves as President of the Kent Credit Union, and Joe and Jodi are active members of Riverwood Community Chapel. They host a weekly “life group” in their home, a Bible study gathering of couples close to their age.

“My faith has made a great difference in how I look at life decisions,” Joe says. “It influenced who I would marry, my job decisions, everything. I try to weigh each decision on how it can advance God’s kingdom instead of my own agenda. I am called daily to share my faith. The main people I am in contact with on a daily basis are my co-workers. As the leader of my company, they look to my example. I try to reflect the light of Christ to them in our work environment.

The CCO’s ministry really encouraged me to see my whole life as belonging to Christ, instead of just ‘church’ type things. It broadened my view of the world and my place in it. This means that Christ is Lord of my relationships, career, family, church, and everything else. It is a constant battle to surrender and give God the control, but things always work out better that way. I find if I get out of God’s way and submit to him, I can live in the freedom of knowing that God is in control and working through me, instead of taking that entire burden upon myself.”

“Proverbs 19:21 says, ‘Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails,’” quotes Rachel. “My life since college has been a series of misses on my part. I squandered my days chasing after my own desires rather than the desires of the Lord. Since his grip has been firmly placed upon my life, he has ultimately led every experience to this place.

“After attending Urbana 2009, Elliott and I heard a distinct call from the Lord to serve together in missions—wherever that may be and however that may look. Right now, our ministry will be to serve college students in mentorship and discipleship.”

“I want to work for the CCO because I want to challenge students to take one step beyond themselves and take one step deeper into the wilderness, that they might be transformed,” says Jamie. “I want to help students to take what they learn on the mountain and translate it back to their day-to-day lives.”

Previously, Jamie worked at Camp Merri-Mac in Black Mountain, North Carolina as a counselor and backpacking instructor. In Ligonier, Pennsyvlania, she spent time as a horse wrangler for Ligonier Camp and Conference Center.

Click here to find out why he works for the CCO, why he thinks students should consider participating in the CCO-sponsored Ocean City Beach Project, and which sports teams he cheers for.