Disciple: The Church’s Best-Kept Evangelism Secret
Campus ministry teaches what it means to say “God loves you. No exceptions.”
By the Rev. Kevin Matthews
One of the privileges of being a campus ministry is having the opportunity (some would say the need) to try new things. Today’s students are never the same as yesterday’s, so the need to reinvent the ministry can come at a rapid pace. Things we did for years suddenly don’t work anymore. Furthermore, it is no secret that, no matter how large and successful a campus ministry is, it will lose between one-quarter and one-third of its students every single year due to graduations, transfers, studies abroad and the shifting lives of young adults.
Take a moment and think about that. Imagine if you knew for a fact that one-quarter to one-third of your congregation would depart every year.
What that means in practical terms is that just to maintain the ministry, an equal number of students have to join each year to balance the departures. For the ministry to grow, the number of incoming students must exceed the departures. And that is just numbers; it doesn’t begin to delve into the student leadership that may be
lost as students move on and how that leadership might
be replaced.
But while we hope you don’t experience the regular turnover campus ministries do, you may find that the approach to campus ministry has a lot to share in terms of how we all might approach ministry.
[Images throughout: In order to succeed, campus ministries need to meet people where they are, embrace them for who they are and proclaim the all-encompassing love of God boldly. At St. Mary’s House, that looks like worship for all ages, embracing LGBTQ+ and neurodiverse students, sharing meals and karaoke. Not pictured: Dungeons & Dragons. Photos courtesy of St. Mary’s House]
PANDEMIC LESSONS
The pandemic was the extreme version of the turnover challenge. None of us were prepared for what it would do to campus ministry. In fact, two years of students being home wiped out many ministries. On a public school campus, there was no way to get the names of Episcopal students with whom to be in touch, though this admittedly was never a deep reservoir of information. At the private school I also served, the contact list was down to three students my last year.
When the world reopened post-pandemic, our only goal for the first semester was to get students back into our building and breathe some life into it. What we did not realize until later was that we had stumbled onto something that should be obvious for ministries everywhere: Our purpose was to provide ministry to our community. Period.
In our case, that meant establishing a few underlying principles. First, our building had to be a safe space for anyone who entered, regardless of religion, gender, sexual orientation or church experience. Second, it was not enough to say that to ourselves; we had to proclaim boldly so that people would hear and see it. Our fall kickoff booth on the first day of classes included both a Pride flag and a Black Lives Matter flag. Our banner had a large D20 die on it, signaling that Dungeons & Dragons was part of what we did.
Third, while worship was offered, no one was to feel obligated to participate in it. Put another way, worship was not used as an evangelism tool. Those who entered our building would learn about Christianity by how we treated them, regardless of their relationship to Christianity or religion at all.
To be clear, we never hid who we were. It’s almost impossible to walk in the building and not see the huge crucifix in the nave/meeting room/eating space/game center/karaoke lounge. After the pandemic, though, we became a hospital for souls. We were ministering to students who had missed several key rites of passage and were finding their way back to something like normal.
The result was that we forged the most diverse campus ministry we ever had. A good portion of the Christians were, in fact, “exvangelicals,” many of whom had been kicked out of evangelical churches and would probably have been out of church altogether had they not found us. We attracted students who never heard the gospel message that starts with “God loves you. No exceptions.”
While that was how we got there, other Episcopal campus ministers will tell you that their groups are very similar to ours: a few students from mainline churches, a lot of LGBTQ+ students and exvangelicals. There are some converts from other religions, and even some from no religious background.
In other words, we’re doing evangelism. I would venture to say that many of us did not start out with the intention of specifically attracting the particular groups of students we have. We just learned that if we proclaim a God of love, we will attract people who often have heard only a gospel of fear and anger.
Once the message of “God loves you. No exceptions” was received and trusted as our actions matched the words, the relationship deepened from there. The students soon asked for a Bible study, and before the school year was out, they had started a community garden. Even Dungeons & Dragons turned out to meet a need for students of neurodiverse backgrounds. We broke through the wall that says, “Church is for religious people.”
APPLYING THE LESSONS
So, the real question is, can what campus ministers have learned about growth and meeting the needs of people outside of the church be enacted in every church? I’d like to think so.
It might be easy to look at campus ministry and say that it is a simpler system than a town or community in which a parish exists. That certainly is true. Campuses are their own ecosystems, but the needs of those who live within them still mirror the needs of those who reside in any community.
The lessons still apply:
- Focus ministry on the needs of the community you are trying to reach, not your need for membership. What can you offer to someone in the community? Be useful in ways the community can identify.
- Declare boldly and publicly the love of God. It means nothing to say “God loves everyone” in your bulletin, newsletter or even on your website, though it needs to be in all those places, too. Find ways to say it, and show it, where the people you wish to reach will see or hear it.
- Recognize that no amount of perfecting your worship beyond what you have already done is likely to increase membership.
- Do some things that churches don’t do.
When the God you proclaim, the one who loves with no exceptions, is unrecognizable by most of the people you attract, even if they have been in church all their lives, it is evangelism. When they come to know the God you proclaim through your actions, it’s evangelism.
I am not a church planter, but perhaps church planters/revivers and campus ministers should be talking. I’d like to hope that they are saying many of the same things. They could also have a lot to learn from one another.
The Rev. Kevin Matthews is the recently retired campus missioner for Greensboro college campuses and St. Mary’s House. Contact him via the communications department.
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