Martie Larsen is campus minister for Collegiate church in Ames, Iowa, directly across the street from Iowa State University and its 28,000 students. At 11:15 each Sunday morning — not too early for the night owls — Collegiate offers a contemporary service with a praise band, with informal dress, with Power Point images on big screens, with a Reformed approach to worship. Most weeks 150 to 200 people show up, about half of them students.
Larsen, who’s been on the job for two years now, has learned some things. More sophomores show up than freshmen — maybe the freshmen are still figuring things out, feeling their freedom. Not all college students want praise music; some prefer a traditional style of worship. Many come to Collegiate with their friends, so word of mouth matters.
What are they looking for? “Probably what anyone else is looking for,” Larsen said. “A place where they know people,” where they can ask honest questions and seek answers, where they can reach out and try make a difference in the world.
The PC(USA), to put it nicely, hasn’t always done a fabulous job in reaching out to college students. The story, too often, goes like this. The kids from Presbyterian families stick around through high school — maybe because they want to, or maybe their parents make them. They graduate, go off to college or a job or to travel. They’re not often seen again at church — at least not anytime soon.
Sometimes, the Presbyterian churches located near college campuses complain that they’d love to have more young people involved, but the students don’t show up. Some of the students complain that no one invites them and that if they do come to worship, no one talks to them and almost everyone at the church is old. Some of the students the congregation hopes will show up spontaneously have no experience at all of going to church; for others, none that is good.
Some Presbyterian congregations located close to colleges, however, are trying to teach the old dog some new tricks. The ones doing it best understand there are no connect-the-dots primers to success and that they face considerable competition from nondenominational or other evangelical churches, and from parachurch organizations such as Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and Campus Crusade for Christ.
It’s not easy — but some churches are making up their minds to try.
At Collegiate, for example, Larsen gets lists of students who’ve filled out enrollment forms “and checked the big P that says Presbyterian,” and she sends those students welcoming letters and e-mails. The congregation takes out ads in the student newspaper. Larsen sends letters to churches in the synod — mostly those in Iowa and the nearby border towns — asking them to let her know if they have any students who’ll be coming to Iowa State. Then follows up with those students to invite them to worship. And Collegiate feeds the students — lunches after the 11:15 worship and Sunday @ Six, home-cooked meals on Sunday nights.
What Collegiate and other congregations also do is offer programing with substance, something beyond bowling and pizza, which gives college students a chance to connect with their peers in honest discussion, to worship and grow in faith, to be a part of a larger intergenerational body as well.
Susan Andrews, moderator of the 215th General Assembly, has paid attention as she’s traveled around the church to what young adults are getting from Presbyterian churches and what they really want. So how’s the PC(USA) doing?
“I’m seeing some really good things,” but not enough of them, Andrews said in an interview. For campus ministry to work, a congregation must “make it a priority. And figure out what it is college students will respond to, and do that, rather than expect students to fit into their existing program.”
Andrews would like to see some change, some soul-searching, so that “every Presbyterian congregation that’s within five miles of a college or school is being called by God to ask whether that’s one focus of their ministry.” A successful college ministry must spring from “a vision that a church owns,” she said — where it’s seen as a central part of ministry and where reaching young adults is a priority that the congregation is willing to stick with for years.
That’s exactly what’s happened at University church in Seattle, which started a program called the INN nearly 30 years ago — a program that began with about 30 students and now draws more than 1,000 college students from across the Seattle area each Tuesday night for worship, music, prayer, teaching and connection.
“The INN is best described a weekly service of celebration,” University church’s Web site states. “It is not a seeker-oriented event, though many seekers come and many have discovered Jesus for the first time here. It is not merely a worship service for believers either, though we do celebrate the Lord’s Supper every third week. The INN is high on energy, low on Christian cliché and centered on making Jesus relevant, whether you are unchurched, sitting on the fence, or actively maturing in your faith.”
University church is located just a block away from the University of Washington, which has about 40,000 students overall. At its first INN service this fall, close to 1,600 young people turned out — some of them regulars, some newcomers wanting to check things out.
“This is the product of a long commitment from a congregation to loving its neighborhood, which is college students,” said Ryan Church. He is in charge of the Ascent Conference, a campus ministry conference that University church sponsors each year (the next one will be in Seattle on May 21-24, 2004). “There are lots of empty churches that line the campuses of America, especially at state universities,” Church said — that’s one reason, he contends, that parachurch groups are so strong. But “in the ’60s and ’70s, when a lot of congregations gave up on college students, University church did not.”
As important as it is, college ministry is only one part of what that congregation is about. Typically 3,500 to 4,000 people attend worship on Sundays — from young to old — plus more than 1,000 young adults come to the INN on Tuesdays, many of whom aren’t members of the congregation or even Presbyterian.
And while the INN is “the loudest, biggest thing we do,” Church said, it isn’t the only thing the congregation offers to young adults. He said University Presbyterian is serious about discipleship, and sees the INN as “the doorway to the other things we want students getting involved in where they are ready to go deeper with Christ.”
Some of the students join small groups — groups led by older members of the congregation. Some go on mission trips, teach Sunday school, work with youth groups, provide child-care so other members of the church can be involved with ministry themselves.
At Collegiate Presbyterian, in Ames, Larsen has found that some college students welcome the opportunity for intergenerational involvement — they help lead the Wednesday night youth groups for high school and middle school students, for example, or join Bible study groups open to people of all ages.
When Andrews talks to students, they tell her “they want to be needed, they want to be valuable in terms of leadership, they want to be heard.”
Stokes, who’s from Missouri and is a youth member of the General Assembly Council, now lives in Cincinnati and works as a young adult volunteer at a small church in northern Kentucky. She enjoys working with older adults who are open to new ideas — although she wishes there were more young people around too. “I work with people who are all over 75 and they’re willing to change, to adapt,” Stokes said. “They don’t want to be stuck in 1954 anymore.”
At University church in Seattle, having so many college students around “has a tremendous impact” and “keeps the congregation sharp,” Church said. “We hear story after story from adult lay leaders (of small groups for students) who walk away feeling they’ve gotten more out of the experience than the college students.”
And the students get the experience of “having a 50-year-old businessman from Seattle who loves Jesus leading a college-age Bible study,” he said. “They get the opportunity to see there are lots of people here who love Jesus and who want to serve Jesus with their lives” — an example that’s more likely to make them stay involved with church after graduation. They may start out at the INN, Church said, but in time, if they stay in Seattle, many of them decide to join University church and become involved with the congregation itself.
Each parish that wants to reach young adults must find its own way — not all are big congregations with big staffs and a long history of commitment to campus ministry.
Carolyn McLarnan is an elder at Westminster church in Hattiesburg, Miss., a congregation of about 125 members located not far from the University of Southern Mississippi. The congregation recently called a new pastor, after a 25-year tenure with the previous one, and is exploring ways to do more to reach out to college students. People want to do that, McLarnan said, but aren’t quite sure how to find their way.
“The church has never had a large number of young people,” she said. There is competition — there are large Presbyterian Church in America congregations in the area and “the Baptists have so much more money and all these programs for young people.” Of the 98 churches listed in the local phone book, she said, the vast majority are Baptist.
McLarnan also knows from experience that the other congregations aren’t shy about approaching students on campus — they already know how to evangelize. She and her husband sing in a choral group that’s based on campus. One night, a group of Baptist students came in offering ice pops, saying, “If you don’t have a church to go to, why don’t you come to our church? We have great fellowship.”
Despite the numerical disadvantage, Westminster church wants to move ahead — maybe not to do everything, but to pick some things that are distinctive and to do them well. It’s just started a Sunday night worship service — “a lot of the students work in restaurants,” McLarnan said. “They normally have to be there at 10, 11 o’clock in the morning, they’re not able to come to the morning service.” So far, some students have come — as have others who’d rather worship on Sunday nights than on Sunday mornings.
That’s another lesson congregations are learning: not everyone, not even all college students, want the same thing. Some prefer “high church excellence” and others a highly participatory style of worship, Andrews said. But what they don’t want is what they often do find — garden variety, highly rational worship, where nothing pulls them in.
Too often, “congregations are not tapping into that spiritual hunger” — and “spiritual hunger doesn’t mean crystals and yoga,” Andrews said. “It means ‘How do I experience the presence of God in my daily life and my relationships? . . . How do I experience Jesus Christ? How do these stories become my story?'”
Larsen said some of the students who end up at Collegiate church have looked around, and said “they can find the praise bands other places. But the theology tends to be more conservative and more fundamental” and “I end up getting some of the fallout.” She hears the still-churning questions that didn’t get answered somewhere else. “They want relevance — how does this work in my life? They tend not to want things black and white. They want to be challenged more and be able to agree to disagree” with one another.
At University church in Seattle, Church said “the one thing that everybody’s looking for, no matter what their background,” is authenticity, “that which is real . . . ‘Real’ being that it identifies the questions that everybody’s asking, it engages doubt within faith” rather than just saying, “God is good all the time,” and leaving it at that.
What questions students are asking?
“Who am I? Who is God? A lot of it centers around doubt as well,” Church said. “How can I be loved by God when I have this perspective,” have all these doubts and failings and questions. “And of course you get the standard, `Why do bad things happen to good people?'”
And many want to know why different churches teach such different things — “to figure out why there are these divisions when it feels like we believe the same thing anyway.”
Stokes, the 20-year-old, also wants to have her views taken seriously when she does ask questions or offers an idea. “It’s so frustrating to attend an event and be the youngest person there and have people look at you as though your opinion doesn’t count,” she said. “It’s like we’ve become old enough to inherit the beach house, but we don’t like it the way it is. We want to refurbish it,” but the older members of the family are saying, “No way — don’t touch it.”
Stokes said she attended a Presbyterian college — she didn’t want to say which one — that had no Presbyterian campus ministry. “I worked in the presbytery office and no church in the presbytery had any sort of college ministry. We say we’re going to change. Does anybody do anything? No … I want someone to stand up for young adult ministry and say, `We have to nurture this program, we have got to do it now. Because all the stuff we do isn’t going to matter in 20 years if we don’t do this now.'”
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