An opening caveat: I help lead the Princeton University campus ministry called Christian Union NOVA, and believe participation in campus ministry is a significant blessing for Christian college students and important for college-age faith formation. This blog is not meant to denigrate college ministries but instead articulate my beliefs about the local Church in the context of college life.

I have reason to believe that actively participating in the local church is significant for college-age faith formation. In all honesty, I believe it’s significant for faith formation at any age. My goal currently is to illustrate why local church membership is critical to spiritual growth and maturity specifically in the case of college students.

Why college students? Well, because I am a college student. I find that my current experiences relate most directly to people sharing my life circumstances, although many aspects of this argument will be applicable to any and all believers, especially those experiencing a period of life marked by new independence and/or a new environment.

And why is it important to make this argument? Because becoming involved in a new local church is difficult, and the difficulties of college life, along with the prevalence of strong campus ministries (a blessing), make the difficulties of joining a local church appear, in the student’s mind, to outweigh the benefits.

If you believe that last statement, I hope this post can (begin to) change your mind.

Transition to College

College life is different.

Most of the adult population in the United States of America have tasted, or been closely acquainted with people who experienced, college living, so those reading this post will probably agree that college living is different. There is a freedom and repression to college life that create a unique environment of discovery, passion, and intensity.

Often, living on a college campus means that you have close proximity to a wide range of people, most of whom are vastly different from you. They speak different languages, read different books, have different racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, political, ideological, family backgrounds. This can be intimidating, because if you grew up anywhere other than a dense urban sprawl, you probably experienced relative homogeny in your daily life. This is especially true if you’re a member of your hometown’s racial and linguistic majority.

So the new college environment you’re living in can daze you a little bit. All of a sudden, you start hearing and seeing people with conviction living out very different beliefs than yours. Many of these beliefs challenge your own. I think this is true regardless of what you believe—that if you hold conviction about what it is you believe, then first close encounters with people of equal conviction but with different beliefs can make it seem that your own beliefs are under attack.

Truth is, they probably feel the same way.

So what do you do? Often—and this is a generality to people of any deeply held conviction—you take immediate comfort in 1) yourself and your inner life, 2) people most like yourself, and 3) institutions that are easily accessible and promote your beliefs.

For the Christian student who believes in Jesus Christ and the Triune God, the most easily accessible institutions that promote Christian beliefs and lifestyles tend to be campus-specific college ministries. College ministries, like most youth ministries, come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, doctrines, institutional styles, and denominations, usually all on the same campus and all vying for your attention as an incoming freshman student; again, an incoming freshman student who soon may feel confronted, assaulted, confused, and overwhelmed by the myriad voices crying Believe this! on their campus.

Often, the first contact an incoming Christian college freshman has with a Christian ministry on campus that feels authentic and personal wins that’s student’s initial allegiance to that particular ministry. So college ministries launch freshman campaigns to try to make as many of those connections as they can with those Christian students, and to evangelize to all the freshman as a happy consequence.

An aside: I don’t believe it’s wrong for college ministries to run campaigns with these things in mind. In fact, I’m a part of freshman outreach for my ministry (Christian Union NOVA) right now and am not experiencing any moral dilemmas. My goal is to paint an honest picture of a Christian student’s first experiences and college ministries’ responses to these experiences as an avenue for understanding why the local church in particular is so vital for college faith formation.

And so the Christian student lands on campus, struggles through the first few months of encountering radical difference (sometimes the first few months encountering such extreme cultural heterogeneity in their lives), and finds restful comfort in a community of like-minded, similarly-aged fellow believers within the college ministry that expressed their authenticity and personal nature quickest and most clearly to that student.

If this story feels at all familiar to you, know that it’s extremely familiar to me. The image I just developed of a Christian student’s arrival to a modern college campus generally described much of my own experience transitioning to life at college and encounter with Christian ministry. If this is not your story, then please contact me (see my email at the bottom) and I’d love to hear it.

Therapeutic Christian Interaction vs. Faith Formation

At the outset of this section, I want to make it clear that I do not believe that if you are involved in a college ministry then you are involved only for therapeutic reasons. I believe many students commit themselves to campus ministries because they rightly believe that the Holy Spirit is working in and through those ministries to lead students to faith and form their faith, and that involvement in those ministries is a means of forming their own faith. College ministries can and do form involved students’ faith and ministers involved in those ministries work with the intention of teaching the Gospel to students. I do not want to diminish or demean campus ministries.

However, as a member of a campus ministry and as a person who myself has been motivated to attend ministry events at times primarily for therapeutic reasons, it’s important that I be honest about what I perceive as a prevalent threat to faith formation in only participating in campus ministries and not the local church.

I’m considering the phrase “therapeutic Christian interaction” as representative of something which tends to flourish on campuses and within campus Christian ministries. Therapeutic Christian interaction refers to the dependence of a Christian student’s positive or negative experience at a campus ministry event or within the campus ministry community on feelings of authenticity, camaraderie, and ideological reaffirmation. This is to say that authenticity, camaraderie, and ideological reaffirmation all contribute to feelings of self-worth, which tend to be therapeutically (restoratively) beneficial to the student’s conception of self. These things bolster the student’s courage to live as a Christian on campus, surrounded as they are by fellow believers who they know will support them. In this sense, campus ministries can often become primarily a support system for Christian students and a student’s lifeline for persisting in faith when inevitable difficulties, doubts, and life changes happen through their college career.

This therapeutic support that the communities of Christian ministries provide for students is absolutely vital and instrumental for the faith of many students at college, including myself. But often, for believers, the campus ministry fills a supporting role in the student’s life that I contribute more to the like-mindedness and similar lifestyles of the community within the ministry than any essential “Christianity” that distinguishes the ministry from other religious, athletic, or social campus organizations. This is not to say that campus ministries are not Christian—they absolutely are—but that many believing students interact with these ministries primarily because they feel commonality with the ministry and the community thereof according to their beliefs.

The feeling of commonality within Christian community on campus that provides students with a sense of relief from a secular college living environment is not the same thing as faith formation. Faith formation, as I understand it (with the help of Andrew Root’s book Faith Formation in a Secular Age), pertains to one’s participation in the transcendent reality of the Triune God. Faith formation is a shift from participating in only material (“natural”) reality to seeing and participating in the Divine reality.

Do you see the distinction? Therapeutic Christian interaction prioritizes you, the self in need of respite from a chaotic and challenging world, and a functioning (i.e. large) community. Faith formation, on the other hand, prioritizes your increasing participation in Divine realities. I don’t mean “Divine” ambiguously, but necessarily pertaining to God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit as described in the Christian Bible. “Participation” in the “Divine reality” therefore means that a person is actively living according to the reality of God and the Kingdom of Heaven, living as a member of that Kingdom and demonstrating that Kingdom in the culture of our lives.

Therapeutic Christian interaction is a consequence of a community of people living together with some level of faith, but the ongoing personal benefits of therapeutic Christian interaction do not of themselves constitute faith formation. Again, faith formation is an increase in life lived within Divine realities—of which Christian community is one (especially for the privileged few who live with religious freedom)—but which is not fully constituted by, or even driven by, therapeutic Christian interaction.

I believe campus ministries often become primarily places for students to find therapeutic Christian interaction because of the reality of college life and the proximity of campus ministry to college life. Just as I described a person’s transition to college in the previous section, the Christian college student often feels continually battered by their secular environments and in need of a place and a community to find therapy. Campus ministries offer this up front since they tend to be the nexus of Christian community-making on campus. But because of a college student’s tight academic, work, and activity-related schedule and overwhelming to-do list, and because the campus ministry knows these things about students’ lives and structure themselves accordingly, the degree to which campus ministries interact with students and students interact with campus ministries often stays at the level of therapeutic Christian interaction. Over the course of an undergraduate education, the campus ministry can easily remain a place for the believing student to easily find some level of respite, community, and affirmation before continuing on with their student life. In a sense, the degree to which campus ministries tailor themselves to students fosters, instead of faith formation, the students’ habits and transience. Ministries become merely the comfortable harbors for the rest of the student’s campus life rather then a place where they’re learning to participate in Divine realities.

If it is the case, as I consider, that campus ministries often become primarily about therapeutic Christian interaction for believing students, and if therapeutic Christian interaction—although a blessing—is not the same thing nor holds the same importance as faith formation, then the campus ministry is not the best institution for the faith formation of the believing student and for Kingdom work to be done in and through them.

The single institution that has been about Christian faith formation for two thousand years is the local church. From this belief and my above reasoning about campus ministry, I argue that involvement in the local church is the single most important thing a believing college student can do for their faith throughout their entire life and for the Kingdom of Heaven.

College Faith Formation and the Local Church

There are many reasons why involvement in the local church is wonderful for a college student, especially if you’re going to school away from home. People from the church can take you in as family and treat you to home-cooked meals and slow, family evenings. When you run out of money, kind church moms can buy you food and keep you alive (another one of my experiences). When you need to store things for the summer or move in and out of your dorm or apartment, church friends often offer their homes, their cars, and their hands. It’s a community of support much like the campus ministry community but that has the perks of people in different life stages. People in a local church have homes, have money, have spare time, and are often looking for ways to make college kids feel at home. It’s ok and good for you as a college student to accept the outpouring love of adults who are older than you in your local church. These are some of my experiences at my local church (Hope Presbyterian) here at school, and they constitute some of my warmest memories and most treasured relationships.

However, the local church isn’t primarily about you and fulfilling your needs. A church community is (ideally) more than therapeutic and has intended to be a transcendent community from the moment of Pentecost (Acts 2) onward. The church is the Kingdom of Heaven breaking into the world and intends, generally speaking, to be a community of people living according to Divine realities. That is, the church’s purpose, and the intention of people seriously involved in a church community, is faith formation. It is to know Christ and to make Him known when you are a young child, a teenager, a young adult, a parent, a single middle-aged adult, an elder, and everything in between.

The generational aspect of the local church carries a particular significance in my understanding of college faith formation. The typical college student lives in a dorm, house, or apartment surrounded by people who are approximately their same age. Those are the people the college student interacts with in classes, on sports teams, and in campus ministries. Those are also often the people the college student hangs out with and even works part-time jobs with. College students can find themselves interacting almost exclusively with people their same age.

This importantly means that college students are often displaced from the march of time and life. Apart from occasional visits home and the feelings of unseen and unspoken change that accompany those visits, the college student is buffered from realities of life and death that transcend the campus experience. The campus experience and campus ministry experience can become the only relevant reality for the college student. Student activism, publication, athleticism, academics, and involvement in other student groups become outlets of meaning-making, but all these occur within the same generational cross-segment. Illness, birth, marriage, decline, raising a family—all of this happens outside the campus and doesn’t encroach on the student’s life.

But the Kingdom of Heaven contains people at all stages of life. Participation in the Kingdom means, in part, participation in these stages of life with other people who are experiencing them even when we are not.

Moreover, enduring faith formation most often occurs in deep relationships that transcend generational boundaries. People who have lived twice, three times, four times as long as you have and who have an eye for Divine reality are able to demonstrate and point out God’s presence in the world far more deeply than college peers, simply because they have been walking with the Lord for far longer and have experienced Divine reality through many life circumstances. And you, the college student, have experienced God in ways that the toddler or middle schooler never has and are able to teach them to see and know Him; you yourself can be a tool for the faith formation of younger people in the local church, and this contributes to your own faith formation as you participate in Kingdom work.

Local church participation also forms faith by teaching Kingdom rest. Church services across denominations have developed within the context of Sabbath—Kingdom rest. This rest is regular and periodic, built into the lives of believers not as a law but as a realization that God is the one who works, and that his grace allows us to rest. Sabbath rest, fostered in the local church by participating in regular services, is a manifestation of Divine reality in our lives every time we choose to experience it. Sabbath rest is a rejection of society’s demand that all our time and energy be committed to working for some goal or another. Sabbath rest is enjoying the reality that salvation work is done through the sacrifice of Jesus. Learning to rest is a meaningful, powerful, and tangible facet of faith formation that happens primarily within the context of the local church.

Rest is especially hard for college students because of how everything in our lives demands all the free time we have to spare. It’s easy as a college student to try to do everything you possibly can, leaving yourself not a single hour of rest in the 7 day week. You burn out, begin to feel irritated and frustrated.

If you become involved in the regular service cycle of a local church, that can help you keep one day of your week clear of all homework, all work-related activities, and anything else that isn’t rest.

Finally, faith formation in the local church is so important for the college student simply because the purpose of the local church is not to serve, to cater towards, to speak to, or to attract them, the college student, specifically. In contrast, all student agencies and organizations on college campuses, including campus ministries, are tailored specifically for college students. For college ministries, this means that messages, Bible studies, and outreach events all aim to be “youthful” and “relevant” tailored primarily to the college student. Sometimes this college-age “relevance” muffles clearly communicating Divine realities. The local church, on the other hand, and specifically the priest or pastor, is primarily concerned with clearly communicating Divine realities regardless of age or life stage. This focus declutters messages pertaining to Divine realities and forces the church leader to speak clearly about Scripture in a way that children will understand and old, wise folks can still learn from. Campus ministry messages, on the other hand, can often become so cluttered with college culture and college-related worldly things that they obscure Divine realities in an attempt to make things palatable or therapeutic for the student.

Of course, a caveat to all this is that a local church can fall prey to becoming primarily oriented towards therapeutic Christian interaction and can obscure Divine reality with “cultural relevancy.” This is, and always has been, prevalent.

However, the intergenerational nature of the local church, as well as the thousands of years of refinement, and significantly the fact that God instituted the church are all reasons why involvement in the local church is extremely important for the faith formation of the believing college student above and beyond involvement in a college campus ministry.

Encouragement

If you’re a college student and you’re not involved in a local church, I encourage you to begin exploring your local area to try and find one. Then I encourage you to go to it, test it out. It’s totally ok to try multiple churches, but after a few weeks I believe it’s really important to choose a church and stick with it. Ingrain yourself in it. Get to know the families, the old people, the little ones, the other young adults that go there. Listen to the pastor and have real conversations with them about their message. Accept people’s offers for help and be quick to offer your own services when you see a need.

Make the local church your home. Don’t reject your college ministry, but begin to think more deeply about faith formation and how you can help your campus ministry be more about forming the faith of your peers.

Importantly, thank God for a campus ministry and a local church where you can learn to see Him more.

Closing

Part of this blog is simply me juggling ideas and trying to make what I feel about parts of my life a bit more concrete by giving those feelings words and structure. If you disagree with anything in this post or want to talk about it, I would love to hear your thoughts and have a conversation! I learn the most from other people, so please make your thoughts known to me. You can email me at ceramic_mug@outlook.com.

Thanks for reading!

May the peace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ be with you always!