Campus Ministry, Sharing the Numbers, Breaking the Rules

dnapersonaltraining.com/

I am going to break the rules and talk about ministry numbers and why they matter. This is a lesson I learned over the past year as I have built a solid relationship with a cross fit gym. The most intimidating thing for me, to this day, is the report out board where everyone posts how they did todays workout. What was your final weight lifted, how many rounds did you do, how quickly did you do them, etc.. I am basically in the middle of the pack now, and with my body type I will probably stay there even as I improve. Different bodies have different contexts and different capacities and what my numbers mean for me and my work out and my health are not what they would mean for any one else in regards to their workout and their health.

Still I do not want to share my numbers because I am intimidated by the numbers of the firefighters and police officers that come to the early morning classes and because I do not want to intimidate the person who is struggling through their first weeks or the recent cancer survivor working out in recovery. The deal is that claiming my numbers, sharing my numbers, and being proud of my work out for being mine is important. The deal is that the gym can create better workouts and solve systematic problems by seeing everyone's numbers. The data on that board is powerful and important on both levels.

So in the ethos of learning valuable leadership skills from outside the church I am about to share with you a lot of my Campus Ministry numbers. I am going to share them knowing that Campus Chaplains with more experience and better skills than I will have worse numbers than me this year and knowing that on some campus a group of students might be forming a campus ministry from scratch with no support or guidance that will be four times the size of mine. I am sharing them because I am proud of my work, the work of my students, and my community supporters in our ministry in Tucson to college and university students. I am sharing them because I firmly believe if more of us start doing this then we will be able to create better campus ministries and solve systematic problems. I am sharing them because in important ways numbers do matter.

The Core of my ministry are eight individuals. Three of these individuals were raised in the Episcopal Church and five of them found the Episcopal Church in college. All of them regularly attend campus ministry events, all of them actively work or volunteer for episcopal parishes, camps or schools. Six of them I can expect to go to both a parish worship service sunday morning and a campus ministry worship sunday evening. Two of them are actively discerning a call to ordained ministry or full time lay ministry in the Episcopal Church.

The worship periphery involves a group of twelve individuals, a number of them incoming freshmen, who either are planning on regularly taking part in our worship life or students who will attend irregularly. Three of these came to the Episcopal Church in college and nine of them were raised in the Episcopal Church. They are in this group because they are interested primarily in engaging us in worship.

The fellowship periphery involves eighteen individuals, all of them are not from an Episcopal Background. These are individuals who take part in our service projects, game and movie nights, and intentional open conversation space but are wary of engaging with us in worship. They are students who are becoming Episcofriendly.

At this point we are dealing with thirty eight individuals that are in regular contact with the ministry and view the chaplain as a safe adult and a provider of pastoral care and life skills advice. In this mix are twelve individuals who were raised in the episcopal church and twenty six that are engaging the episcopal church for the first time in college.

To this I will add fourteen more students that I know about, who were raised in an Episcopal context, that have either been introduced, via email, phone call, or letter, by their youth minister or parish priest or someone has taken my contact information to give them or I got a few minutes to talk to them when I visited our diocesan summer. This group also includes all the students I know attending local parishes but not engaging in the Campus Ministry Programming. This means there are twenty-six individuals that were raised in an Episcopal context whose existence on campus I am at least marginally aware of.

Episcopal Student numbers are important to me. Nationally Episcopalians make up .6% of the population and surveys of incoming students, which do not get every student but enough to be representative, show the same results of .6%. This means in a campus of 32,000 students there should be around 200 of them from Episcopal backgrounds. What this means is that the twenty-six individuals I know about, which covers every one engaging in the Episcopal Campus Ministry, everyone attending a local parish, and everyone a clergy or youth minister has mentioned to me makes up less than 15% of the students raised in Episcopal contexts that are on campus.

Comparing students raised in Episcopal backgrounds participating in Episcopal ministry versus those from other backgrounds is also noteworthy. Overall if we include everyone above the ministry is basically half students raised Episcopalian and half other. As a general rule a large amount of our growth, when it comes to bringing in non-Episcopalians comes from relationships they have with Episcopal students that are engaging in the ministry. My ability to build relationships on campus is exceptionally greater when an Episcopal student is part of that other community with which I am trying to build a relationship. Eventually students from other backgrounds become Episcopalian identified, officially or socially, but that requires time, and in a program where an individual's involvement is typically 34 months... time is something for which there is always short supply.

This is primarily to note that the involvement of students with Episcopal backgrounds is exceptionally important for me being able to build an outward looking relationship based ministry engaging the entire campus community. At this point about half of the Episcopal Students I know about on campus are actively participating or on the periphery of engaging with the community. I would say only a two or three of these are do or die Episcopalians who would overcome all odds to find us, the majority of them are with us because of the willingness of a youth ministry, parish, or camp to be in relationship with us and advocate and promote our work.

The result of this advocacy is not simply my having more robust numbers to report. It means that my overall capacity for formation and ministry grows across the board because engaging those from an Episcopalian background in an outward looking relational ministry model allows the ministry to connect with more students from other backgrounds, it allows my ministry to form everyone involved to bring this skill set to the wider church upon their graduation, and thus enriches the entire church. To that end the reality that 85% of Episcopal students on campus are in an unknown space troubles me because it represents a humungous unknown. What is going on with these 174 Episcopalians?

I do not think all 174 of these individuals are ones that the Episcopal Church has no actual meaningful relationship with. Somewhere that relationship exists for I would hope 74 of them... that would mean that the Episcopal Church had some form of relationship with half of the students with Episcopal backgrounds on my campus. Where do I have to go to build a relationship with those parts of the Episcopal church? What does the church need to do to build up an ethos of relational based ministry internal to the Episcopal Church such that these ministries connect with mine? What baggage, expectations, or practices about Campus Ministry, mine or in general, need to be overcome or dismantled to make this relationship building possible?

This might not change my numbers. Maybe only 15% of students raised in the Episcopal church will ever want to engage in Campus Ministry or Parish Ministry while they are in college in any way. My thought, however, is that the Episcopal Church has a greater capacity for forming individuals who will engage Campus Ministry than we are currently seeing. My belief is that an ethos of relationship building between Episcopal Campus Ministry and Episcopal Youth Ministry could give us a greater capacity and do this in the midst of all the issues facing both ministries.

So there are my numbers. The ones that I am excited about, and the ones that I am confused about. There is a lot of work that I need to keep doing, a lot of relationships I have to keep building and improving, some baggage between my ministry and surrounding ones I have to discover and overcome. I think there is a limit to what I, or any Chaplain, can do. The unresolved question of what is happening to 85% of students raised Episcopalian on my campus is something I cannot solve on myself. So I am sharing my numbers, the first one to post on the board. Maybe they will intimidate others, maybe some will think my ministry puny, whatever... until we start looking at the numbers, trying to make and repair the connections not being made, get more transparency, data, and dialogue in the house... I can only go so far with the capacity of myself, my students, and my current ministry partners and supporters.