Campus Ministry, Sharing the Numbers, Breaking the Rules

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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.

Youth and Campus Ministry... living together... mass hysteria...

Maybe this is an absurd idea... I think, however, that it would be really nifty if Youth Ministry and Campus Ministry had a healthy vibrant relationship. Youth Ministries, in my mind, should be seeking to be in healthy relationship with relevant Campus Ministries and vice versa. To be really honest for me this is a no brainer. 

Sometimes, though, when I mention this idea it feels like I have suggested we take up human sacrifice and want to plunge the church into mass hysteria. That this would be some epic crossing of the streams and we all know that crossing the streams is bad. Everyone looks at me as if I am the person who failed to keep his head clear and now a giant marshmallow man will destroy New York.

To be clear what I am not talking about is going back to a time when Episcopal Campus Ministry was an inward focused institution dependent upon the church to supply numbers for a special Sunday student program. I do not think we could bring that back if we tried and I would not want to even if we could. Episcopal Campus Ministries were forced to become nimble, crazy, and missional long before it was cool and we are not going to be forced back into that parish style box at this point. 

At this point our most effective campus ministries are running full tilt in missional/mission shaped/relationship based/emergent styles. It is the basic ethos by which the campus ministry I serve runs and one of the reasons we found a mutual call was a general commitment to this style of ministry. This means we spend a lot of time striving to create a worshiping community that relates to and impacts the campus environment and less time focused on fostering the institution of the Episcopal Church. As things stand we are a growing vibrant community with a solid grounding. If things remain as they are then things will be good. I am not writing this because if something does not change then my ministry will fail. I am writing this because if I can build better relationships then my ministry and the ministry of the Episcopal Church will get even better.

The deal is that Mission Shaped ministry and Parish ministry are not polar opposites. They are symbiotic creatures that create a robust church when brought into full partnership. They are like a jam filled pastry. A person can just eat jam or just eat pastry dough but the magic happens when one takes a deep generous bite of a jam filled pastry. If we are going to have robust mission shaped ministry and robust parish ministry creating an overall robust church then we have to put the two into interworked layers of relationship and let them bake. 

 

So the plan, the absurd plan, is that we create an overall ethos of Episcopal Youth Ministry that empowers Episcopal Campus Ministry that then empowers Episcopal Ministry at large.... we can even throw some powdered sugar on it for good measure. 

My ministry, as it stands, is doing pretty good at empowering Episcopal Ministry at large. We are baptizing, confirming, and receiving members into the church. My students are working and volunteering at Episcopal Parishes, Schools, and Camps. My students are actively discerning calls to ordained ministry. That layer is working.

It is the first layer, the Episcopal Youth Ministry to Episcopal Campus Ministry layer that seems to be having problems. The relationship dynamic here simply is not vibrant and healthy, in many places it does not exist at all. What I want to present is a place in my ministry where this relationship is working.

I have a great relationship with one of the local youth leaders. The parish is in a suburban area about thirty minutes from the university with an amazing youth and family ministry program. If a relationship exists between the parish and a student at the university I get an email of mutual introduction. About half of those emails result in a student becoming a regular participant in the campus ministry, which is fine. The point is not to force the students to involve themselves in campus ministry but to introduce them to the concept of campus ministry and the chaplain. It is great that this parish is thirty minutes away but any parish can take up this email exchange and create this level of relationship. The problem is that this does not happen.

The main reason this does not happen, that I encounter, is that youth and parish leadership just do not think to create this basic type of relationship with campus ministries and incorporate their graduating youth into those relationships. Sometimes I hear arguments about how they want the graduate to be able to freely discern, to not be forced to go to the campus ministry, to be able to be part of a parish, or the like. The deal is that every campus minister I know wants every student they encounter to be able to do just that... they just want to be sure that the student knows they have a resource as they go about that if they need it. 

So this is the core of what I would like to see with parishes. Initiative on the part of parishes to build a relationship with the campus ministries where their former youth become students, ensuring that youth know that campus ministry exists if they need it, and whenever possible a mutual introduction of an incoming student to a chaplain. I try to build these relationships in reverse whenever I can but it simply is not the same.

The other part has to do with diocesan and national youth ministries and events. Our forms should have space for high school seniors to mark where they are going to school and to provide the local chaplain or parish their contact information. Our events should have time for seniors and college students to interact with a college chaplain and build relationships and awareness. Our diocesan camp brought the chaplains in for a day this summer, just to hang around and make one announcement at lunch. The connections with graduating seniors and staff who were in college was electric. 

So that is my absurd idea. Youth Ministry having a basic and healthy relationship with Campus Ministry. I do not know why these ideas are so controversial. I do not know why these relationships are not natural for our ministries... but for some reason they are not natural. I hope someday they can be... I want my Jam Pastry... I want to cross the streams and save New York.    

Cults on our College Campuses, a reality not a myth.

Walking back to my office I see a group of young women, or maybe a man standing alone, all with a bundle of quarter pages in their hands. Students walk by and one of them asks “do you have time for a survey?”. The first few questions are innocuous enough but soon the conversation turns to immortal souls, paradise and hell. I encounter this happening almost every week. At first I walked on by, then I stopped to listen, then I began to interrupt and disrupt the conversations.

The group is Faith Christian Church and their practices are insidious. The United Religious Council of the University of Arizona has compiled a set of safe practices for evangelizing on campus. These are tenets so basic that groups from overwhelmingly divergent faiths and theologies, Jewish, Buddhist, Later Day Saints, Unitarians Universalist, Roman Catholics, Para Church groups, and Main Line denominations, like my own, can all agree on them as basically a no brainer. This list can be found here. The issue I continually confront Faith Christian Church on was one of deception, specifically a refusal to state from the start that they were representing Faith Christian Church.

The difference is simple “Do you have time for a survey?” is a very different statement than “I am from Faith Christian Church, would you answer some questions?”. The first is a deceptive means to get a students contact information, the second is an authentic way to share one’s faith with students on campus. As far as we can tell Faith Christian Church does not stop in their problematic practices when it comes to recruitment.  They do their utmost to stay just under the bounds, not bending the rules so far to actually bring about accusations of abuse and entrapment while individuals are still students, but the use of the student body as a ready source of new members is becoming more an more obvious. The newest report of Faith Christian Church as a highly abusive and problematic cult are just now coming under public scrutiny.

Many University Students are in a vulnerable personal space. Away from home for the first time, readily isolated, in search of a place where they can belong. This is the reason why healthy campus ministries, and other programs, are so essential on our campuses. They offer the possibility of healthy support that can guide students to become healthy full-fledged individuals. The problem is that the same environment that make healthy organizations a crucial reality also makes it a ready place for abusing individuals, stinting their growth, and forcing them into places where they no longer have the capacity for knowing who they are and exercising basic freedoms.

Faith Christian Church is the reality that we have to deal with on the Campus of the University of Arizona, sadly it is not the only group with cult like characteristics that we are monitoring at this time.  These predatory entities are alive and well on campuses across our country, specifically targeting those individuals who are least likely to be noticed if they simply disappear from the healthy social networks. There is a lot of my work which is Episcopal focused, a lot of days when I just focus on getting my worship numbers up a bit, have more dynamic conversations at our Wednesday evening theology/atheology discussion group, etc. but then there is the reality that part of my work is simply striving to ensure that the campus in which I work is a safe place for the students to practice self discovery. A striving to ensure that individuals seeking a faith group find one in which they can build a healthy sense of self and develop fully into who they are in the most basic senses of the word.

University Campuses, even ones as large as the University of Arizona, are microclimates of culture. Small but active counter voices to prevailing thought can have a major impact on that culture. Small groups seeking to do harm can trap and capture the vulnerable. Small groups seeking to create spaces of transformation and growth for the vulnerable in our midst can bring about amazing effects, not only to those we impact directly and can name but also those whom simply hear us stating clearly that all can have a place in our midst. This voice, said loudly and clearly with no reservations, is essential for eradicating the work of predatory religious groups on our campuses and in the world.   

Rebuilding temples and undoing systematic violence against women…

“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

                                                            -Jesus

International woman’s day is a yearly call for us to first recognize how our prevalent so

ciety inherently destroys the spiritual, emotional, physical, and mental temples of the women in its midst, and calls us to create an environment where they can be rebuilt in full. This caustic realm of sexism that has deprived women of the necessary components needed to build up the temples of their personhoods has perpetuated for thousands of years and the bitter and hard won battles of the feminist movement over the past centuries show that there is no three day miracle to be had. This does nothing but make the Spirit’s call to enter into this work even stronger and more requisite for the church.

The role of the church in the midst of this is clear. For good reason on this day when Jesus speaks of his own body the temple our lectionary points us to one of the earliest of Christian writings, the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians, where he speaks for many chapters on the role of leaders and preachers in aiding individuals in building up the temples of their being. Paul notes that

According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw – the work of each builder will become visible, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what work each has done. If what has been built on the foundation survives, the builder will receive a reward. If the work is burned up, the builder will suffer loss; the builder will be saved, but only as through fire.                                                                                       1 Cor. 3:10-15

Paul here is specifically talking about himself as a builder, in comparison to Apollos or Cephas, and how at the end of days the leaders of the church will be held responsible for the materials they gave to their followers. That, in fact, if the builders have systematically given individuals low grade materials with which to build upon the sure foundation of Christ that they will face a fire in inverse relationship to the shoddy materials they have provided. I take this reading to be very clear, that those given shoddy materials by the church will be refined to the glory they should always have been, while those who provided the shoddy materials will face a burning purgation for the atrocity they allowed to perpetuate.

I work on a campus where there are no full-time ordained female chaplains, where only a handful of ministries recognize the capacity of women to be priest and pastors to the world and openly discern towards such vocations. The full feminist voice simply is not allowed to be heard in most of the ministries with which I work alongside. As a gay man who is a fumbling profeminist I strive to create a space where all women have the freedom to discern that which the church and the world have provided them with which to build their temples, but the work to be undone and done is staggering, in both the micro pastoral care level and the macro societal injustice issues. The concept of a ministry that strives to create a safe space for all women, regardless of race, regardless of being cis or trans, regardless of sexuality, regardless of class, regardless of any other characteristic, remains a staggering one for myself and for the church in which I work. Attempting to create that space isolates my ministry in some ways and places a barrier of expectations for those who might come and visit us.

This is the same barrier, however, that creates a safer space for those vulnerable and hurt in the world. It is the same barrier that forces myself and the other men who participate in the ministry here on campus to face and process our privilege in this world. It is true that this barrier may indeed keep some out, but to remove it is to no longer require us to truly discern what materials we are giving our followers to use in the building of their temples. To remove this barrier is to begin building up our members on the false lies and expectations of patriarchy, a material of the weakest and basest sort imaginable.  

Chaplain in a Tea Shop… one semester and many tea cups later…

The question of how to gain access to the community and neighborhood around one’s point of call, be it a parish or other, is a pressing question for many clergy. This is a report out on one possible methodology, ensconcing oneself in a café in the area in which you serve. 

Location, Location, Location…

The Scented Tea Leaf is a block from my office at the Christian
Campus Center. They have iced tea on tap, a wide variety of
hot teas, pastry, soups, and chicken pot pie.

Choosing the right location is paramount. It needs to be a place that you naturally want to hang out in, and can afford so to do. It needs to be a place that has regulars, people that spend a few hours in that location near daily (you will become one of those regulars). It needs to engage the demographic, and hopefully a few known individuals, that take part in your ministry.

Passive, Passive, Passive…

This is a ministry to which your structured goals must be few. If you go in with active intentions about how this will bring people into your ministry or have x number of meaningful pastoral conversations then you will fail. Your goal is simply to become a regular, part of the woodwork, but with intentionality and active observation of the community around you.

Collar, no Collar, Collar…

So this might be a big hurdle for some of us… but this is a ministry where blurring the lines between personal life and clerical life is essential. The regulars need to know you are a cleric of the church but also be able to relate to you as a regular member of the community. This means sitting in the space with a collar on and in street clothes. I strongly suggest getting stickers to cover the back of your laptop… an “Episcopal Church Welcomes You” and a “Pride Flag” sticker will go a long way.

Patience, Patience, Patience…

This is a looong process. It will only really start to show fruit after it has become such a habit that one almost forgets one started going to the café with any intentions towards it being a ministry. If you are not ready to put in a six-month commitment of ten to twenty hours a week spent in the café… then don’t start.

The Fruit, the Fruit, the Fruit…

So what have I found one receives from doing this after six months…

The majority of my administrative work, liturgical planning, and sermon prep happens at the café. The ten to twenty hours I spend here every week are not extra hours but my general work hours. This is pretty much what every other regular is doing in the space as well.

Walking around the neighborhood I constantly see people I know, and know something about them. When you spend this much time with a group of people having the brief one on one interactions and group conversations that occur in a café, everyone becomes known entities. When I walk around my neighborhood with members of my ministry and am able to say hello to people we meet it has a meaningful positive impact to the ministry participant.

I have had some amazing practical, theological, and pastoral conversations, and they occurred in that order. Conversations will start with the day to day. Then at some point conversations will move into the philosophical and theological. If you can show you have both a knowledge of theology/religion (its important to understand everything the “spiritual but not religious” are thinking and reading especially new paganism and eastern religions) and also a non-judging curiosity of the faith lives of others then one will start having pastoral conversations with the regulars.

From there one will get to the point where mutually interesting events might start coming together. Probably not Sunday Worship, but maybe a book discussion group or a interfaith forum… more probably a community event. It is all about building up the network of mutual interest and associations.

This network is the true fruit of being in the café. Basically one is growing the potential energy one has to make a kinetic impact. One is expanding the area in which meaningful events, which will allow your ministry to have an impact on the community, can happen.

So that is it, a six-month report out on basically moving my office to a local café and seeing what happens. So far there are no regrets and a lot of good coming out of it. A lot of it is little stuff, but it’s all the type of little stuff that builds up to great stuff.