9 Reasons Some Churches Will Not Reach College Students

I love college students. In fact, I’d want to be pastoring in a university town if the Lord called me back to the senior pastorate. I’m convinced that their generation has a much greater opportunity to reach the nations than my generation does. On the other hand, some churches, I’m convinced, won’t reach college students. Here’s why.... Read More

Related Article:
9 Reasons Why Churches Must Reach College Students
8 Reasons Why Your Church Needs to Connect with the Nearest College
Why Church Leaders Need to Invest in College Ministry

A somewhat dated photo of university students. At my university female students wear what past generations called Daisy Dukes, running shorts, yoga pants, leggings, skinny jeans, and dresses of various lengths. Wearing a dress usually means that they are a member of a sorority that has a dress code. Baseball caps are ubiquitous on both genders and those in transition. Hairs styles for males, females and transgenders range from shaved heads to mullets to scalp locks to samari knots to long hair. Hair tinting, tattoos, and nose piercing is not uncommon. A number of students are experimenting with new gender identities. Add a large segment of international students with their own fashion sense and gender ideas and you may have a snapshot of what the next few years of the twenty-first century may be like. But I would not count on it. The world is changing rapidly and the young people with it. I would not attempt to image what the student body of my university will look like 5 or 10 years from now.

Most of the churches in the community do not have a clue when comes to relating to the latest crop of university students. Some of the students at my university are adamantly atheistic or agnostic. For others spiritual matters are not on their radar. A number of students are open to spiritual conversations.

A tip for older adults. Let them do the talking and you do the listening. Be anamchara, a soul friend, and not a proselytizer.

My university has two annual events that do little to advance the cause of the gospel. They are not on the university calendar but they occur every year. The first event is the guy with the bullhorn shows up on Free Speech Circle and harangues passing students, telling them that they are going to hell. The second event is that a group of volunteers from a local church station themselves at various points on campus and pass out New Testaments. They have been known chase down students and to corner students and to shove a New Testament into their hands. Most of the New Testaments are thrown away. For days afterwards New Testaments can be found in all kinds of strange places where students have left them rather than throw them into a trash can. Some of the Christian students collect them and hand them out to students whom they have befriended and who show an interest in reading the New Testament.