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I have been attending Murray State University for the past three years, taking Japanese language courses. I have always wanted to learn Japanese and was pleased to discover that my local university had a Japanese language program. I would love to study Chinese and Korean but I am finding Japanese challenging enough. The older one gets, the more difficult it is to learn a foreign language but it not entirely impossible. It just takes longer than when one is younger.
Taking courses at the local university brings me into daily contact with the other students. This contact offers me some insight into why they may drop out of church while they are in college. As they take on heavier academic loads, they have increasingly less time for other activities, including eating and sleeping. They often eat meals on the go and catch an hour of sleep when they can. The cost of tuition, fees, books, and other educational expenses are higher than when I did my initial degree work in the late 1960s – early 1970s. A substantial number of students work at part-time jobs. They also worry about how they are going to pay off student loans after they graduate.
Between the demands of a heavy academic load and part-time jobs, the students at my local university give priority to whatever else is important to them. A lot of things get left by the wayside. This includes attending church.
Take the case of young woman who was a classmate last semester and the two previous semesters. When she first enrolled in the university she regularly attended the Sunday evening Masses at the Newman Center and served as a cantor for these Masses. As she explained to me, she has stopped going to these Masses because she does not feel God’s presence in them as she does in the Masses in her home parish. She now prays in her dorm room.
I have never attended the Masses at the Newman Center or her home parish so I cannot say whether a significant difference exists between the two worship experiences, one that would cause her to stop going to Mass. Other factors may be at work. Attending Mass may no longer play as important role in her life as it once did.
In university a student’s spiritual life is apt to take a backseat to everything else. As students see it, they have more pressing things on their mind. We may not agree with that perception but it is the perception that they have.
What I have also discovered is that a sizeable number of churches in the community are ill-equipped to minister to the students at the local university. They do not know how to relate to them. Every semester one of the community churches in Murray dispatches teams of volunteers to the university armed with pocket New Testaments. These teams then hand out to the New Testaments to the students. They may go back to their church, believing that they have fulfilled their obligation to the Great Commission. But in reality they have not.
Most of the students do not keep the pocket New Testaments, much less read them. I find them tucked away in all kinds of strange places. The students to whom they had been given could not bring themselves to throw them in the trash.
The teams handing out the pocket New Testaments also reinforce any negative perceptions of Christians that the students may have. Some team members can be very aggressive, chasing down students, cornering them, and thrusting a New Testament into their hands. They will not take, “I don’t want one,” for an answer.
The Baptist Campus Ministry found that it had greater success in reaching and engaging students when it took an interest in what they are interested. It also found that students were more likely to attend a worship gathering on a weeknight than on Sunday morning.
When I was involved in the Journey Church which meets on Murray State University’s campus, we discovered that students used Sunday mornings to catch up on their sleep and Sunday afternoons and evenings to catch up on homework and other assignments. Students were not going to give up sleeping late on Sunday morning for a great band, great preaching, and a free breakfast.
University students do have positive interests to which they will give priority. It falls to local churches to exegete the campus community as they would the larger community and to identify those interests. For example, the Japanese Club, when Japan experienced a series of high magnitude earthquakes and catastrophic flooding, raised money for those affected by these natural disasters. One of my classmates from last semester raises money for a local Humane Society no-kill animal shelter.
If we genuinely wish to reach and engage the students at a local university, we need to get to know them. This takes time and effort on our part. We also should not let any preconceptions interfere with how we see a particular generation. We should relate to the members of that generation as individuals and not to a stereotype of them.
We should have fun while we are doing it. This is a lesson that we can learn from our Lord. We tend to see him as a real sober guy but if read the gospels, we will notice that he peppered what he said with all kinds of witticisms—logs in eyes and that sort of thing. He had a sense of humor. Our Lord also mingled with those he was seeking to reach and engage. We should too.
Photo by Matt Markgraf on WKU Public Radio
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