The 5 Big Issues in Campus Ministry Today: #2 Theological Foundations

I’m devoting this week on the SENTinel to answering the question I posed last week: what are “The 5 Big Issues in Campus Ministry Today”? I’ll be writing on one issue a day. It’s turning into a Manifesto of sorts. Today’s post is on Theological Foundations. You can read yesterday’s post on Missiology. Todd Engstrom is also blogging on these questions, a very worthwhile read!

I. The Need for Theological Foundations in Campus Ministry

I was originally going to dedicate this post to knowing our history, but realized that the history piece is symptomatic of not knowing enough about our theological foundations in general.

One of the joys of campus ministry is its immediacy. Many of us train for our positions in a matter of weeks and hit the campus. We then plan and run around like mad for 15 weeks, see some immediate and huge life-changes among our students, and then do it all again in the Spring. Pretty soon, those students have moved on, and we do it all over again with a new batch of students.

But immediacy has its downside. The danger is that we become whirling dervishes of kinetic ministry, without sufficient rationale, understanding, and foundation for what we’re doing. We’re moving as fast as the wind, yet we can become just as groundless. Since we’re often reacting to who or what is right in front of us, we can be led to grab on to what is the newest, what is the latest, what is the freshest.

We rarely stop and consider what it is we’re doing, from a rigorous theological perspective. We’re often left open to the charge of being a mile wide and an inch deep.

Theological foundations are needed for the faithfulness and long-term fruitfulness of our ministries. We are running semester-long sprints when we need to be training students to run the marathon of the Christian life. We need to be content with the long, hard work of going deep with students, rather than settling for sexy crowds that are as fleeting as the flowers. Or haven’t you heard how many of our Christian students walk away from the church upon graduation from college?

II. What Theological Foundations?

A. Practical Theology

Much of what campus ministers get by way of theological education falls under the banner of  “Practical Theology.” This needs to be bolstered beyond “How to lead a Bible study” and “How to have a quiet time.” We need more resourcing on biblical counseling, leadership development, and organizational management. Practical theology also gets into yesterday’s topic, Missiology, as well as tomorrow’s, Ecclesiology.

Even with all these things added, Practical Theology is good but incomplete. The other traditional theological disciplines are necessary as well: Biblical theology (New Testament AND Old Testament, please!), systematic theology, church history, worldview & apologetics.

B. Biblical Theology

This is the ability to take the Bible and make sense of what it says on its terms. To make sense of all the parts, and especially how they fit together. To not quote Scripture out of context. My favorite example is the way people always quote Jeremiah 29:11 without having a clue about the original context of that verse. WHO is that promise for? WHERE are they? WHAT are they commanded to do before that promise, and WHY does it matter? [If you start answering those questions, that passage will really come alive. It’s probably my favorite text to share with college students].

Can you see Jesus on every page of the Old Testament, and more than just the so-called “Messianic Psalms?” Can you exegete the tough passages? Can you make sense of the Psalms that talk about hating your enemies AND Jesus’ command to love them? Inductive Bible studies are good, but insufficient. This is why we need more work in Biblical Theology.

C. Systematic Theology

ST gets a bad rap these days. Now I like Donald Miller, but even he wrote a book against Systematics (Searching for God Knows What). It’s not sexy, and it’s decidedly not in tune with the zeitgeist, because, you know, we all want stories and stuff.

Well let me tell you a story. Mark was a kid I befriended this year. Mark was basically unchurched, a C&E Catholic. He had a vague sense of guilt and of his need for God.

Do you know what made it all click for Mark? What made the light come on? An article we read that quoted Martin Luther at length, and talked about the doctrine of “passive righteousness.” This is good ST, people, taking truths that are represented all over the Bible, and helping us make sense of them. Without ST, we don’t have doctrines such as the Trinity.

ST is unavoidable.  Everyone has a set of beliefs that they have synthesized from their reading from Scripture, Christian resources, and experiences. The question is, how conscious are you of it, how consistent is it, and how faithful is it?

D. Church History

What is it about campus ministry that produces historical amnesia? Why are we so unaware of church history, historical theology, even the history of our own organizations and particular campuses?

Is it a skepticism of the usefulness of history in general?

A tendency towards abstract theologizing that doesn’t do justice to biblical narrative?

Church history lets us connect the dots from the past to the present. It gives us needed perspective and discernment. There’s nothing new under the sun, after all. Read about the Welsh Revival and its aftermath, and you learn that while revival is desirable and worth praying for, it is not the be-all and end-all. Read about previous movements for social justice and the history of Anabaptist engagement with culture (or lack of), and you see that Shane Claiborne is a Moravian Tony Campolo with dreads.

Campus ministry has an interesting history, and a rich one. A quick survey of the history of awakenings/revivals, and of world missions, reveals that college students have played vital roles in ALL of them. The Haystack revival, Student Volunteer Movement, etc. Yet it’s hard to find coherent histories out there. What does exist is usually hagiographic write-ups by in-house PR departments. It’s even harder to find seminary courses or bibliographies on campus ministry.

We need more critical interactions with the history of campus ministry, which can affirm the contributions of people like Bill Bright, yet also draw out the unhelpful trajectories they’ve put us on. As our own country quickly becomes a post-Christian mission field, we need to know how previous generations mobilized students for mission. “Those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it.”

E. Worldview/Apologetics

Everyone’s talking about worldview these days, so it’s almost cliché in campus ministry/church culture. But how much are we really engaging with nonChristians? We read Mere Christianity or The Case for Christ, but do so in a holy huddle, without any nonChristians present.

Meanwhile, the conversation about God is happening all over campus. In classrooms, in dorms, at the eateries—everywhere. It’s not hard to have conversations about faith and Jesus—we just have to find where they’re already happening, and join in.

Not a week should go by that a campus minister doesn’t have the opportunity to share their faith in a substantial way. The reason many campus ministers hardly ever share their faith isn’t scarcity of opportunity—it’s fear. And one way to address that fear is to bolster their knowledge with the many thoughtful arguments for Christianity out there. No one has been argued into the faith, for sure. But plenty of people have walked away because they found Christians’ “answers” shallow, anti-intellectual, and otherwise lacking.

III. So are you saying we should we all go to seminary?

I don’t think we necessarily need to mandate that everyone in campus ministry goes to seminary. I speak as someone with an M.Div and ordained in my denomination. I’ve worked for both a parachurch org. and a local church. But shouldn’t each campus have at least one trained staffer who can speak intelligibly and credibly into things like higher criticism, typical apologetics issues, and the like? To do this credibly will take seminary training.

A trained and learned campus ministry is a missional imperative. This is higher ed people! If we’re not familiar with the intellectual climate of our day, and particularly the intellectual arguments for and against the faith, we are not “all things to all people, so that [we] might save some!” (1 Cor. 9).

I’ll close with an excerpt from Prof. John Stackhouse, whose post on Engaging the University: The Vocation of Campus Ministry is a must-read for anyone engaged in Campus Ministry:

The intellect, however, has not been valued always and in every respect in campus missions.

Many activities provide but elementary instruction in Christian discipleship: the “quiet time”; the so-called “inductive Bible study” …

Many campus staff–and leaders on up the hierarchy of campus organizations–have only an undergraduate degree, and often in a field that prepares them badly for ideological contest and Christian disciple-making (e.g., engineering, natural sciences, commerce, medicine). More recently, more have a master’s degree or better in a relevant field. But one wonders why such qualifications are not simply required, the way denominations and congregations require at least one theological degree to do the job? What is this job that requires so little theological training, so little philosophical awareness?

Similarly, one wants to ask why in Canada and in the United States, and likely elsewhere also, there has been so little premium placed upon having genuine intellectual experts as speakers? Why so few professors, and particularly professors in the university, rather than popular writers, “pop pastors,” members of that student ministry’s own staff–few of whom have academic qualifications that would qualify them even for assistant professor status?

What one sees too much of in campus ministry instead is an arrogant amateurism. We’ll do it ourselves. … We staff don’t need advanced training in theology or Christian discipleship; furthermore, we’ll set up our own study centres and do the teaching ourselves rather than work with schools that already exist who have much better-trained faculty. The history of these movements shows that some staff will even innovate theologically and teach ideas that they enjoy thinking are “cutting-edge,” while what they breathlessly announce as “fresh” is simply the latest version of an old heresy that any genuine theological expert could spot at 100 metres. The intellect needs valuing better than this.

…

Similarly, one finds precious little involvement of the people who know the university best: not students, not alumni, not staffers of Christian groups, but professors and administrators, who inhabit and who shape the university far more than any other participants in it. To ignore them so consistently, which most student missions do at every level, is to try to work at a hospital without consulting physicians or nurses or administrators, or to work in a law courts building without consulting judges, lawyers, or police officers

In particular, one finds precious little involvement of those professors who inhabit ideological “hot zones”: religious studies, philosophy, psychology and other social sciences, native/women’s/black studies, and the like. All too often, instead, professors–when they show up at all–come from geography, engineering, medicine, and the like where there are, to be sure, some sites of moral and intellectual controversy from time to time, but not nearly as centrally and as daily as in the disciplines I have listed. Why are these resources, then, so rarely tapped, let alone thoroughly involved–as speakers, advisors, and board members?