When Harvard opened its doors in 1636, it did so intentionally as a way to train clergy.  Its humble beginnings in Cambridge, Massachusetts was simply a response to the general public’s need to have more trained Christian pastors.  When William and Mary, Princeton, Yale, and others opened their doors the story was similar.  And while the world of higher education has dramatically changed in the past 400 years, its relationship and connection to religious identity has never been more important. Read more…

As a United Methodist Clergy, I struggled greatly with what I want my community to be about.  On the one hand, there are colleagues and friends of mine who think that the Church is about helping people find a way to God and to a better relationship with Jesus.  That’s all well and good, but it just doesn’t seem to appeal to me to try to get them to come to this relationship in the way so many people see the Church’s role.

There’s the other end of the spectrum, one in which the Church is simply the ground for social justice organizing and the fostering of movements.  This is more appealing, but it lacks something and is hard to differentiate from all the social justice organizations that are happening.  Additionally, most faith communities are doing this tremendously poorly, likely because they are trying to accomplish between 3-14 different kinds of social justice and service related things all at once.  It so often feels like little is being accomplished, aside from general education. Read more…

Every year, I work with plenty of students who are studying abroad for a semester or even a year as part of their college experience.  And many times, I hear that parents are worried or concerned about where their children are headed off to.  Are you sure it’s ok to go to Turkey?  Do you have to go to Israel right now?  And the list goes on and on.  Yesterday, I saw a tweet from someone who I do not know, but who asked whether the United States is really the place people shouldn’t be traveling to rather than us being fearful of traveling abroad.

Their point is clear. As a person who works in higher education, who has traveled to over 100 schools, have met thousands of students, and knows full well the way higher education is valuing international students as a way to diversify campus, I have to ask: are we as a country actually ready to to realize that it may be that we are the unsafe place for students to come.  Just imagine it for a moment.  In the aftermath of the situation in Orlando, as targeted as it seems to be toward the GLBTQIA community, we still have to understand that hundreds of thousands of international students this fall will come to the United States for the first time to attend institutions of higher education.  But should they?  Will they?  How many families of international students today will reconsider sending their children to U.S. Universities because we are still having mass shootings almost everywhere in the United States. Read more…

This past week, I came across my dear colleague Mark Schaefer’s words regarding campus ministry from four years ago.  I would be misguided if I did not credit him with some of the inspiration for this post.  His words in his self titled blog post Missions Need A Missionary: Why Full Time Campus Ministry Matters are words from when the Baltimore Washington Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church sought to cut funding for the ministry at the University of Maryland.  While the conference did succeed in some respects, the ministry is now growing again.

But growing is often the last words that are used in campus ministry work today.

Instead, much of the realm of campus ministry has been left obliterated, as bishops and bureaucracies across many denominations seek to curtail funding and sell off aging buildings as commodity to pay off debts within the larger structure in the Church.  In places where campus ministry does not exist, there have been intermittent attempts to put local churches in charge, almost all of which have failed due largely to the lack of full time dedicated staffing, as Mark so eloquently remarks.  But what about the other ministry sites, the ones that have survived and yet are struggling along.  And what about the places where there we are to birth new campus ministries or resurrect ones that have died off.  What has happened to the field? Read more…