Day: June 6, 2016

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…