It’s mid-June which means that another class of incoming first-year students is arriving in waves with their orange showing and their parents in tow. Two groups a week for 5 or 6 weeks will check into the dorms, attend financial aid sessions, skits on college life, and late night fun in the Rec Center. And at 5:30 on their first afternoon, they will have the option of spending 20 minutes with me (or one of my Campus Ministers’ Council colleagues), learning all about religious life at UTK. Except that of course none of the students will actually come. They need to go to the Honors College session or to learn about Greek life or study abroad. And I absolutely don’t begrudge them that at all. The Honors College session is required, the Greek life session feeds students’ imaginations of what their college experience will be like and who can argue with England or Italy? This does mean, however, that my session will be almost exclusively parents.
Parents who can’t wait to tell me about how Janney was president of her youth group and spent two weeks in Guatemala saving the lost or about how Johnny is a gifted speaker and most surely will be a preacher someday. Parents who ask if I will go to their child’s dorm room and make sure they go to church on Sunday mornings or who feel sure that if I just called their child (without telling them where I got their number of course) that they would embrace the faith again. Parents who are so committed to one particular sort of doctrine that they insist on describing it to me in the hope that I will immediately identify a Knoxville church which believes exactly this way as well and perhaps even drive their child there on Sundays.
And if I sound a little snarky, it’s only because I know how this ends. After describing the difference between campus ministries with professional staff and ones that are student-led, after outlining three markers of cult recruitment, after recommending Sharon Parks’ Big Questions, Worthy Dreams and Donna Freitas’ Sex and the Soul, every single question will be about a para-church ministry. No one will ask about the Wesley Foundation or the PC(USA) Center, or the Episcopal/ELCA ministry, or even about the Catholic University Parish. They want to know how on earth their child will find Campus Crusade or Young Life or InterVarsity. How, in this huge place, will their child ever identify FCA or the Navigators?
I tell them not worry – those groups will find their student.
It’s not that I begrudge the para-church ministries’ their large groups or brand names. In fact, I know that some students will thrive in these organizations; that they will jump in with both feet and decide this ministry was the best thing that ever happened to them. They will grow and mature in the Campus Crusade incubator, and even join a staff when they graduate.
No, what I both resent and embrace is the clean-up work. (Actually, that’s not quite true, I don’t resent the work itself, just the fact that it must be done at all.) In two, three, maybe even four semesters, some of these students will wander into my office or land in my inbox barely clinging to a thin, vulnerable string of faith. Most often they are young women whose leadership skills have been denied expression in one of the para-church ministries, young women who can’t figure out why they should stay in the shadows when God has clearly blessed them with all kinds of potential. There will also be young men, fewer of course, but there nonetheless, wondering why no one wanted to walk with them through the questions, or was willing to admit they didn’t have an answer. I’ll do my best to offer new interpretations and contexts. I’ll drink lots of tea and try to coax the sparks of faith back to life.
Yes the mainline is dying, but I don’t think its theology has lost any relevance. The ability to integrate learning and faith, to face questions without fear, to apply critical thinking to Biblical interpretation and church tradition: these are the legacy of the Protestant Liberal Theological project. Within it many students have found freedom in a new kind of faith that affirms the intellectual enterprise and seeks connections in even the most unlikely of places.
Do you participate in your institution’s orientation programs? What are your experiences with parent questions and what sorts of answers have you worked out? Do you work closely with para-church organizations? How does that partnership work and why? What wisdom have you to offer your colleagues on this subject?
