Check out this great post from Thomas Kuhn, campus intern for Reformed University Fellowship at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY on the importance of doing ministry on college campuses.
The Westminster Confession of Faith states that Christ has given to the Church “the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints, in this life, to the end of the world” (WCF XXV, III). If the Church has been given the truth (Scripture) to gather and perfect the saints, surely this commission must apply to the college campus. Author Stephen Lutz argues in his book College Ministry in a Post-Christian Culture, that “[c]ollege ministry is the most strategic mission field in the world today” (41). When a student steps on a college campus in the United States, they are a part of a group of the largest college-going generation (nearly 16 million undergraduate students) (Lutz 37). If you include graduate students, higher education students make up at least 7 percent of the population (Lutz 41). To insist that college ministry is the most strategic field is not to take away from foreign missions, but to insist that in reaching this 7 percent of the national population, we are reaching the future leaders of our nation and indeed the world. With an opportunity to reach the world’s future leaders right here at it’s doorstep, the Church should take the gospel to the college campus.
The Church should reach the college campus not only because of the future leaders of the world but also because college is a formative time and place for students. Fresh out of the care of their parents, college students arrive to campus with numerous hopes and dreams of their future. It is during these 4 or 5 years that students set a trajectory for the rest of their life. The college campus is a place where “where worship, business, and the exchange of ideas are combined so powerfully, freely, and personally” (Lutz 42). Authors Brian Habig and Les Newsom in their book The Enduring Community: Embracing the Priority of the Church, suggest that there is a growing confusion and disillusion with the Church among today’s population (13). If this is the case, the Church must enter into this formative hotbed of ideas that is the university with the gospel of Jesus Christ. If the Church can reach the college campus with the gospel now, it will undoubtedly alter this current culture of confusion and disillusionment with the Church in the future.
The college campus also should be reached with the gospel because it is a culture increasingly confused about truth. Postmodern thought rules the day on the college campus. Students are either explicitly or implicitly taught that doubt is the only worthy dogma and that submitting your ideas to some over-arching principle of truth is “wrong-headed” and “backwards”. Students are taught to value diversity, but as Stephen Lutz point out, this “diversity” is a strikingly uniform cocktail of “relativistic personal morality, shape-shifting sexuality, a crusading ‘save the world’ idealism by day and a debacherous ‘party as if the world is ending’ nihilism by night” (23). Authors K. Scott Oliphant and Rod Mays state in their book Things that Cannot Be Shaken that in such a world of relativism, “the authority of Christ and his Word is acceptable at the personal level perhaps, but it is almost a forgone conclusion that it cannot be applied to everyone” (19). This view handcuffs the student to a subjective and non-authoritative view of truth. If this is the orthodoxy of the college campus then the Church, the pillar and buttress of truth (1 Tim. 3:15), cannot stand idly by and watch a generation perish in a mire of confusion and rejection of the truth. The college campus is in dire need of the redeeming power of the gospel. The Church should be about its mission of “gathering and perfecting the saints” among a generation so confused and resistant to the truth and the college campus is undoubtedly the most strategic place to do so.”
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