From Ash Wednesday to Pentecost

Once upon a time, when the NEPCI project began, it all seemed fairly simple—find out what’s going on at New England college campuses, discern some of the needs on those campuses, and tell the presbyteries about it. That’s still at the core of what I do, but somewhere along the way, I ended up doing several other things, too. A part of the project that I didn’t foresee at the beginning, organizing Presbyterians to engage in campus ministry has become another major facet of what I do when I’m in the office. So I hop back and forth around New England, visiting presbytery meetings, sending out innumerable emails, and getting committees together. It is one of those mustard seed things, where you throw opportunities out there on the sheer faith that they’ll grow into a great movement.

One piece of the project that has become increasingly important to my day-to-day work is our upcoming spring event on May 30, 2009. Please, please, please mark your calendar! The planning team for that event met last week in Worcester, MA to talk about some great potential keynote speakers for that event (although I’m not able to divulge that information at this time). We are also hoping to have a title and location in the Greater Boston area nailed down after a conference call we’re holding on Friday. So look for more information on this page soon!

Today is Ash Wednesday, the day when Presbyterians remember our mortality and fallibility, the day when we seek forgiveness in order to renew ourselves during Lent. You’ll notice that our spring event intentionally falls on the eve of Pentecost, a time when Jesus’ disciples awaited the coming of the Holy Spirit. Together, Ash Wednesday and Pentecost provide the frame for the great Lenten/Easter cycle of the church year—what begins today in dust and ashes ends with fire in a few short months. As you journey with Christ this season, I invite you to reflect with me on our church’s ministry to the campus. Consider our past, with its successes and failures, and pray for its renewal as we recognize where we have too-often forgotten our young adults. Look toward our future with hope, expecting that the Holy Spirit will anoint us for new and revitalized ministry on campus. And when we meet on the eve of Pentecost to imagine the future of campus ministry, it will be at the end of a long road we have walked together through this holy season.

All Are Welcome at the Waysmeet Center

Last week I had the opportunity to visit with nearly 20 students from the University of New Hampshire as part of the project, and spent time learning from them about their experiences with campus ministry, their needs, and their thoughts for the church. I’m not going to say exactly what they said at this point—when I get a chance to summarize information from all the focus groups we’ve held across New England, then I’ll post some reflections here on this blog for you. But I did have a few general thoughts I wanted to share with you about my visit to UNH.

The United Campus Ministry at the University of New Hampshire, also known as the Waysmeet Center, is a collegiate ministry sponsored by your Presbyterian mission dollars, as well as the mission funding of several other Protestant denominational partners. When you pull into the Waysmeet Center in downtown Durham, right across from the UNH campus, you’re immediately struck by its colorfully painted door splattered with yellow daffodils. If you come when I did, you’ll also notice that the front door is open. This place encourages the stranger to wander in as well as the friend, and has plenty of food on hand to greet her!

The ministry offers a variety of entry points for student involvement—some learn about Waysmeet through the large number of UNH student groups that the campus minister, Rev. Larry Brickner-Wood, allows to meet there. Others get involved through the ministry’s popular Drum Circle and pasta dinners. Some are involved with various spiritual groups. A few are looking for a place to live, and Waysmeet offers affordable housing in an intentional community. And many get involved as volunteers in service. The Cornucopia Food Pantry, which is primarily staffed by student volunteers, is open three times a week to community members in need. The pantry produces 450 food baskets annually over three gift cycles, feeding 2,250 people. This and other related volunteering activities give 300 students and community volunteers the opportunity to reach out to over 5,000 people every year. This is a place where students can have fun, explore their spiritual lives, and make a difference in the lives of others.

And I will say this much about my conversation with students there—they care deeply about this ministry. The mere fact that 18 people gave up an hour or more of their Thursday night to come talk to me, and another two emailed me responses because they couldn’t come in person, shows me more than any words how meaningful students find their involvement with this ministry. If you think that college students aren’t interested in our campus ministries, I invite you to check out the work at UNH. You can visit their website here.

The Long and Winding Road to the Presbytery of Southern New England Meeting

It was a long weekend, with six hours in the car to and from New Canaan, Connecticut for the Presbytery of Southern New England’s quarterly meeting. But the lunch conversation I had with interested Presbyterians about collegiate ministry made the drive well worth it. Bringing together those involved with successful congregationally-based campus ministry programs and those looking for ways to reach out, we talked a lot about the challenges and possibilities of collegiate ministry.

Now, in my research I’ve learned that there are different types of congregational involvement in the collegiate scene. Some churches give money to support campus ministries as part of their mission budget, which helps fund many of the campus ministry programs out there today. Other churches serve the students who come to them by sending care packages, hosting in-church meals and Bible studies for students, and just generally trying to make a place for students in the life of the congregation. The last type of involvement is perhaps the most missional, in the sense that the church actually comes onto the campus and establishes a presence there. Traditionally the presbyteries and synods have been in charge of that kind of involvement on behalf of the larger church. Increasingly, however, local congregations have adopted the direct approach, sending their own staff onto the campus. This, for example, is the primary form of outreach our brothers and sisters in the Presbyterian Church of America take—many of their churches employ pastors whose primary task is to establish Reformed University Fellowships on nearby campuses.

These are the predominant, though not the only, types of congregational ministry to students. Nor are these forms mutually exclusive—a church can fund a minister on campus while also offering programming for the students in its own pews. At the Presbytery of Southern New England’s discussion, people doing all three of these forms of outreach were sitting at the table. What did they actually share with one another?

One, the group agreed that issues of campus ministry funding have to be discussed. If I have learned nothing else in eight months with NEPCI, it is that campus ministry is an expensive proposition, no matter who does it. Churches can do great things on a shoestring budget, but they can’t do it alone. So what funding sources are out there? We talked about other funding agents for special projects, such as outside grant-making agencies and foundations. The group suggested that perhaps the regional and national governing bodies, if they cannot sustain ministries themselves, might help congregations find those pockets of outside funding and apply for them.

We also talked about partnering with others. Who are the partners out there? Other churches? Other denominations? Outside groups? Presbyterians in New England live with the reality of small numbers compared to our United Church of Christ and Episcopalian siblings. In many cases, we don’t have congregations situated near the largest universities in a given region (in Connecticut, for example, there is no PC(USA) congregation anywhere near the University of Connecticut—but a UCC church sits right on the campus). How can we build relationships with others who have similar goals, finding ways to do ministry together?

Finally, how do we strike that balance between taking care of our own Presbyterian students and offering meaningful spiritual opportunities for those exploring Christianity for the first time? As we talked about location (whether to go to the students or simply invite them into your congregation), I pointed out that the students who seem most likely to find a Presbyterian church are those with a strong sense of denominational identity—and those students are diminishing in our increasingly pluralistic, secular society. Will students with weaker ties to the PC(USA) or Christianity in general be willing to leave campus and seek out our churches? How will we expand our little pockets of the Body of Christ to include a very different kind of student than those on campus 50 years ago?

I’m still seeking the answers to these questions, as are those I met at the Presbytery of Southern New England meeting this weekend. But I’ll leave you with one insight I had, driving home that afternoon—as I thought about the people sitting around the table with me for lunch, I recalled data I’ve heard from several ministers who work with college students. They say that students seek meaningful, direct, hands-on ways to engage in mission and service. And somewhere on the road between Hartford and Worcester, I realized that members of our congregations are no different. Presbyterians want direct, meaningful, hands-on opportunities for mission, whether that means reconstruction work in New Orleans or ministry to the college campus down the street. Perhaps the ardent desire on the part of Presbyterians to attract college students to their congregations stems not simply from panicked self-preservation, but from a desire to enter into deep, life-changing relationships with students seeking meaning and purpose. Perhaps what we need to ask ourselves, then, as we look to reinvigorate Presbyterian outreach in the region, is how we are to tap into that desire for authentic relationship, for meaningful mission, in our churches, and bring that to bear on the needs of our campuses.

Starting Off

Welcome to the newly inaugurated NEPCI website! Here you can follow the work of the New England Presbyterian Campus Initiative in the final stages of the project and learn about events coming up in your area. But before you learn about all the ways you can get involved with NEPCI, you may first have a few questions. Let me try to answer a couple of them...

What is the New England Presbyterian Campus Initiative?
NEPCI is a joint partnership between the Presbyteries of Northern New England, Southern New England, and Boston that seeks to discover the current state of collegiate ministries in New England and develop a mission and strategies for the presbyteries to pursue in order to strengthen Presbyterian outreach on campus. Since June 2008, NEPCI has collected information on the region’s 215 colleges and universities, spoken with nearly 40 stakeholders in collegiate ministry (including currently serving campus ministers, congregational ministers, governing body officials, and college faculty and staff), and conducted four focus groups with students from a variety of campus ministry backgrounds. The project is a year-long initiative, from June 2008 to May 2009.

How did NEPCI get started? How is it funded?

NEPCI emerged from a tri-presbytery collegiate ministry summit, organized by members of the Presbytery of Southern New England, that took place in Amherst, MA in November 2007. That summit reached two major conclusions: the presbyteries needed a better understanding of the state of campus ministries in the region as a whole in order to develop effective strategies for outreach, and a follow-up summit was needed to continue the momentum of the initial conference. A group of conference participants from the Presbytery of Boston later applied for a grant from the New England Presbytery Partnership Group to fund a position that would achieve these purposes. This grant, received from the Presbytery Partnership Group in the spring of 2008, secured a year of funding for the project to do a campus ministries needs assessment and then report back to the Presbytery Partnership Group with a mission and strategies for outreach in the three presbyteries.

Now, of course all this exciting information (ha!) has made you wonder what we've learned and how you can get involved. The goal of this website is to answer both of those questions. Keep checking here to find out what the project is doing, where you can meet Kelsey, and how you can get involved further. And please feel free to share with us your questions and comments about NEPCI here! We look forward to hearing from you!