The professionals are in trouble and need outside help
All around us there is abundant evidence that religion is not doing well on the campus. We greatly need new approaches to campus work.
In the years since Sputnik, science and industry have made tremendous gains. Their increase of knowledge has been gigantic. Space exploration is moving rapidly. But what is happening in the areas of the mind and the spirit, and in the understanding of one another as persons? The humanities have suffered in our culture so much that universities now put on drives to stimulate interest in these areas.
Our religious heritage has been allowed to dwindle also. In the colleges, the Church has not kept pace in its manner of presentation. It is regarded as a second-or even third-class citizen on most campuses.
On the average, about 10 per cent of the students on an American campus have some contact with Christianity through the organized church. Ninety per cent of the students on most campuses have no such contact and look upon the church as a thing of the past. This group often contains the most exciting students on campus, the future leaders of our country.
American colleges and universities are being profoundly affected by the swift and complex changes taking place in our society. The world is in a ferment, and the campus reflects this. The university or college presents many different opportunities for Christian witness. There are the faculty, the students, and the families of faculty and students. And there are also employees of the university and their families. Obviously the Church needs different approaches to reach these various groups.
The students are probably the most complex group. They are of many nationalities, many different home backgrounds, various religious connections or none at all. They are smarter than ever before. They very much want to be individuals; yet at the same time they desire to hold fast to some group connections and conformity. They are often lonely. They are searching for something. Many are very self-centered, and some live in a state of rebellion.
None of these characteristics is new. What is new is the great number of students, many more than ever before. American campuses now contain about 5.2 million students; by 1975, there may be 8.6 million.
Regrettably, not much effort is being expended in presenting Christianity to the whole campus—at the appropriate intellectual level—as a living religion. I do not mean enticing students into religious services. Nor do I mean preaching to them. I mean alerting the campus to the fact that Christianity is a living religion and speaks to the problems of twentieth-century man.
Denominational chaplains make their effort through small group meetings and the one-to-one approach. Many build their programs around social and political interests and have become very secular in their methods. Choruses, folk music, drama, and art are used, and so are coffeehouses and teahouses. Some of these programs are good; but others are poor, and many are only fair. Organizations like the YMCA, the YWCA, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, and Campus Crusade offer varying inducements for student participation. There is always room for more groups like these. But we are still faced with that disturbing statistic that 90 per cent of the students have no contact with organized Christianity. How to reach this group—that is the burning question.
Communication is a starting point. In the United States the art of communication has been developed into a science, and almost a fetish, but the Church has not learned to use it. The story we have to tell is simple and powerful, if we only can get it across. One prominent churchman has been quoted as saying, “Don’t worry. We are chipping away at the problem.” That seems to be just the trouble. We are using aspirin to treat the patient instead of open-heart surgery.
The first step in developing new approaches to the campus is for the top leaders of the organized church to realize that new approaches are needed. They must admit that the chaplaincy system by itself is not the answer to the present-day campus and certainly will not be the answer to the greatly expanded campus of the future. There are just not enough chaplains to minister to the 25–30,000 students on the larger campuses. (Jones B. Shannon has covered this aspect of the situation in an article in the Church Review, May, 1965.)
Here are some suggestions for first steps in developing new approaches:
1. Hold an interdenominational conference or series of conferences of the best minds that the various denominations can recruit. Invite participants from business, advertising, the mass media, public relations, publishing, management, education (recent graduates, faculty, and students), the sciences, the ministry, and other fields. Have them meet at some out-of-the-way place, without newspaper coverage, for four or five days. Instead of addresses, have brain-storming sessions. Conferences could be set up on a regional basis. They should not be allowed to become too large and unwieldy, and they should not be dominated by the present campus-ministry leaders. As far as I know, no such free-wheeling, idea-seeking conference has ever been held by the organized church. Anything can happen if enough brains are brought together to attack a problem.
2. Stress the campus ministry as a project for every church in America, just as we stress missions. The time to do this was ten years ago or yesterday, but certainly today also. The churches have been very negligent in alerting members to the real problems on the campus. They simply report a rosy picture of “X campuses contacted, X chaplains at work.” Church members are not told what the Church does not do on the campus.
Yet the hidden resource of the Church is its laymen. The Church must stop sitting on its hands and must utilize the great talent of its creative members. Like other institutions, it is using only a small fraction of its tremendous capability. It must not be content with the small number of lay people who now contribute their services. There are many men and women capable of making real contributions to various phases of church activity who do not want to be bound by the overly organized structure of the Church.
3. If the brain-storming conference is productive, and if more creative lay people are involved, many ideas will appear that are good enough to try. Set up an interdenominational task force to experiment with them. This group should be separate from the present campus ministry, and the members would have to be chosen with great care. No one wants to change what is being done at the moment; we just want to see more done and a better approach made to the 90 per cent of students not now being reached. This task force could start with a large university to gain experience and might eventually minister to several campuses in the same area.
Some areas in which the task force could work are:
a. The use of the mass communications media.
b. Clever college-newspaper advertisements beamed to intellectuals. Having a theme for the whole campus for the academic year is important.
c. Distribution of books to freshmen as an arrival greeting—perhaps a paperback edition of The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis. This could be followed up with other books of like caliber distributed each year in October, and with repetitive contacts maintained by mail throughout the college year. The mail campaign should be planned by experts in this line.
d. The bringing of top-ranking artists and groups of actors to the campus, in connection with the year’s theme. Many students will attend a play or concert by nationally known artists when they might not support a local campus group’s performance. These artists could travel on a circuit of colleges and universities.
e. Concomitant exhibits for the whole campus on astronomy, geology, archaeology, religious art, medicine, and so on, all coordinated with the theme. Faculty could be enlisted as resource people for this phase.
f. The establishment of research centers adjacent to the campus. Research is the keynote of college and university activity, but the Church does practically no research on the campus. Visiting scholars could be brought to these research institutes for a few months, or as much as a year, to work on specific problems. They could hold seminars that would attract students. Students could also be involved in the research, and the scholars could publish the results of their work in the college publications. They also might travel from one campus to another. To attract the whole campus, this presentation has to be made on a grand scale with real excellence. (A medical-religious research institute is in the planning stage for the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, spearheaded by J. Donald Woodruff, a gynecologist.)
4. Explore the possibility of joint campus services with other denominations. Financially, the ecumenical approach is the only feasible one. The campus is an excellent testing ground for this approach, since few students are interested in denominational differences.
5. Stop trying to get people to attend services. If the all-over influence of the campus religious work is good, students will come to the services. Often the invitation to come sounds the death knell of their interest.
6. In church-related colleges, arrange for better working relations between chaplains and the departments of religion. Students recognize that a dichotomy exists, and this has a negative effect.
7. If there is a theological seminary on the campus, use it some way, somehow. Usually the seminary is a total loss as far as the rest of the campus is concerned. It is outside the mainstream of intellectual life and might just as well be a thousand miles away.
8. Provide some sort of religious experience for those attending summer school, particularly graduate students and teachers.
9. Investigate the possibilities of junior-college programs and of day-college programs in large cities where students commute from home to college. Re-evaluating the senior high school program might be fruitful, also.
10. Search for new staff talent for the campus-planning groups of the various denominations. These groups need bright, enthusiastic people with ideas, imagination, and initiative. The recruits need not all be clergymen.
Many profound discourses have dealt with the nature of the university, the psychology of the student, and the relationship of student, church, and university. Yet one never finds any practical guidelines for initiating new methods of presenting the Gospel to the campus.
The Danforth Foundation is undertaking a comprehensive study of campus ministries, under the direction of Kenneth Underwood. Documentation of the failures, weaknesses, and strengths of various phases of the present ministry will be interesting and valuable. However, we already know that current programs are inadequate. After all the findings have been digested and evaluated by many committees and the study report has been filed away, the planners will still have to take the necessary steps to develop something new. My plea is that we start now.
I am convinced that the professionals now in this field cannot provide new methods of approach to the campus without outside help. The present leaders of campus work cannot institute new ideas without the support of the national boards of the various churches. Hopefully, the interest of the lay people will arouse national boards from their lethargy and open their eyes to the importance of college work. For they do not now realize the seriousness of the problem. They are working with too little, too late; their programs are out of step and are not making an impact on the campus.
Christianity is not something that the non-Christian has thoroughly comprehended and rejected; it is something he has never really seen or understood. The campus work is one of the most important challenges facing the organized church and our nation in the decade ahead. We must summon all our imagination, intelligence, and faith to meet it.
