College campuses around the country are gearing up to welcome students back to school over the next couple of months. That means campus ministers are switching gears to “welcome back mode,” right about now. I’m currently prepping for year number four at The Wesley Foundation at Arizona State University and I find myself asking the same questions over and over, “how do we reach incoming students?” My first goal when I first arrived was to maximize participation from Arizona United Methodist churches. That did not mean we were not actively trying to reach out of state students or unchurched students, it was just that our ministry had struggled even reaching local UM students and that seemed like a great place to start. We did this by teaming up with the U of A Wesley foundation to gather names and contact info a graduating seniors from conference youth groups (Actually, local congregations are required by Discipline to provide this information to their District Superintendents at their church conferences. You have three tries to guess how that has worked-out and the first two don’t count.) This project has worked great and the last three years we have been able to send welcome letters to students to invite them to our ministry when they arrive on campus.
The next task was to reach out-of-state UM students. This has proven a bit more difficult, especially at ASU where about twenty thousand students are non-resident students. Most of our out-of-state students simply looked for us when they arrived, others found us at student organization fairs or through other publicity we were doing on campus or in the school newspaper. Others met some of our local students in the residence halls or in other clubs or classes. This year we are trying some targeted Google and Facebook advertising in hopes of reaching the rest of the UM out of state students. Basically, we want to be able to say that, even if every UM student does not connect with our ministry, they at least heard about us and know we are here.
Finally, many of our non-UM students are a part of Wesley because they were invited by a friend or they find us because the denomination they are a member of does not offer a ministry on campus. We plan on having more “invite a friend” type activities during the next year.
The next few weeks will be spent meeting and planning with student leaders, designing and printing promotional materials, organizing welcome events and promoting the heck out of this ministry. ASU is a challenging place to do campus ministry because of it’s size (nearly seventy-thousand students, with fifteen-thousand living on campus), the fact that students in this area of the country are not as interested in organized religion, and the overall decrease of young adults, ages 18-25, interest in organized religion in general. This just means that we need to be more creative and more relevant to students on campus. Our residence hall project is one way of doing this, however, it does not mean we get to stop trying to reach more students. We need to be observant to the needs of students, we need to be a part of and even creating the conversations that are shaping their lives. We need to offer them a way to address not only their own brokenness but also the brokenness of the world. I don’t think we are going to do that by cramming a pre-packaged message down their throats or guilting them into believing something. We want to keep it simple by asking students to join us on a journey of loving God and loving neighbor. That leaves a lot of possibilities on the table. The Gospel message has inspired me to love God and neighbor in a number of ways and I love seeing the new and creative ways it inspires others.
I hope you will join me in welcoming new students and welcoming back returning students by praying for them, encouraging them, by giving them space to grow and to flourish, and by supporting your local campus ministry.
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