Students Need an Integrated, Holistic Faith

Campus pastors often feel students arrive at college knowing the gospel but not knowing how to live it out in their lives. Lacking a framework to help them prepare for diverse ideas, students “fall away” because they never truly understood what it means to follow Jesus.

“My experience…is that 80 percent of all incoming college freshmen who are ‘saved’ youth group kids become ‘lost’ college students very quickly. Why? Because they didn’t follow Jesus to college. (Instead, they followed their friends, parents, ‘the system,’ or whatever.) They are usually good kids but not very godly. They are nice Christians but not very Christ-like. They are kind of spiritual but not very Spirit-filled. The exceptions are those kids who were part of a nitty-gritty ‘discipleship-band’ or mission-trip experience during high school, where they worked out how to truly follow Jesus and learned to pray and to not give up meeting together.”

—Daniel Curran, East Bay Ministries/San Francisco Metro Ministry with Campus Crusade for Christ, based at University of California Berkeley

 “A seasoned campus minister once said that many Christian students arrive at college with a kindergarten Christianity. Some students have a real, saving faith, but they don’t know how it compares to alternative worldviews or how to share it with others with completely pagan backgrounds. Students need to know that they are not simply at college to survive as Christians, but to be Christ’s ambassadors and to take the university by storm for the sake of the gospel.”

—Camille Kay Hall, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, at Swarthmore College, Cheyney State University and Delaware State University

“I worry that in our concern for real and urgent issues facing teens (for example, remaining ‘pure’) we ignore other serious questions. Young people need to know that their faith is not only an inward spirituality, it does apply to every area of life: how they treat their roommate, what major they choose, what clubs they will join, whether they find a local church, and the myriad of social issues that are raised by professors and classmates.”

—Becky Wainwright, the Coalition for Christian Outreach, metro Philadelphia

“I hope that [students] are learning that there is a difference between acting like a Christian (saying all the ‘right’ Christian words and displaying the ‘right’ behaviors) and actually striving to become like Christ.… I hope [they] are heading into college with the perspective that they first must be changed before they expect to transform their campuses. I hope that they are learning how to hear His voice for themselves.”

—Daniel Kim, creative arts director for NewSong Church in California, currently ministering in Bangkok, Thailand