Nor Cal / Nev College Ministries

Launching a college ministry from your church can seem overwhelming. Here's how to do it:

Get Vision

Repeat after me: schools are the steering wheel of our society—as goes the campus, so goes the culture. Our leaders are shaped in university lecture halls.

Don't believe it? Read all about The Vision For College Ministry.

Get Conviction

Vision is all well and good, but if you don’t have a strong sense of conviction, you’ll never sustain ministry to collegians. There’s a very simple reason for this—college students don’t return the investment that a church makes in them. Children’s ministries bring families into the church, youth ministry brings families into the church, but college ministry sucks money out of the church.

Parents don’t choose to go to a church because their college-aged children will be ministered to there. Their college children might be going to school in another city, state, or nation. Even if they live in the same town as their parents, the family dynamic has been altered enough that there’s a pretty good chance that they don’t all go to the same church.

That means that the students you reach will be other peoples’ kids. That means that they will be a resource drain on the other ministries of the church.

You might convince yourself that it will begin to pay for itself once the students graduate and get jobs. That may be true in a minority of cases, but in general once they graduate they move to another town, get a high paying job, and begin tithing to another church.

And that’s the bottom line—they become involved in another church. College ministry is Kingdom ministry. It blesses your church far less than it blesses the Kingdom as a whole. Is your church determined to be a generous church? If so, you’ll be able to minister to collegians.

If not, then don’t expect to accomplish much. At least, not for any lengthy period of time. You’ll get started, but the college ministry will always be the first thing on the cutting block when hard times roll around.

Vision without conviction just won’t cut it. And you’re not the only one who needs conviction—the senior pastor, the church board, and a broad slice of the laypeople need to buy in.

I hope I haven’t terrified you. College students aren’t the death knell for a congregation. Far from it!

Your church will benefit in several ways from ministering to collegians: you’ll get volunteers for your worship team, for nursery, and for youth group. You’ll have excitement and passion. You’ll have all sorts of wonderful things as a result of pouring into collegians.

You will not, however, have money.

Get Resources

Don’t reinvent the wheel. The church has been ministering to collegians for centuries, and there’s a wealth of knowledge you can glean from. Read more about it at Resources.

Get Help

There are almost certainly people in your church who were deeply touched by Chi Alpha, Intervarsity, Campus Crusade, or some other ministry in their college years. You’d be surprised at how many of them would love to help in a low-commitment way.

First, find out who they are. At a few Sunday morning services announce that at the end of the month you’re buying lunch for anyone who was involved in a college ministry to pick their brains before launching your own thing.

When you get them together, find out if any of them were small group leaders or student officers in their college ministry.

Share your vision, listen to their advice, and then ask if any of them would be willing to serve as adult mentors for college students once your ministry is off the ground. Explain that you’re not looking for a major investment of time, but just for someone who will host two or three students in their house for free laundry, a home cooked meal, and some simple discussion every two or three weeks.

If you do this, you’ll guarantee two things.

1. The college ministry won’t evaporate because of a pastoral transition (whether yours or someone else’s) because the laypeople won’t let it. Once you connect laypeople with college students you can see a strange mania beginning to possess them. They catch the vision and get conviction, and wonderful things happen.
2. You won’t be on your own. Some of these laypeople will want to do more, and you’ll have a ready-made list of people to call when you’re overwhelmed.

You will also likely get some good ideas out of the whole process.

Get Started

And once you’ve done the groundwork, get started. If you wait until things are perfect you’ll never get anything done. Get out there and try a few things. Keep what works and change what doesn’t.

Let me say that again—try a bunch of things and keep what works.

College students are an extremely forgiving bunch, so if you blow it don’t worry. You’ll get another chance.