Nor Cal / Nev College Ministries

Models That Churches Can Use (in ascending order of difficulty)

• Student-Led Bible Studies on Campus: there are tons of resources for releasing your students to do this sort of thing and do it well. You’ll need one or two gifted and committed students to launch this. Point them to Advice For Student Leaders.

• Lunch Programs on Community Colleges: begin offering a free meal along with an evangelistic program on campus once a week. You’ll need enough time to do this and a core of students who will agree to come to the meeting (to create energy). You’ll also need money for the food. Learn more at Reaching Community Colleges.
• College-Age Sunday School Class: if you’re overwhelmed and are trying to do something, try to throw one of these into the mix. You’ll need a quality leader and a core of college students to start.
• The Three Hours Model: a college-friendly Sunday morning worship service, a college-specific Sunday school class/small group network, and a college-specific midweek worship service (either on campus or in the church). You’ll probably need multiple youth staff to be able to pull this off. In fact, under this model the ideal is to have a full-time college pastor.

So you’ve got a handful of college students coming to your church. What’s the next step? Call them individually and ask them to go watch a movie with you and then hang out for coffee afterwards. Don’t call it a college ministry function—call it hanging out. Repeat once a week or so with variety (have a pizza party, go paintballing, etc).

After you’ve got a comfort zone established, start saying things like, “Hey, since we’re all here, let’s take a few minutes and pray for our campus.” “Hey, now that there are six of us wouldn’t it be cool if we did a little Bible study on thriving spiritually at college?”

If you’re the pastor at a large church in an area with several colleges, you probably need to follow a metro model of ministry. What that means is that you can’t focus on just one campus (unless your church is across the street from it).

Your best advice is to start big. Assemble a talented worship team, get a very charismatic up-front person, and launch with style. Print hundreds of invitation tickets, do direct-mail flyers, do a poster campaign on campus. The whole deal.

Build a crowd, and out of the crowd recruit a core. Pour into them and develop leaders. Expand your ministry like crazy.

You’ve got two groups of college students in your congregation: those who are going to college in your community and those who were raised in your church who are now going to college somewhere else.

How can you minister to the ones who have gone?

• Care packages during the first week of school, at midterms, and at finals. Include junk food and a spiritual growth resource (a CD from your most recent college meeting or a booklet that you’ve found helpful or a devotional guide, etc).

• Schedule your retreats over holiday weekends when they’re likely to be home. Invite them to be a part. (be aware that their family is going to want to see them, so scale back your events).
  

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.

How can you integrate college students into the life of your church? Here are some ideas:

• First, be careful. Some churches work students to death and burn them out. They are students, not pack mules. Put limits in place and observe them.

• There are some roles in the church that college students can fulfill well: worship team members, sound technicians, nursery workers, and youth sponsors are some of the most common. Let them know about these opportunities.
• A word of warning—-make sure that you offer opportunities beyond youth ministry. Yes, college students are naturally gifted at helping with that age range. However, some of them are desperately trying to escape from youth ministry and asking them to be youth sponsors or a youth pastor is a bad idea. Let them serve elsewhere.
  

If you’re doing church-based college ministry, how do you relate to groups like Intervarsity and Campus Crusade? For that matter, how do you relate to a denominationally-based group like Chi Alpha?

Cooperatively.

If you have a ministry of any significant size, you will attract students to your worship service who consider themselves to be members of Campus Crusade/InterVarsity/Navigators more than members of your ministry. You have a choice—view it as an asset or a liability.

I strongly suggest you learn how to think of this as an asset. Meet the directors of the parachurch ministries you are drawing from. Talk with them. Figure out ways to partner together.

When most churches think about college ministry, what first comes to mind is launching an age-specific Sunday School class. If that's where you're at, here are some resources to consider:

Prepackaged Curricula

The Scrolls

A very comprehensive curriculum developed by Pantego Bible Church. The best part is—it’s available for free online: http://pantego.org/resources/College_Courses/College%20Scrolls.htm

Being a college pastor can feel pretty lonely. Youth pastors have their own community, senior pastors exist in a world filled with conferences and camraderie, and you're stuck somewhere in the middle.

Few churches have full-time college pastors unless they're running 1,500 or more. That seems to limit your pool of peers pretty strictly. In actuality, you have more than you realize--see the Ministry Directory.

Please know that in this district you as a college pastor are welcome to join with the Chi Alpha missionaries anytime for anything. The default is that you're invited. This specifically includes social functions, training times, and retreats.

Leading college ministry in a local church can be frustrating, because you feel all alone and that there aren't any resources to help you out.