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To reach young adults we need to invest in campus ministry -- An e-interview with campus minister Jan Rivero

The Rev. Jan Rivero has served as United Methodist campus minister to the Wesley Foundation of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 1998. Previously, she served at the University of Virginia Wesley Foundation for five years and at Northern Virginia Community College for three years.  Over her 25 years of ministry in local churches and on campus, she has come to understand her call to be "a ministry of hospitality and healing."  Untied Methodist asked her to share her insights about young adults and how the United Methodist Church can be welcoming to them.

You've been a campus minister for 15 years. Have you noticed any distinctive characteristics or trends among young adults today that might be different from when you first began in campus ministry?

Students seem today to have more interest in applying faith to everyday life. They are more committed to having a faith that is relevant, useful, purposeful.  They want to make a difference in the world and they want their faith to be what drives that difference. They also seem to be more comfortable with the ambiguity of faith - more willing to accept the unanswerable questions, more able to tolerate shades of gray, more entertaining of divine mystery.  They are very attracted by the Eucharist and find in that an experience of the divine that allows them to transcend their uncertainties.

Are there ways you find yourself approaching campus ministry differently today than you may have 15 years ago? How and why?

I am bolder in my scriptural interpretation.  It's more a function of my age than the students.  I'm just much more comfortable working to dispel the myths that they bring with them; for example, the Christmas story - just helping them to see that so many of the things we "believe" about that story are not scriptural.  Once they get a handle on that one they seem very open to looking at Scripture more honestly.

I am also more attentive to what students bring with them to campus.  Very few students come without baggage.  Campus ministers get a lot of that baggage pushed onto them - unresolved issues with parents mostly.  Generally when I am able to identify that it provides a window
for some good pastoral care.  And, as you know, pastoral care gives us a lot of leverage for other things.  When we have built that trust students are more willing to look at other areas of life and feel safe questioning them.

A young adult wrote me and said she chose the United Methodist Church because a lot of the newer churches lacked something she loved and longer for -- tradition. Can you help those of us who rebelled against tradition much of our lives to understand why tradition is so important to many in this generation?

Tradition may be gaining popularity because it has a trustworthy track record.  Students in this era are smart.  They have survived September 11 and know that some things have to change.  They are seeking things that "work," feel "tried and true," without binding or being stuffy. Tradition (as we boomers are finally figuring out) is not bad in and of itself.  These students know that.  They are willing to try things that may not be new to us but that may be new to them.  One of my favorite realizations is that they are going back to the traditional wedding vows!  I love that.  Maybe they realize that their forefathers and foremothers did have some things right.  We were too rebellious!

As I said, my students are attracted to Eucharist.  That's pretty basic tradition.  They like the old hymns as well as some of the contemporary music.  My main goal in worship is to help them move away from the temptation to see faith as simply "Jesus and me."  I try to help them see that church is not a group of individuals but a community of faith, the body of Christ.  When they get that a lot of their priorities seem to shift.

I assume your students come from throughout the United States, but maybe more from the South. Have you observed regional differences among young adults?

At Carolina the state mandate is that no more than 18 percent of students come from out of state.  Because North Carolina is a very rural state, many of these students come to campus, leaving home for the first time.  Some have never left the state.  There is a lot of new stuff to
take in.  It's overwhelming.  Out-of-state students tend to have a bigger world view, but they don't necessarily feel at home quickly at Carolina because there are so few of them.

At the University of Virginia we had many students who came from military families and some of them had traveled or lived all over the world.  They had a higher degree of curiosity than what I experience in students who first come here to Carolina.  But over time it seems to even out.

How should United Methodist churches that want to reach young adults go about doing it?

The United Methodist Church has some catching up to do.  We don't do a good job of keeping our students connected to the church while they are at college.  Campus Crusade and Intervarsity do a much better job at this, and they have a strategy of recruitment that trumps most mainline
churches because they get students in the "front-line positions" - resident advisers, orientation counselors, etc.  They average one staff person for every 50 students.

We need to take campus ministry more seriously.  We ought to be putting more money as a denomination into this important ministry of our church. This is a critical time in the lives of our young people.  If we do not pay attention to them the parachurch groups will nurture and feed them, and we will lose them.

Ministry in higher education is at the heart of our denomination.  At the Christmas Conference in 1784 they did two things:  elected two bishops and chartered Cokesbury College.  Campus ministry is not new; it is not a fad.  In fact, it is the source of a good percentage of our ordained clergy and lay leadership.

Ministry to our young people away at school HAS to be a priority.  Local churches would not dream of not providing ministry to their youth.  They ought to see it as being equally important to provide ministry to their college students.  But we have lost our understanding of the value of the connection.  As our culture puts more emphasis on the individual and as local churches look more locally to do their mission, they forget about students at college and fail to think of them as mission.

Our connectional system provides a way for being involved in campus ministry.  By covenanting together through our apportionment giving, local congregations provide support for campus ministries. Unfortunately, some annual conferences have cut budgets and campus ministries have suffered and in some cases been eliminated. 

This is where local congregations can step in and step up.  They can provide staff and ministry opportunities for students, but they can also work with conference boards of higher education to get campus ministry back into annual conference budgets so that resources can match the needs. Annual conferences keep asking about our numbers, but we will never have the large numbers of students that parachurch groups have unless we have the kind of financial support they have.

It is important to remember that one of the tasks of young adult faith development is to appropriate their own faith, not simply reiterate the faith of their parents.  To do this sometimes students need their own space, their own minister, their own context, where they can feel comfortable exploring, questioning, doubting.  Again, the value of our connectional structure is to pool our resources so together we can provide more adequate ministry for all our students.

Our thanks to Rev.  Rivero for her thoughtful sharing, and for her push for the United Methodist Church to put a greater emphasis on campus ministry once again.  Our divestment from campus ministry over the past several decades --a decision usually made gradually at the annual conference level in the face of budget crunches caused by the high cost of pensions and health care-- has been amazingly short-sighted.  It was the wrong place to cut. But a new generation may be especially open to the United Methodist presence on campus if we were to again make campus ministry a priority as United Methodism has historically done.

Are young adults discovering the UMC?

Statistics about the age of United Methodists have not been encouraging. The average United Methodist is 57 years old while the average American is 35. Less than 20 percent of all United Methodists are under 40 while 59 percent of all Americans are under 40. (Based on a 2004 story by United Methodist News Service [UMNS] and U.S. Census data.)

I wonder if this might be changing. Here at Foundry Church we just looked at the ages of our last 100 new members (confessions of faith, confirmations and transfers). We were surprised.

We divided our last 100 new members into age cohorts spanning five-year ranges. The single largest group of new members, 33 percent, were between 30 and 35. The next largest group, 15 percent, were between 25 and 30. A total of 53 percent were between 20 and 35. Our last 100 new members here at Foundry actually had a higher percentage of young adults than the U.S. population does.

This would not have been the case a few years ago. I wonder if this new trend is an isolated case here at Foundry or might it represent something new happening within United Methodism on a broader scale? Because the statistics about United Methodism we use today are based on reports from two, three, or more years ago, it is hard to tell.

We are beginning a process using appreciative inquiry to ask our new members to tell us why they joined Foundry, so I should have more to report about this later. My intuition, however, is that United Methodism may be doing a better job of attracting today's young adults than we did with the baby boomers.  Here's why I think this might be the case:

1. The young adults of this generation seem to value authenticity and depth above hipness and polish. We boomers loved rock concerts. Boomer worship kept taking on more and more of the characteristics of a rock concert. Guitar players in praise bands around here have been increasingly open and unabashed in their imitations of Eric Clapton's facial expressions as they play. This sort of thing does not seem to appeal to young adults today at all.

In an article entitled "Talking to Generation X" in First Things Sarah E. Hinlicky wrote:

We know you've tried to get us to church. That's part of the problem. Many of your appeals have been carefully calculated for success, and that turns our collective stomach. Take worship, for instance. You may think that fashionably cutting–edge liturgies relate to us on our level, but the fact is, we can find better entertainment elsewhere. The same goes for anything else you term "contemporary." We see right through it: it's up–to–date for the sake of being up–to–date, and we're not impressed by the results.

Today's young adults seem to be able to smell artifice and pretense a mile away. They can tell when folk are posturing or are in it for alternative motives other than a true desire to serve Christ.

Comparatively speaking, United Methodists tend to be a pretty sincere group. We are ordinary folk not claiming to be super-saints but still committed to Christ. We are more ready than many Christians to admit we don't have all the answers while still having commitments and values we strive to live by. We are not usually judgmental or holier-than-thou. I think this appeals to this generation of young adults.

2. Today's young adults seem to value intellectual depth and consistency. It is to our advantage that our clergy are seminary trained and are often graduates of university seminaries. Our clergy tend to be better read in substantial theological and secular literature. We don't specialize in pop hits from the local Christian bookstore.   

This generation is not, by and large, as touchy-feely as we boomers were. Young adults today seem to value intellectual clarity and discipline over emotional and sentimental appeals. This appears to be true across the theological spectrum. Conservative young adult Christians today are much more scholarly and systematic in their thinking than was the case in my generation. For this reason, I suspect some conservative young adults would rather tolerate a thoughtful preacher even if he or she is more liberal than they are. They prefer this to enduring the platitudinous preaching of lazy thinkers who might otherwise be closer to their own theological position. Our requirements of vigorous theological study may be a plus.

3. The young adults of this generation don't seem to mind hanging out with old people.  We boomers valued youth and newness. We wanted to do things our own way. We were in a hurry. We didn't have much time  or patience to listen to our elders or to accommodate their concerns.  We wanted to start our own congregations, or at least our own worship services, so we could do things our own way.

Today's young adults seem to value continuity with their elders. They seem to have time for meaningful relationships with older people. This may be a consequence, in part, of the fragility of family relationships in their parent's generation.

Craig Kennet Miller, a staff member of the General Board of Discipleship (GBOD) who specializes in generational studies, calls the current generation of young adults postmoderns.  In his article "From Generation to Generation," he writes about postmoderns:

Born between the assassination of President Kennedy and the election of Ronald Reagan, members of this generation grew up with parents who were dealing with the social revolutions of the sixties and seventies. Approximately forty percent of them have parents who are divorced. "Postmoderns" are hungry for healthy relationships and models of family security. Many are creating their own extended families through networks of friends.

If postmoderns are looking for extended families including people their parent's and grandparent's ages, we've got them in  the United Methodist Church. We are a multi-generational denomination, and  most of our churches are multi-generational. This was not to our advantage with boomers, but it seems to be a plus now.   

4. This generation of young adults appears not to be impressed by superstars. They are not into personality cults, especially not in church. This is to United Methodism's advantage, because we don't have many superstars, and most of those who might qualify in one way or another don't act like superstars.

Dan R. Dick, another GBOD staffer,  has written an excellent article about a long conversation he had with a group of young adults in an airport. He quotes one of the young adults:

I grew up in three different churches. I always wondered, "Who are we worshiping anyway?" Everywhere it was the same. It never felt like we stayed focused on God. Were we worshiping church? Maybe the dollar? Maybe our own egos — like, hey if you’re Christian and God loves you, then you’re okay? Maybe we were worshiping the organist or the pastor? But worshiping God? I don’t think so!

Given the way that Christian preachers and musicians have so often become part of something that feels more like an entertainment industry than church, ordinary United Methodist congregations may be a  breath of fresh air to a generation that is seeking to worship God rather than the preacher or the band.

I am writing in generalities, I know. This is an intuition, that's all.  But I think it is important that we think about this and research it. If we are beginning to attract more young adults these days, we need to be careful not to change so as to imitate the churches that have been more successful with past generations.  We have a way of doing this -- trying to become like something that was successful 10 years ago. What if the Spirit has prepared us for just such a time as this?