Building Student Work in a Noncompetitive Way

(in a complex evangelical environment) 

Seminar delivered at the Church Student Ministries conference (CSM), January 2008

Over Christmas the TV was full of statistics of how much people will spend, what the average level of debt is, whether people actually enjoy the occasion or not. The bizarre one that caught my eye on the news was the claim that as many as 1/3 of people will storm out of Christmas dinner in anger because they can’t take the company. Somebody, somewhere in the BBC has the job of discovering strange and unproveable statistics.

Regardless of whether that is correct or not it does highlight that we live in an age when people aren’t very good at relationships. The in-laws is the classic example. When you get married you discover that not all families have the same values, expectations and practices as yours and if you are to live without permanent tension there is always a process of adjustment, getting to know people, beginning to understand them and take them on their own terms, even if they are very different. And, of course, one party is always going to better at that than another. Sometimes one party is completely inept at it and doesn’t seem to be able to make any compromise, instead expecting it all to be one way. But that doesn’t absolve the more sympathetic party from the responsibility of making concessions and doing their best.

At least with the in-laws there is a strong incentive to make an effort, to assume the best and to work through difficulties. When we come to building student work in an environment where lots of other churches and ministries are trying to do the same thing, there doesn’t have to be any incentive. In fact making sure that you never meet other workers, and especially that your students don’t, can seem like the best way of ring-fencing and safe-guarding what you are trying to build.

A Complex Evangelical Scene 

25 years ago there was basically only one player in the student ministry field in the UK, and that was UCCF. Maybe a few churches, but nothing like the plethora of different works and workers that we have now. Regardless of the strengths and weaknesses of that, one positive was that it was easy to see how everybody pulled in one direction, building one coherent ministry to a campus. The situation now is very different. Any traditional uni campus will have interest and input from multiple evangelical church ministries as well as multiple para-church agencies, all with slightly different agendas, perhaps slightly different theologies and perhaps different ecclesiologies. You approach student ministry and relating to others differently if you think that it should only be based in a church (or in your area that it should only be based in your church) to if you think CU-style witness is a good thing. You will approach it differently according to weather you think a CU is a church or not. You will approach it differently if you think that other ministries are acting in a predatory way towards students you have discipled or work in which you have a large stake historically.

And so the temptation is for our starting point to be essentially negative or suspicious about other ministry, especially people we don’t know very well. I spent my first years in student ministry relating to other ministries on the basis of guilty until proven innocent. And it often didn’t take people to do things very differently, very badly or very insensitively to my ministry to affirm me in that position.

Building the Kingdom, Not Empires 

We are in a complex and potentially competitive environment. The question is how do we handle that in a godly way, with gracious attitudes, and a concern for building the kingdom above building our own work

God loves it when people work together for the gospel. Just read Philippians. Make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Developing witness with others is sometimes very messy and can involve considerable pain. Again, just read Philippians.

It is very easy to cover up our hurt, anger, pain or personality clashes with some theological justification or speculation about the motives of others. Anyone can come out well in our minds by comparing the best of what we do with the worst of what we assume someone else does.

The more theologically acute we are the easier it is to justify ourselves. “I have the right to take people away from other works because I am mature, other people don’t have the right to do that to me because they are immature. By definition what I build will be the better work that people should come to. If they don’t want to they automatically demonstrate their own immaturity”. If they were mature they would already be like us.

Make no mistake, the Bible does draw lines. Our struggle is to make sure we are nottempted to draw them more tightly than the Bible does.

Starting From Repentance 

A leader of a well known ministry came to me and said “I have lost count of the number of occasions I have heard you and people like you run us down without ever coming to see what we do. I have heard myself public referred to as a bad teacher or false teacher by people who have never offered to come and help me improve. How is that possibly justifiable among Christians?” And I knew he was right. The unusual thing was that he still wanted anything to do with me, was prepared to name the elephant in the room rather than just let things harden and harden between us or go to war with each other’s ministries. It would have been much less painful not to.

Exercise:

How should you respond when someone says something like that to you? How easy or hard would you find it to go to another student worker or ministry and have that conversation in an attempt to find ways to unite in the work? Why?

Living Out Grace 

We have to live out the gospel, in grace, even when we feel others aren’t doing the same. We must never get tempted out of grace-filled attitudes just because others take advantage or we feel they do.

Quite a normal pattern adopted by many for student ministry over recent years has been for a local church to employ a recent graduate, perhaps doing church admin and to say to them “we would love to develop our student work, you have lots of student friends, go get a group together.” No real training, no accountability for how that is done, or measures of how to do a good job. If I were a 21 year old the way I would do that would be to recruit people from the Christian Union, because I wouldn’t know any other way to do it. I wouldn’t necessarily see the difficulties that raises for other people. And when people jumped down my throat I wouldn't understand why. It would be all too easy for me to read the situation as me doing my best for the Lord and them being horrible to me. And I would be doing my best for the Lord.

In one case student worker from a church asked if one of our staffworkers could disciple them in the work because she didn’t know how to do it. After a year she said “now I do know how, I am taking most of the CU with me, goodbye.” There was no way of telling up till that point. She was highly duplicitous.

There were three immediate temptations: 

1. To play dirty in response to the one who played dirty because we had been hurt and our ministry had been damaged.

2. To treat another worker from the same ministry with hostility and suspicion, even though she was hirrified by what her colleague had done

3. To enter into subsequent relationships with other evangelicals on the basis of guilty until proven innocent, out of safety. To cease taking risks in relationships because of historic hurt

Exercise:

How, ideally, should we respond to that kind of situation? Honestly, how would you really want to respond?

Start With Generous Assumptions 

Always assume and say the best about other people’s ministries and ministry assumptions, even when you have a critique to bring.

None of us do student ministry in a vacuum. There is almost always a local evangelical scene and other interested parties. And they aren’t all the same as us. I have fallen into the following traps over the years, all of which have damaged ministry:

• Assuming that I am the one who is exclusively allowed to define the parameters of what unity in evangelical student work should look like. When I used to say to others “lets put aside our secondaries to concentrate on primaries together in evangelism” it was implicit that I was the one who defined what was primary and what was secondary. There is no better way to force wedges between mostly like-minded people than by saying “you have to give up stuff that is important to you and only be like me if you want to do anything with me.” And the way that most often works out in student contexts is conservatives insisting on a particular position regarding spiritual gifts. The danger is that because I think something is secondary and I know someone else does, therefore they won’t mind me treating it as unimportant (eg Baptism)
• Assuming that someone who does things ineptly because they don’t know very much yet should be excluded, except if they are in my ministry
• Assuming that received tales of how other people have behaved in the past are correct and should colour our relationship with them in the future
• Assuming that because we have differences in a minor area that should damage unity, that therefore they must also differ in greater areas that should preclude unity. Eg – this person disagrees with me on X secondary (women in ministry, baptism, charismata, whatever), but by doing so they actually reveal a fatally low regard for scripture and we can’t relate to anyone with a low regard for scripture. I see way too much of that kind of upping the ante at the moment and it is sin.
• Assuming that because people do unhelpful things or teach badly that their motivation is poor or their heart not inclined to the Lord. The moment I think that there is a good chance that their heart is much more godly than mine

General Secretary of UCCF, Bob Horn, always used to say “start with generous assumptions” Otherwise the temptation is to see partnerships not as gospel opportunities but simply as threats to be managed. And when there is disagreement or misunderstanding we can feel it would be so much easier just getting on with it by ourselves and keeping everyone else at a safe distance. Even if you do decide that someone differs significantly enough that you can’t work with them, that doesn’t mean you can’t be friends with them, you can’t speak well of them, or that you have to be hostile towards their ministry.

An Unaffordable Luxury 

I contend that in our current climate in this country that is an unaffordable luxury. When I was working in London there were three student ministry teams from mission agencies and around 40 church based student workers, and we all pulled in different directions. The thing that started to change that was a few leaders who began to say “the challenges we face are much bigger any of us individually, and not working together simply isn’t an option if we want to see Kingdom growth.” If we don’t hang together with as many as possible, we are going to get hung separately.

So how do we build partnerships with others, broadly and generously?

Exercise:

What have you found effective in building partnership in student work with people who aren’t quite like you?

Doing things together is a good way of tearing down walls of misunderstanding and suspicion. Basically when we are doing evangelism it is much easier to relate positively, because the main thing is the main thing

Have the attitude of Christ

Here are my "3 Cs" of doing evangelical relationships: we have to be simultaneously

• confessional
• clear
• kind (sic)

It is easy to do one and two but not three and consequently be very hard. It is easy to do three but not one and two and be woolly. But we are to be gospel people with Christ-like attitudes. God is remarkably kind to people we might be tempted not to be kind to

My big tip for developing mutual generosity: give your best stuff away. When other ministries approached us in London and said “can we help out?” it was very tempting to say “here is a very tough FE campus, nobody knows how to impact it, there are few resources available for the work there, so you have that bit and we will keep the easier, larger places.” Guess how many people wanted partnership on those terms? What would you say was our underlying attitude?

That response just led to resentment. The opposite was only wanting to build work in the places where it looked like there was immediate short-term gain to be had for our ministry or church. I remember a large church coming to me and saying “we have a worker we would like to dedicate to somewhere where there is real need, can you suggest somewhere.” I suggested a place and they said “actually the only thing we are really prepared to consider is X college” where they knew there were plenty of workers and a flourishing ministry.

We really have to ask the question “are we working to attract students to us and our work more than we are working to spread the gospel all over the place.” Its OK to want to attract students to our church, but not to place it more highly than mission where Christ is not named. And we can justify that subtly – “if we just attract a lot of students to ourselves from easier places now, then we will have the resources to do the other places in 5 years.” That almost never works because your mindset is that student work happens here where I am and centres around getting students in to you, which is the opposite of the mindset of frontier missions. "Lets all pitch for the same small number of Christian students rather than reaching anywhere new."

Genuine, Generous Partnerships 

The point is, that if you want partnerships – and you must - then you have to do it genuinely and generously. Give people your best stuff and see what it does for your relationships. Go to the hard places together and give them a stake in your best places. This is far too important not to bring as many to the party as we possibly can.

A vicar recently said to me “I can’t understand why nobody I have invited has come to a training course I have put on. The content is excellent.” I asked him how many of them he is friends with or puts time into building a working relationship with. He said “they should come on the basis of the excellence of what is on offer alone.” I don't agree. Its impossible to relate well with people who think you have no time for them. Of course the challenge is in order to give the time, you have to not do something else you think is important. And it is always easier to persuade yourself that time is better spent doing things you can see immediate benefit from.

These are increasingly important issues because the student ministry scene is getting increasingly fragmented, with a growing number of players from churches and ministries. At exactly the point in our culture where we most need to present united fronts. The dangers of infighting, territorial ministry are more real than ever and I hear lots of horror stories. If ever there was a time when we need to fight that tendency it is now. We have lost the universities and colleges, and even are Christian students are no longer particularly impressed with separatist evangelical politics.

But while these things are important I think they are far from easy. They may mean that we have to support and encourage people who are quite different from us on secondary matters. In fact we have to say we will actively support difference on secondaries that make us uncomfortable. It will certainly mean that as leaders in student ministry we seek to be known as people who outdo others in repentance, forgiveness and love. It will mean that when people screw up our ministry that we refuse to do the same back. It will mean that we refuse to knock down others, that we refuse to spend a lot of effort justifying ourselves. It will mean that we identify walls of historical pain and hurt and do our best to remove them, even if we fail.