Part 1: Welcome to College! Now Find a Church
Part 2: You Need Christian Fellowship in College
Part 3: Four Marks of a Faithful Campus Ministry
Part 4: Campus Ministries and the Priority of the Local Church
Part 5: College and Christian Fellowship: Now What?
Congratulations! You are now a college student. Your hard work has paid off, and you are now embarking on the exciting, four-year journey of higher education. During your time in college you will learn much about God’s world, meet new people, and forge friendships that will possibly last a lifetime.
For many students, this new adventure will include learning how to navigate life away from the immediate supervision and provision of parents. And because you will not be able to lean on your parents as you once did in grade school and high school, you will need learn how to develop and keep your own schedule, complete assignments, and fulfill obligations without regular reminders from your parents or the predictable structure of home life. College is a formative time in a young man and young woman’s life.
But it’s important to realize that your time in college holds special promise and peril. For believers in the Lord Jesus, college is an important stewardship from God; a place where you will learn skills that will prepare you for a life of service to your family, your neighbors, and to the greater society. The Lord calls you to work diligently in your classes in order to make yourself useful to others (see Prov 12:4; 21:5; Col 3:23-24).
But college is also a dangerous place for the Christian. Although your education is a stewardship with which God has entrusted you, your college may be a place where the Christian faith will be often attacked directly by unbelieving professors or undermined indirectly by an underlying non-Christian worldview that pervades the fabric of your school’s philosophy of education.
These difficult realities do not imply that a Christian shouldn’t attend a state or private, non-Christian college or university. We have biblical examples of believers who served God faithfully during their time under the tutelage and educational influence of institutions that had no regard for the one true God (e.g., Joseph in Genesis 39-45; Daniel in Daniel 1:1-21). Rather, in light of these challenges, it is imperative that believing students make Christian fellowship the unshakable priority of their college experience.
That’s why I’m writing this series of blog posts. I want to help you grasp the vital importance of faith-sustaining Christian fellowship while you are in college and aid you in finding such fellowship. In the next post, I will explain in more detail why you need Christian fellowship while you are at college. In the following post, I will discuss the essential characteristics of a faithful, Christ-honoring campus ministry. In the fourth post, I will show you why the local church should be the centerpiece of your college experience. I will conclude the series by drawing some practical conclusions from the previous posts.
In the next post we will consider the vital question: Why do you need Christian fellowship at college?
