Often, in spite of their best efforts, congregations and church committees become frustrated and give up when they don’t see college students in worship regularly and when church school classes are poorly attended. Perhaps the problem is that our congregations’ goals for ministry to college students are not on target and that our measuring sticks for success are skewed. If we began to view collegiate ministry as a ministry of hospitality, instead of a ministry of programming, what might that do to the things we attempt? What might it do to the measuring stick by which we gauge our success?

A Time of Spiritual Upheaval

Young adulthood is typically a time of spiritual upheaval. It is a developmental stage in which most young people question the values with which they have been raised, explore new directions and options, pit their spiritual values against new information they encounter in their college academics, and often step back from their former level of participation in the life of the church while they go through this stage. They ask tough questions about God, about the church, and about their beliefs, but they don’t always attend worship and church education programs.

A Ministry of Hospitality

Congregations have a choice about what to do with young adults going through all this. They can choose to pretend it is not really happening and proceed to offer programming as usual, then find themselves disappointed or angry when college students don’t support their efforts.

Or they can acknowledge the importance and reality of this stage of development, recognize the implications for the church, and gear their ministry to meet the needs of young adults. A ministry of hospitality to this age group creates strong, if somewhat invisible, ties to the church that help young people understand that they matter to the church whether they are physically present or not. It may be a few years before those invisible threads tug those young adults back to an active presence in the church, but the threads can be powerfully important.

So what works? What can congregations do to effectively minister to college students? What does a ministry of “hospitality and presence” look like? Here are some ideas that your congregation might consider. Not all of them will work in your church setting, so select a few that sound like good places to start . . . or adapt them to meet your congregation’s strengths and interests. Then decide how to change your measuring stick for whether or not you are doing effective ministry.

1. Have different families or groups in the church befriend a student who is away at college. Decide on ways to be supportive of that student—notes and birthday cards, care packages, phone calls, e-mail messages, and invitations to meals or gatherings while they are home during breaks, and so forth.

2. Offer scholarship help to your church’s college students to enable them to participate in special events such as campus ministry retreats, mission trips, or international experiences. Offer help toward purchasing books or providing financial assistance for students with special needs.

3. Offer your church fellowship hall as the site for a weekend retreat or spring break mission experience for college students from another area. Have members help provide meals and coordinate local mission projects.

4. Contact a campus minister and find out what special needs his or her campus program has and gather supplies to support that program (Bibles, songbooks, study materials, audiovisual equipment, and the like).

5. Invite college students from your congregation or another to help as liturgists in worship during school breaks or to do minutes for mission about campus ministry on their campuses.

6. Make sure college students are on updated church mailing lists to receive newsletters and other correspondence.

7. Send a brief weekly or monthly e-mail devotional to your church’s college students—keep it short, relevant, and uplifting.

8. Make sure Presbyterian campus ministers get the names and contact information for all your college students on campuses where there are PC(USA) campus ministries.

9. Provide emotional support to families whose kids have gone away to college—empty-nest syndrome is very real for many parents.

10. Include college students by name on your church’s prayer list. Cards could be sent to the students the following week to let them know that they were lifted up in prayer.

2. Find out what is happening in Presbyterian campus ministry in the area and how your congregation can be supportive of existing programs.

3. Have members offer to host students who can’t afford to travel to their homes during breaks.

4. Provide host families for international students or for other students looking for a local family connection.

5. Offer your church facilities as a host site for college events, retreats, meetings, or memorial services.

6. Invite college students to join your congregation for mission opportunities like soup kitchens or Habitat workdays.

7. Ask a group of students from an area campus to sit with your church’s leadership to share concerns, ideas, and needs.

8. Work with the student life office on the local campus to help with freshman move-in day.

9. With permission of the campus, set up a hospitality booth during freshman orientation to serve parents and students snacks and help with maps and directions to area churches.

10. Don’t limit your thinking and offerings to only Presbyterian students. Students travel in packs with their friends. You may need to minister to some students from other denominations in your area.

Deb Guess is on staff of Charleston-Atlantic Presbytery as Associate for Campus Ministry and Mission. She lives in Summerville, South Carolina.