Three NEW Reasons to Connect Your Student to Lutheran Campus Ministry!

I am back this summer with three brand new reasons why you should connect your student to Lutheran Campus Ministry...

1. You can’t!

Well, you can and you should, well, maybe that’s not the best reason to start with…

This is time of year when people tell me that the biggest reason they don’t  connect a student with campus ministry is because they want to the student to make that decision. 

I get it. You want to honor your student’s burgeoning freedom. College is the process of beginning to make for ourselves the important decisions that will shape the rest of our lives...But...There is this important fact I’ve learned about college students…unless you’re holding grades or money over their head, you can’t make students do what they don’t want to do. Trust me, no student has ever stayed connected to campus ministry because of parental guilt. Even if you sign them up, the decision still rests with them. 

It can be difficult to navigate the changing relationship with your student as they head off to college. There are a number of things you probably should not do for them:

• You probably shouldn’t text them multiple times a day, every day. 

• You probably shouldn’t pick out your students major.

• You probably shouldn’t call their professors to talk about their grades.

One thing you probably should do is connect your student with supportive resources that will walk with them as they make the increasingly important decisions they’ll be faced with throughout their time on campus. My suggestions for a knowledgable, supportive, and faithful resource whose only goal is the health and well being of your student…Hmmm...How a campus pastor!? Like me, or my hundreds of colleagues around the country. If your student doesn’t know we exist, it’s a lot harder for them to make the decision to take advantage of a life-giving resource. 

2. You’ll get good grades…and save money!

I know I said this last year, but the research keeps rolling in. Study after study shows that students who have a supportive relationship with a non-student on campus have much higher retention and graduation rates than those who do not. But what non-student on campus has the time to get to know and build a supportive relationship with your student? That’s a tough one...whew...How about a campus pastor?! That’s, literally, my job description. Connect your student to Lutheran Campus Ministry, your student will get better grades, and it’s much more likely that you’ll only be writing out those tuition checks for four years!

3. Because we’re Lutheran….and connecting your student to Lutheran Campus Ministry is good theology. 

You see, in the coming years your student will have to make important decisions that will shape their future. As you send them to college I hope that you send them held in the promise of the God who holds them and refuses to let them go regardless of the the decisions they make and the places they go. Because that’s the God of grace that we proclaim as Lutherans, that’s the God who doesn’t let us decide if God is going to love us or not. Connecting your student to Lutheran Campus Ministry is one way of sending them held in the promise of the God of grace. 

When you connect your student to Lutheran Campus Ministry. We’ll send them a welcome packet, full of our promotional schwag. They’ll probably receive some form of invitation from the students in our groups, but I can guarantee you that they’ll receive an invitation from a campus pastor who wants to get to know them and help them make their way on campus. 

Those are three awfully compelling reasons for connecting with campus ministry. Here’s one more piece of good news. You can connect your student to Lutheran Campus Ministry at college campuses around the country at www.elcacampusministry.org. Just select the campus your student is headed to, submit the information that you’re comfortable sharing, and through the magic and power of the internet that information will find its way to the campus where your student is headed in the fall. 

Check out the website, enjoy the rest of your summer, and we look forward to welcoming your student in the fall!

God is Imaginary

A Pentecost sermon preached at Holy Love Lutheran Church based on Acts 2 and the presence of the Spirit, with some help from John Green. 

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place, the Parthians, the Medes, the Elamites, the residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, those from Phrygia and Agloe. Suddenly, from heaven, there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, rested on each of them and they began to speak in a great variety of tongues. 

As this tongue twisting reading from Acts maps out these people and places, I’m reminded of how much I love maps. In fact, I think they’re holy. So much so that each year on campus our students spend a night discovering the theology of maps. 

Before we meet I go to the chamber of commerce and pick up as many of their free maps of Boulder as I can discreetly sneak out to my car. I hand out markers and I ask students to draw their lives on these maps. Mark the places where you live, where you study, where you go for fun, where you work. Draw the routes. How do you get from one place to the other? What roads or paths do you drive or walk?  

We connect the dots and each student ends up with a map of their life. Then we lay all the maps on top of each other, tracing our footsteps over one another. In the end what emerges is a mapping of the life of our small community. But this process produces something else, something that makes maps particularly holy. This map of maps also shows the places we don’t go. It reveals the white spaces; the places we do not go, the places we do not know.

An Ash Wednesday Confession from Ethicon, Inc.

An Ash Wednesday Sermon on 2 Corinthians 5.20-6.10 preached at St. Aidan's Episcopal Church in Boulder.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return...These words are seared into my mind, and not just from the yearly ritual of smudging ashes on my forehead.

One sometimes surprising fact about me is that I studied civil engineering as an undergraduate. Where I went to school co-oping was a really big deal for engineers. The summer after your freshman year you went to work for a company as a sort of long term intern. From then on, you’d alternate semesters of study and work.

If you’re interested in being an engineer, it’s a wonderful way to make the connection between career and classes. Through co-oping you graduate on time, end up with a year of work experience, and a connection to a potential full time employer.

If it just so happens that you didn’t actually want to be an engineer, co-oping turns out to be a very helpful, if somewhat painful, tool for vocational discernment.

I co-oped with a company called Ethicon, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, where I did environmental engineering work at a factory where they made hypodermic needles and absorbable sutures. There I learned rather quickly that I did not, in fact, want to be an engineer.

The factory was a converted textile mill in Cornelia, Georgia. Cornelia is a tiny town in north Georgia, which is a part of the state known as 'Not Atlanta.' It’s close enough to Gainesville that you can smell the chicken plants, but far enough way that you don’t get to enjoy the amenities that come with being the chicken processing capital of the world. That summer I shared a cubicle with my boss, a rather unpleasant man experiencing his first southern summer after migrating from Massachusetts. The cubicle we shared was in the basement of the factory. We had one little window at the top of the wall above our desk that looked out onto the ground level of the parking lot. On my first day someone covered up that window with a piece of plywood, as roof maintenance began that lasted the rest of the summer.

To be brutally honest, I hated that job and I hated that summer. The work itself was tolerable and my co-workers weren’t unkind. Rather this summer was the first time that I was forced to face and wrestle with issues of depression and anxiety.

One of the perks of this job, besides its spectacular pay for a college sophomore, was that the company provided housing. They did that for me. I had a one bedroom apartment in Baldwin, an even smaller town than Cornelia, just one town over. Everyday that summer I’d go to work, where I mostly made rounds by myself, checking flows and counting barrels of chemicals. Then at five o’clock I’d go to sit by myself in my apartment until I could convince myself to fall asleep, wake up, and face another day of walking around the basement of the factory.

It was an intensely lonely three months. Throughout the summer I thought enviously of friends working at summer camps, in summer classes, working at home, surrounded by people who knew and cared for them. I wanted out. I wanted desperately for that summer to be over. I wanted anything except for what I had.

Somewhere in the middle of that summer I heard my father-in-law, who is a Lutheran pastor, mention something about praying by repeating one short phrase over and over. I confess, my personal prayer life is usually a growth area, but I was desperate. So, I tried it. Everyday as I made my rounds in the bowels of the old textile mill, as I summoned the strength to get out of bed, and searched for the strength to not literally run out the front doors of the factory and never return, I repeated the phrase;

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Over and over, each day, tucked away behind chemical vats, in closets inventorying safety equipment, I prayed;

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. 

This prayer and the ashes we smear onto our foreheads are a call to repentance. They acknowledge the brokenness of ourselves and our situation. They are a powerful reminder of our mortality and sinfulness. 

But my prayer in the bowels of a converted textile mill and our prayer in this place is ultimately a prayer of hope. It’s the hope that now is the acceptable time, that now is the day of salvation. The ashen cross confesses that the world is not as it should be, but it also proclaims the hope that our brokenness shall be returned to dust from which it came and out of those ashes God will bring life.

Wear the ashes and know that while we are dying, we are alive; that while we are sorrowful, we are always rejoicing; that while we have nothing, we possess everything. This is the symbol you are called to bear. Do so earnestly. Do so with undying hope. Amen.