In campus ministry we use a variety of educational mediums. Our group Bible studies involve discussion and discovery, and our training sessions involve lots of one-to-one meetings and workshopping. Why then, when it comes to our ‘mission’ events, do we continue to emphasise teaching from the front? Do we believe […]
What I’ve been referring to as ‘participation’ is sometimes included under the banner of apologetics, and since I first ran an apologetics group as an undergraduate student, I’ve seen periodic attempts to make apologetics into something more encompassing. Sometimes we seem to use apologetics as a sort of catch-all category […]
In the last post, I was asking in part how ‘participation‘ is evangelistic. But after a friend gave me another angle, I now want to ask how participation is spiritually formative. In university ministry I guess we’re all agreed on the need to equip Christian students. Here’s a key phrase […]
Below is the outline of a campus ministry resource I’ve been working on for Go Conference 2016. One of the reasons for this particular resource is the need to move people beyond the commonplace idea that evangelism means standing and preaching. In what follows I’m therefore using evangelism as an […]
Engaging the university (see all posts) refers to moving campus ministries beyond the pietistic, evangelistic, and apologetic realms into new territory: participation and dialogue. I have not yet asked in detail why we might want more of this, or what motivations we might have for trying to move in that […]
As he travels between different IFES movements, Terry Halliday has been raising the call for dialogic ministry. He was recently speaking at the University of Queensland, hosted by Leigh Trevaskis and co and one of the UQ residential colleges. Terry has shared some of the questions people had: What does […]
Nicholas Wolterstorff is an important voice in our discussions of engaging the university. Here’s a mashup of some of his thinking, which I’ve begun exploring in the last couple of years. Wolterstorff originally comes from a Dutch Reformed background, in the tradition of Abraham Kuyper. He is often addressing Christian […]
Meet Jesus at uni 