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Being Stewards of Campus Ministries

 

            Colleges and universities across the country will have been in session for six plus weeks by the time you read this reflection.  Did your congregation get the names of your students to campus ministers on those campuses?  The reason I ask is that these Lutheran and ecumenical college chaplaincies and campus ministries are an opportunity to offer nurture and support to young adult members of our congregations who are suddenly immersed into an unfamiliar, yet exciting new culture of academics and personal life.  Helping them become connected to a worshipping community in their ‘home away from home’ is another way to say that your church family cares.

            Lutherans have been supporting campus ministry for one hundred years.  Lutheran Campus Ministry began in 1907 on the campus of the University of Wisconsin – Madison.  That Lutheran ministry has grown to over 150 campuses nationwide.  Locally there are Lutheran Campus Ministries at Penn State University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Pittsburgh, Oakland Campus.

            The people and congregations of the Allegheny Synod in cooperation with Lower and Upper Susquehanna Synods and the Campus Ministry Office of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America directly support the work of Lutheran Campus Ministry at Penn State with mission support dollars from our annual budget, designated special gifts from congregations, and through persons who serve on the board of Lutheran Campus Ministry and give other forms of time and talent to the ministry.  Additionally Grace Lutheran Church in State College has had a long-standing ministry with and to students of the University.  For several years now Grace Congregation and Lutheran Campus Ministry have taken their highly regarded, respective ministries and fashioned them into one seamless ministry to students, faculty and staff.  What a wonderful witness that is!

            But not every community of higher education is home to a Lutheran Campus Ministry or Chaplain.  Thanks to our denominational church partnerships we also participate in and financially support ecumenical ministries.  Plus, there are specific Lutheran congregations located near college campuses who have made the students, faculty, and staff of a nearby school of higher education a focus of their local ministry.

            In other words, we have a wonderful network of campus ministries and college chaplaincies gracing our nation’s college and university campuses.  If you are reading this Lutheran Letter and are a student on one of these campuses, please get in contact with your campus minister, pastor, or nearby Lutheran parish pastor.  You will be glad you did! 

More likely, though, you have a student or students from your family and/or congregation who are attending a college or university.  It will not take much time to send their name, campus address, email address, and phone number to the campus minister or local congregational pastor where they are a student.  Or if you do not know the campus minister or the address of the school, just send the student’s information, no matter the campus, to Lutheran Campus Ministry at Penn State, 217 Pasquerilla Spiritual Center-Eisenhower Chapel, University Park, PA 16802 or email the information to lutheran@psu.edu.  Our campus ministers there, Pastor Marsh Drege and Alicia Anderson, AIM will gladly forward your information to their colleagues on other campuses.

Campus ministers have wonderful gifts to offer our students.  It only makes sense, then, that we be good stewards of these terrific resources whose ministry is to expand minds, deepen faith and inspire service within students during those college and university years … and for a lifetime to come.  Thank you to our campus ministries for their work … and thank you for caring about our young adults.

                                                                                    +Bishop Gregory R. Pile