Mapping the “Greatest Domestic Mission Field” in a New Educational Landscape

Abstract

greatest domestic mission field: that is how the Right Reverend Roger Blanchard described ministry in higher education in the early 1950s. At that time, ministry in higher education was generally overseen by ordained chaplains, working on college and university campuses primarily with students, providing regular worship and fellowship through Canterbury Clubs and other programs. Many Episcopal clergy (myself included) found their vocations through these chaplains and ministries. And I am a Christian today not by upbringing but because of the lived faith of Christian campus activists. In this legacy I am not alone: many people who grew up in the Episcopal Church, or another church, or no church at all found their way to the Christian faith through these ministries. Hence, Bishop Blanchards comment.A lot has changed since then. In the 1960s, the median age of college students began to rise (as it had after World War II), as did the proportion of students not living on campus and of those studying part-time rather than full-time. Curricula and enrollment demographics changed and diversity increased-all important and mostly good things. This meant that the shape of ministries changed from chaplaincy to churched undergraduates to something broader and often more systemically-oriented. In the ministries in which I have been involved, for example, we have worked with large numbers of students of color from largely homogeneous neighborhoods not only in terms of their own adjustment, but also in terms of what the educational institution ought to be doing to provide them support and to help others in receiving the gifts they bring. Where educational institutions often have a dominant culture-based on race or ethnicity, socio-economic background, or religion-institutions and their members often need to be reminded that fostering diversity cuts both ways.Though many have seen campus ministry as a specialist field, as compared to parochial ministry, the ministers themselves know that they are required to be generalists with a very wide range of knowledge and skills. While a major part of the work of campus ministers has always involved providing worship, social functions, and individual spiritual and pastoral guidance to undergraduates, it also involves ministering in the workplace with workers and supervisors of all sorts, including on occasion mediating conflicts between administration and staff, or faculty and administration. Campus chaplains engage in values-based discourse with faculty groups, and accompany campus and community activists involved in a wide range of issues of justice and quality of life. Chaplains work with people in their family lives and all that entails, as well as help undergraduates make the transition from adolescence to adulthood. And of course they are also writing sermons, planning and presiding at worship services, praying and reflecting, having important conversations, visiting those in distress, and doing everything else that goes with ministry.All this takes place not just in the contexts of particular campuses, but also in the midst of changing times in church and society. During the political turmoil of the mid-1960s through the 1970s, there were considerable debates in the Episcopal Church about whether the church's ministers ought to be involved in progressive or conservative political movements on campus. There were concerns about the link between some campus groups and the General Convention Youth Program. The demands on the church's resources were high, and those resources had stopped growing. Funding of positions in ministry in higher education was severely cut, as were the resources provided for the national staff to bring together campus ministers for continuing education, coordination, and mutual support. Ironically, when trust in institutions declined in the 1960s and 1970s, the role of campus ministries in calling institutions to account was curtailed.As resources continued to dwindle into the 1980s and 1990s more of the work of campus ministry came under the aegis of clergy in parishes close to colleges and universities, whether or not any students came to church on Sunday morning. …