5 Building Blocks to Start a College Ministry
“If you’re looking for a place to serve, we could really use a college ministry.”
I wasn’t expecting to hear these words from the then associate pastor of my home church. I’d met with him for lunch to talk about where I could best “plug in” at the church after a season away from ministry. After 3 years of intense ministry service in college and a year “off” to recover from burn out, I was sensing God calling me back into his service but wasn’t sure where to start.
Terry (the associate pastor) and I discussed the need and what it might look like. After my season of recovery, I was a bit insecure about what I could even offer. However, Terry encouraged me and I agreed to give it a shot. Following that meeting, I started writing, researching, and googling “How to start a college ministry.”
Maybe you’re in a similar space I was 4 years ago. If so, welcome! I’m glad you’re wanting to start a college/young adult ministry! We need them. If you’re anything like me, your biggest question is perhaps something like, “Where do I even begin?” While I won’t claim to be the end all authority on what makes a “successful” college ministry, I would love to share 5 things that helped set our college ministry on the right track and grow it over the last four years from a small group of 4 people to a weekly reach of around 40 and see it through uncertain seasons like 2020. These elements are what we started with — they’re not the only way to start, but I believe they laid a solid foundation.
1. Pray
Duh. Sounds obvious. But I think if we’re honest with ourselves, all the excitement of starting something can cause us to rush ahead if we’re not careful. It’s great to be excited (keep that excitement), just don’t forget prayer.
For us, this looked like several weeks of fasting and prayer before we ever printed a pamphlet, set up a social media presence, or texted our contacts. Furthermore, the leadership team and I hosted 3 prayer services ahead of our launch date. These were services where we invited the church at large to come and pray with us for the work God wanted to do in the lives of our young adults. While there was a brief time of sharing vision and worship, the bulk of time was spent in focused prayer.
By baking in prayer to the preparation and collaborating with the church in prayer, I think it helped us all see this endeavor not just as the vision of one excited 23 year old, but rather a mission God was calling us to as a church. There is something powerful about a group of people asking God to move and bless the work. As has been said by many, “Prayer is the work.” So before you get your vision strategies mapped out, don’t forget to pray and pray in community.
2. Collaborate with the church
On that note of praying in community, I want to encourage you to involve the church as a whole in this ministry. College ministry is notorious for becoming a “church within a church” when unchecked. The reasons for this are numerous (and probably worth discussing in a future blog post), but you can actively counter this if you keep it in mind at the start. How can you involve other sectors of the church in your young adult ministry? Discipleship is something that should be inter-generational and in my experience, young adults want older adults to invest in them. How are you going to make space for that in your strategy?
Some great things to think about are potential connection points. Are you going to provide food? Maybe you can invite the small groups to cater that on a rotation (and stick around for the service to meet the students). What are the needs of your target group? How can you collaborate with other church members to help meet those needs and form relationships? Think about the needs of the students, seek those who can help, and then create space for those connections to happen.
3. Draft a mission statement
Sounds cliche, but it’s important and helpful to have a mission statement for your young adults ministry. This age group/life stage is broad, diverse, and challenging to define. If you don’t have a mission statement, you will lack focus and spread your efforts too thin trying to reach every circumstance in the 18–26+ age range. Here was our mission statement:
“The Spring is a ministry aimed at creating an intersection between “New Adults” and the Gospel. We want to be a place where the Gospel naturally challenges and encourages college aged adults (between 18–26) to pursue the Christian faith at a deeper level or for the first time. Through authentic spirit led worship, teaching, and relationships, we want to see the kingdom of God increase.”
Sure, it’s a bit wordy and not a singular sentence, but I think it helped us stay focused. Our mission statement defines the who, why, what, and how of our ministry. It also discusses the goals of the ministry — increase the kingdom of God through evangelism (“for the first time”) and discipleship (“..at a deeper level”).
As a side note, we used the term “New Adult” on purpose. We weren’t just focused on people in college or singles or people who saw themselves as “young adults”. Rather, we were focused on reaching people who were new to this whole “adult” thing. For us, this was a better descriptor of the people already in the church we’d be engaging and the kinds of people we felt we could best connect with in our community. Our core attendees ended up reflecting this term: college students, graduates, professionals, singles, and married people.
4. Focus on who is there rather than who isn’t
This is a bit more related to your perspective as a leader. Young Adults have crazy schedules and likely won’t be able to be at your service every week. It was easy for me to get discouraged in the early days when one week we’d have 25 and the next we’d have 15 (or 5). Unfortunately, we in church world too easily tie our metric of success to numbers. However, I want to encourage you to remember something:
Whoever is there that week chose and made time to be there.
For the most part, the people in a young adult ministry are in charge of their schedules. It is up to them how they are going to spend that evening — their parents aren’t dragging them to church. They wanted to come to the service/study/event.
So if there are 50 or 5 people there, invest in those that are there. Follow up with those you haven’t seen in a while, sure, but don’t get overly focused on who isn’t there this week. Love on the students that came, catch up on their lives, and pray with them. Schedule coffee with them. Invite them into your home. Be an invested leader. In doing so, you are communicating to those there that it is worth it to come to the college ministry. That they are worth it for you. That this is a place where they are seen, loved, encouraged, and connected.
Every week on my drive to the service, my prayer was “Lord, I pray that you’d bring the right people tonight. Bring those we are to reach tonight. Give me faithfulness to do so.” Numbers are encouraging, but don’t let them blind you to the mission.
5. Start with community
When I was googling “How to start a college ministry” in 2017, I came across a post that encouraged those starting to start small and slow. Rather than a big blow out event, they encouraged the reader to focus on building relationships. I wish I could find this post again today — I’d email them and thank them for their great advice!
College ministry is often known for crazy events, production value, and tons of free food. All of these are good things, but I don’t think they’re foundational ingredients. If a college ministry is a cake, I see events as icing and relationships as the eggs, flour, and sugar. A cake made entirely of icing can look impressive if shaped properly, but it will lack substance.
I think most ministers want to do relational ministry and evangelism. Yet, we can be afraid to do so because it is slow, risky, and hard to measure. A big event where 200 students come to once is impressive (and not a bad thing inherently), but what is our goal? Are we pursuing discipleship that results in deep faith or a wide puddle of nominal Christians?
Case in point, 2020. The Spring was not an events driven young adult ministry. We had a weekly service, discipleship groups, a Sunday school class, a podcast, and regular text chains. Each month we’d have an event, but they were never the center or even the biggest draw to the ministry. I think this proved to be a model with a strong foundation. If we were events driven, the pandemic would have destroyed The Spring. However, because we were focused on relationships first, we actually saw higher attendance and greater commitment throughout 2020. Turns out, young adults really do value authentic, invested relationships.
So, even if it is slower and less immediately impressive, focus on relationships. Do have the big events and hang outs, but don’t let the icing overtake the cake. As people plug in and get invested, you’ll see your events grow and actually accomplish the goal of bringing in more people. Young adults will be more willing to invite their friends to a place where they feel loved, understood, and encouraged.
Conclusion
This post isn’t meant to be the ultimate guide. Just one guy sharing what helped him navigate the early years of starting a college ministry. Some of the above was learned by experience and some by wise council. I can’t take credit for all of it, but I can pass along what I’ve learned.
As I’ve said over and over above: invest in others. Numbers are great, but don’t sacrifice quality discipleship on the altar of impressive statistics. Pray up, team up, write up, and invest intentionally. You’ll be glad you did.
