pastoring

December report from the Pastor

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This past semester, my prayer has been that God would lead to Campus Edge those for whom it would be a blessing and who would be a blessing to Campus Edge. As a ministry that serves a transient population, numbers tend to be a concern for us. This has been especially true this last year as several people were active in Campus Edge for a shorter time period or left earlier than expected. Yet, God has been gracious, and we’ve been blessed by new people who strongly desire to understand faith better. Join us in giving thanks for these new people and pray with me that they might experience Campus Edge as a welcoming community and might know God’s grace. Please also pray for those who are nearing the end of their programs: that they might continue to stay motivated and that they might be hopeful during the challenging experience of job searching.

We’ve spent significant time in our studies looking at biblical texts that encourage and challenge us in our living faithfully for God: the book of Isaiah and the texts for the chapel services witness to God’s concern for the natural world and justice. The books of Daniel and Acts encourage us as we engage with the culture around us and remind us of how the Spirit works in and through people like us. To hear more about our studies and other events Campus Edge, I encourage you to read the rest of this blog.

– Brenda Kronemeijer-Heyink, Campus Pastor

God’s presence is already on campus

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While some might understand a campus ministry as being primarily about being God to the university campus, I’m part of a tradition that believes God is already present on campus. The task of campus ministry is then about recognizing and proclaiming how God is at work, and then coming alongside the good that God is already doing.

Paul Verhoef, a fellow Christian Reformed campus minister at the University of Calgary, ruminates what this looks like in his context. Most importantly, he “has always worked with the goal of trying to achieve mutual understanding among people, he added, because this is an important part of what it means to love.”

On top of this, Verhoef highlights how important it is that the campus ministry love the university. This includes a calling “to serve, to support, and to live in a mutually supportive relationship with the university,” but it also goes further:

“Can we appreciate its work, its research and teaching focus? Can we sympathetically understand its habits and concerns – and if we at times call it to task, can this be done as someone who supports the university, who is seen by the university as a person who loves it, a person who is part of the university?”

Not only ought we to love the campus, but we also need to recognize that God is already there. As Verhoef has noted, he “has seen how God is always at work — that the Spirit of God is always moving, breathing, creating life, reconciling God’s world back to God, and doing this on the campus in Alberta.” And we, as campus ministers, ought to be looking for how and where “the Spirit of God doing good and beautiful things.” And then, as Verhoef himself notes, we can ask how we might be able to “come alongside of those places and lend support, put my shoulder behind the work being done, and work side-by-side with other staff, faculty, and students to make something beautiful happen.”

Help for when faith shifts

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At Campus Edge we strive to be a welcoming place for those who are struggling with faith, especially those who aren’t sure if they’re able to continue to believe what they used to believe about God, church, and faith. If you’re connected to MSU and struggling with faith, we’d be honored to have you connect to us, either to meet others who’ve undergone the challenging journey connecting to faith shifting or simply to be able to share your own journey and struggles with someone who is committed to listening and encouraging you.

We’d also like to share resources with you in the midst of the struggles. Alongside of the series we did on faith shifting a number of years ago, we post resources periodically on this blog. The Well recently posted an article with suggestions for things you can do when your faith no longer feels familiar. The author, Jen Zamzow, noted that while we might expect our faith to shift at certain transitions in our lives, sometimes it happens unexpectedly, and “change is harder when it sneaks up on us.”

In those times, she gives the following suggestions of things to keep in mind “when we need our faith but it no longer feels familiar to us:”

  1. Be patient with yourself. Zamzow especially warns that “when we push too quickly for resolution without taking time to figure out whether this is even how we should resolve things, we end with simplistic answers that don’t even address the questions that we desperately need to ask.” After all, “faith is not about having everything figured out; it’s about doing the hard work of asking the difficult questions. Faith is not pretending to have all the right answers; it’s about trusting that the answers are there when we don’t see them.”
  2. See the opportunity. Zamzow notes that “it’s when we ask why we should pursue a life of faith that we are most likely to find a faith that connects with our deepest selves, a faith that is real and meaningful.”
  3. Be gentle with yourself. Zamzow notes that “We cannot force ourselves to believe something through sheer will; that’s not how belief works. And guilting or shaming ourselves or others into holding onto particular beliefs about God does little more than further our depression and despair. It is not how we foster deep, authentic faith; it’s how we end up overwhelmed, anxious, or angry at God.”

Unexpected Encouragement

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While we always hope that people are encouraged and challenged by the questions we provide at pub theology, it’s not always clear how the questions will be received. Nor is it always clear how the Spirit is present in the direction that our answers go. Yet, sometimes it’s fairly obvious that God is at work.

Earlier this spring, we started pub theology with a simple question: what do people notice about you? People reflected a bit: for many, it had to do with their physical appearance, for others, it was a specific emotion. But it felt like a hard question to answer because many of us weren’t sure what people noticed or even whether we liked what people seemed to notice. Spontaneously, one person started sharing what they noticed about another, and soon everyone heard about the good we saw in each other: one person’s courage and strength, another’s gracious presence, another person’s joy and enthusiasm. The question thus prompted a brief time of encouragement where we could recognize the unique gifts that each of us brings to our relationships and how we appreciate each other’s presence.

Why have the hard conversations?

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At the recent Christian Reformed Campus ministry association conference we talked about a lot of hard things: racism, abuse of power, and sexuality (and all in one day!). It hadn’t really occurred to me that people might perceive this as strange until one person asked me why we were focusing on all these things and another wondered if we’d planned in a drink at the end of the day (pub locations were indeed made public).

The hard conversations were framed by worship and by sharing with each other about how we [campus ministers and students] were doing. That, I hope, helped place the conversations in the right perspective, even as I believe that the conversations were still hard and could potentially have caused people distress and anxiety. I hope and pray that people are still positively working through what we talked about. After all, we have these conversations together because we all need to see how faith relates to all areas of our lives, including and especially the hard things.

Furthermore, I believe these are areas “where a lot of pain and distress has happened and continues to happen,” and so “I’d like to do all I can to be equipped to know best how to bring the hope of Christ to those [who] are hurting.”

May Report from Pastor Brenda

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One of the things I love most about pastoring is getting to walk alongside people in their faith journeys. I am honoured that people are willing to share their struggles with me, and I am thankful that I can be an encouragement in the middle of the questions and the challenges that life can bring.

Another thing I love about what I do is looking at the Bible with others, including difficult texts like the book of Judges. When we started reading it this past semester, I wasn’t sure how encouraging or applicable it would be. Yet, fairly quickly we saw how the text reveals how God uses the unexpected people around us. At the same time, the text raises questions about how God intervenes in peoples’ lives. Struggling through why God acts in ways we don’t understand in the text provides a means of talking through the questions we have about how God acts today.

It’s important to me as a pastor to provide opportunities to have difficult conversations, whether that be talking about how God acts, political issues, or racism. Because these conversations matter so much, we spent part of the semester discerning why these conversations are difficult and then helping each other learn better how to speak about things that matter to us, including spiritual matters. We could still use some practice with this, so we’ll keep talking about political issues at pub theology, and we’re looking further at racism this summer.

Lastly, I want to express thanks for the people who have encouraged and helped me in the ministry. I have been inspired and encouraged by Hannah in the short time she’s been with us. I have also been challenged and helped by the students who are part of Campus Edge, especially with our Lenten service and pub theology. I also am thankful for Cory and Heather who willingly answered questions connected to their academic journey. Thanks, too, to the CEF board who pushed me to organize such an evening and who have supported and encouraged me in many other ways. Finally, I give thanks for all of you, especially for your prayers, financial support and general encouragement of the ministry.