Preparing for Ministry to Students at Princeton

I grew up in Houston, Texas and Darryl and I actually went to kind of rival high schools near each other, but when I came up east for college that became more plain to me in seeing how many alumni come to these schools. I really noticed and it really impacted me at a deep level what a bad situation this was, that schools that are so influential in our culture will at the same time also be very, very secular. It seems to be more or less a train wreck that has been happening in our culture for many years, and God raised me up to help see if I could be a part of seeing that changed.

Christian Union is very much focused on transforming culture, that is the mission of our organization to develop Christian leaders to transform culture. And so when we bring students into our ministry through Bible courses, which is the centerpiece of our ministry, real top notch Biblical impartation, exegetical book studies, some real relevant topical studies, when we're developing and mentoring students in any of those various contexts, we are doing it with an end in mind, and the end that we have in mind is to develop them in order to actually lead Princeton with cultural transformation on their mindsets.

I think of the great sort of theologian Abraham Kuyper who's credited with this quote, "Every square inch there is not one square inch of existence to which Christ doesn't look at and say, 'This is mine.’" So when I think of what we're doing on campus with Bible courses, with one-on-one discipleship, and then specifically with this leadership development thrust, I think that what Christian Union is doing is we are teaching students to reclaim every square inch for Jesus Christ in the broader culture, whether it's medicine or law or politics or arts, athletics, what have you.

We are giving students a vast vision for the world and saying that by virtue of His death and resurrection, this is Christ's world. Now let's image that forth. And so we're trying to get them to embody that on campus so that they'll embody that once they leave campus and enter into these influential segments of society.

But you think about that in every sphere. You look over in business and the importance of those in business that think about how to look out for the interests of the employees as well as the interests of those that are buying the product, and what does it mean to be a Christian in this context? How do I think about the needs of other people while keeping the profit motive but really thinking about God's purposes in addition to that in this context? It's really a broad field, all of these really are.

And so if we can focus on those who are going to be stepping into positions of great influence and give them that Biblical worldview, and we can only get them so much in four years, but at least inspire the mindset of learning and stepping into that so that as they go in they don't think about themselves only as being good church members. We want them to think about being leaders in their local churches, elders and otherwise, but then also leaders in their companies or in their families in terms of how do we see this environment more closely reflect the values of Jesus Christ in every sphere.

Now the posture that we take and our approach, the rhetoric we use, the methods of our engagement have to be nuanced and Christ-honoring and others-centered and loving and all of that, but as far as the mode itself, the mode of engaging culture, the mode of maybe the word is "redeeming culture" is not something that it's good if you get to it. It's very much at the heart and center of the Gospel and therefore what it means to be a people of the Gospel. Mission is something that's really risen to the forefront here at Princeton this past year. If I could say this, a Biblical theological reading that just generates and catalyzes mission in our students is something that's been not only maybe new and fresh for them but something that they're desiring.

It's giving them permission to be the kinds of Christians that they're reading about in Scripture, have always been afraid to approach, but are finding that there's no real plan B to be a Christian is to be the kind of people who do engage culture. So yeah, you have to coach well into that and articulation and nuance and context and all of that matters, but I think what's at the center is the real high view of engagement that we have. It is a mind shift.

When we talk about transforming culture, I don't want us to think that transforming culture is just something out there. There's a fair amount of cultural transformation and mindset that needs to happen with Christians, which I think Matt from the very beginning of Christian Union really set out to do is to really change minds and persuade Christians in how they ought to think about God, His mission, and the world at large.

What Christian Union I believe has done a real good job of pursuing is unifying all of those and saying, no, these don't have to stand in opposition to each other. They can stand together. So for a ministry that is on the Ivy League that wants to have a certain caliber of staff to be able to meet this context, the thing that really, really hangs over the entire ministry banner on various campuses is what we call the “seeking God lifestyle,” a real strong commitment to seeking the Lord, praying and fasting that His presence and power might be what energizes our efforts. So that is very central to everything we do, and so let me now spell out some of the pieces that hang underneath that.

First as you mentioned Bible courses, and I'll just take one case study. This past fall, so I would say last fall, we went through Paul's Book of Romans at a really, really high level, deep exegetical level, not only understanding the text but interacting with different people's view of the text from sort of a classical maybe reformed position, more main evangelical, even new perspective. So really, really getting our students to think real deeply at that level of the text and interacting with it. As you mentioned just sort of classical mentoring and one-on-one where students get encouraged and discipled in a real intentional, up close and intimate way.

The third piece is that leadership development piece. This is where I believe we probably give our students the greatest sense of competitive advantage not only to their peers on campus but once they leave campus as well. Our ministry is broken out into various leadership teams that students are coached in but that students very much own. You Dr. Bock have visited us a few times on Friday nights. That team that puts together what we call our Friday night lecture series is a team of about 40 to 50 students that are led by a leadership team of four students that receive ongoing coaching from one of our staff members in how to think strategically about ministry.

Because what we don't wanna do is create sort of a sacred/secular distinction where when students enter into the real world if I can call it that, they will think strategically about the work they do. They will have certain mission and vision and values to reflect wherever they work, Madison Avenue, Main Street, Wall Street, what have you. And then we don't want them to think of ministry as this just exclusively organic side.

In interviews students have said that they've found that the person interviewing them has really been sort of jaw-dropping, wondering where they're getting some of this training from and where they're thinking about life and some of the things that they're working on so strategically. It's come from just the wonderful coaching that our staff gives them. So we really feel that that's where they get a level up as far as ministry. Love what our brothers and sisters are doing in partner ministries on the campus, but we really do believe that this niche is also the driving edge and competitive advantage that we give students on campus. So this leadership development team coaching is where I think Christian Union has really been able to establish its unique footprint.

I read theses on the other end. And we had a wonderful dinner discussion that was really in two parts. One was "Here's the content that you're dealing with", which would be the normal part of any kind of conversation, but the second part of it was "Here's the strategy. Here's the way to approach handling that material hopefully in a way that will produce a helpful result and on the other end produce a work that people can go and refer to in a way that will be persuasive." And that's very much what I'm hearing is that there's that kind of two-pronged approach of helping people on the substance side but also on the whole – packaging is a bad word, but it's the word that's in my head – packaging way in terms of how to present it in a way that will be effective.

There is everything you would expect on sort of the biggest – when you look at a national list of biggest party schools, a lot of the stuff that happens in those schools are happening at these eating clubs, particularly the hookup culture and sort of just the licentious view of relationships and sexuality. That is very, very much alive and well at Princeton, and I think if not kept in check, it would rise to new levels. One of the sort of data points that I use for that is last year at Princeton there was a student group on campus that was looking to bring in an initiative, which has found its way on many other campuses across the country. It's known as sex week, and it's usually pitched as education, conversation, but really what it winds up being is advocacy in the worst sense of the word.

Not only is it something that's unbecoming of the Princetonian context but obviously of the Gospel context. We're talking about a student group bringing in porn stars, and if I just mention some of the titles of the talks that they were conceiving you'd be horrified by it. So that is something that I really think would've gained steam here at Princeton if not for the engagement, the direct engagement from some of the ministry staff and students here on campus where we gathered together to mobilize first in prayer and fasting, really advocated with all the different ministries, and then even went outside of just the Christian circles here to other circles of student life and student groups that would be sympathetic to the cause.

By God's grace near the end there was no sex week to speak of. It stopped. It didn't land on campus, but it would have, and not only would it have landed here this year, but if you know anything about Princeton it lands on a calendar this year and it's been institutionalized for many years to come. So that just gives you a window into how live the social pressure not just to party, not just to climb the ranks of some social hierarchy but to actually get really licentious how real and powerful it actually is here on campus.

They not only say "Oh, I was at Princeton", but then the next part of the conversation is "Hey, which club were you in?" And based upon the answer you give, you get stuck into one sort of category or another. And so all of that students really inaugurate when it's time to bicker. That's the process. Think about it as pledging or rushing. When it's time for the bicker process, you really see an intensity amongst the students, an extreme panic the night before when they're waiting to hear the decisions of whether or not they got in. I mean, students are in a frenzy like as if they're waiting for their MCAT score or to find out if they got into the med school that they wanted to.

So it is in every sense an idol that must be challenged, and we do that the way we do in every form of idolatry. We hold every thought captive. We teach the Scriptures. We teach the very character and nature of Christ. God chose the foolish to confound the wise, all of these things. It requires every bit of all of our ministry, discipleship, leadership development, energy and efforts to combat that as it would to combat immorality or some of the other more obvious forms of sin and idolatry in our culture, but the social pressure here is so, so significant.

So then you have the other side where you go after these things, and they become more important to you than the Lord, and they are idols. So helping coach people through that is very difficult when there's such a pressure around them to idolize this at all costs. It's either “all-in” in the bad sense, idolatry, or “just reject it all,” which is kind of a fundamentalism response, which is something that we don't believe in.

They really had to rebuild from scratch, and what they did is they created their own subculture, their own schools, their own universities, etc. And for many people that's great, but what happened also is it created a vacuum in all the universities that we're funneling into the core parts of our culture. In that vacuum basically what you got was an acceleration of a secular presence with no counter voice present, and what you all are doing it seems to me is trying to help people be that wise counter voice as a part of that engagement in the very circles that do feed into the main pipelines of our culture.