The Third Degree

Every parent, grandparent and youth worker knows the gnawing sense of anxiety they feel when someone they know first goes up to university or college. Especially if they’ve had the experience themselves, they know the full-on impact of those first few days and weeks as a fresher.

The bewildering numbers of new faces and names and choices; deciding what clubs to join and sports to pursue; managing the laundry and working out how to survive on a student loan; and, of course, learning to negotiate the campus and the timetable! The freedom and the options that university or college life inevitably offer can be a heady mixture. So many parties and so little time! Life back home, especially life in the church youth group, can seem so tame and restrained and, oh, so far away. For a Christian young person there is the challenge of finding a good church, making new Christian friends, and not abusing their newfound freedoms.

Confused or convinced?

Yet going up to university can be for some people a life-changing and mind-blowing experience. Many of my friends actually became Christians at university, while many others took a path of greater commitment during their time there. On the other hand, exposure to secular thinking in some disciplines can easily throw the untrained or less well taught into confusion. So is there any way to make sure that our young people not only get the most out of their study time at uni, but actually make the time spent there count for God? Is there a way they can emerge from this new experience with a faith that is not only stronger but more thought-out, more confident and more convinced than when they went up?

Generations of students have had reason to thank God for the work of Christian Unions. Run by the students themselves and focused on using the time at university or college as a unique opportunity to reach their peers for Christ, the CU offers the possibility of forming genuine friendships that will last a lifetime and the support they need to grow into mature Christians. And, into the bargain, CUs often have strong links to good Bible teaching churches nearby to keep the local church link alive.

Helping young Christians

The CU movement has done stellar work at helping Christian young people integrate their studies, their social life and their Christian priorities at uni. Making good friendships with non-Christian folk in their classes or flat can be a great gospel opportunity. Understanding how faith can co-exist alongside the various academic disciplines is vital to a fully developed Christian understanding of the world. After all, the God who made us gave us minds to conceive of equations and quarks, poems and plays. But as well as helping our young people develop a Christian mind, the CU introduces them to solid biblical preaching and teaching. Just in the last few weeks I’ve spoken to three CUs in different parts of the country. At one, in particular, I spent time after the meeting talking to three people who regularly attended. They didn’t come from an evangelical background. They were hardly even orthodox in their thinking. But they were attending the CU and being exposed to weekly expositions of Scripture and it was making them think. These people would never have had the chance to be exposed to the gospel apart from the work done in our universities and colleges.

CU or church?

Meeting with other Christians in CU is, for many freshers, also the best and most natural way to find their way into a local church. Many CUs provide information on lots of local churches of different denominations and emphases to help new students find a place where they will feel at home, be supported pastorally and fed spiritually. But it’s not just information. Turning up all alone at a strange church in a new city would be a daunting prospect for a mature adult. That’s why CUs often offer to meet up as groups and go along to church together to make the experience a whole lot less scary.

Going to church with fellow Christian students can also be a stretching experience. It’s an opportunity to step outside one’s comfort zone and visit a church that’s different from the one back home. This helps young Christians think through what’s really important about church life. Is the Bible being taught faithfully? Is there genuine fellowship? How important is evangelism?

Partnership

Because of the emphasis on evangelism, CUs are also the places where every year many students come to faith for the first time. They can then be a natural stepping stone into a local church, establishing a pattern of church involvement that will last a lifetime. A couple of years ago in Durham, the CU mission saw over 30 students become Christians. They were then baptised in local churches. It’s great when this kind of partnership between CU and churches works well. Cornerstone Church in Nottingham is a good example of a church that has consciously set out to ensure that its Bible teaching programmes and social activities run for students complement rather than compete with the local CUs. That way, the students don’t find themselves choosing between church and CU, but can commit to both.

Here’s how one student described her experience of CU and church shaping her Christian life: ‘I became a Christian in the months leading up to going to university in Cambridge, and was initially possibly the most reluctant evangelist in the city. However, after months of exposure to God’s word through a local church, his amazing grace began to convince me of the need to be part of a witnessing community in my college.

‘Being part of a CU mission team in university consistently affirmed me in the truth of the gospel, and taught me the challenges that come with living and speaking it to others.’

http://www.uccf.org.uk/freshers/

So how can we help the latest batch of students going up to uni this autumn? How do we help them to connect with their Christian peers? The Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF) have been supporting the work of Christian Unions for as long as anyone can remember. Their staff workers give support to the student leadership of the CUs. They also offer a number of resources you may want to plug into. This year there is a new website, specifically aimed to help school-leavers think through some of the issues they’ll face when going to university. It includes short testimonials, helpful advice and videos tackling some major issues for young Christians. But it also provides the chance for school-leavers to register their details to link-up with the CU in the place they are hoping to study. I would encourage you to point school-leavers you know in the direction of the website (see above) and tell them to register, so that the CU can make contact with them, help them settle in and find a local church quickly.

Recipe book

And with an eye to those about to be thrust into the unfamiliar world of cooking for themselves, there is a specially prepared recipe booklet to keep them from going hungry in their first few weeks! Both the booklet and the registration process are completely free.

The upshot of all this is that sending our young people off to university needn’t be the scary thing we’ve thought it. It could be a great God-given opportunity for them to grow like Jesus and become useful servants of his kingdom.

Going up or falling down?