Our Mission:
We desire to have students understand their lives and reality as a whole under the Lordship of God in Christ. In particular, the Bible is the foundational framework for this Godward orientation. It teaches the pattern of history; that God created all things, upholds all things, and rules over all things as a covenant making God. Christ is the centerpiece of this pattern. With this in mind, the critical disciplines of knowledge, understanding, and evaluation are to be done through the grid of Scripture, trusting it to define both the whole and the parts of all things.
OUR COMMITMENTS:
Grace
God has provided for our salvation and life with Him in total. We contribute nothing but our sin. Therefore, we desire to extol the complete, sovereign work of God in mercifully giving us salvation through Jesus Christ-- the work of grace. We therefore want to highlight the means of grace that God has given us to grow by as well: the Bible, the church, the Holy Spirit, prayer, and believing obedience. Our stress will always be on the sovereign work of God as the impetus and fuel for faithful response.
Evangelism and Missions
We take seriously the call to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ within our local spheres and in cross-cultural situations, both in short term and lifelong opportunities. We believe the collegiate years to be a prime time for biblical theological preparation, academic training, and overall dialogue with a view toward developing effective witness to the gospel as future adults in the marketplace, the academy, the arts, the trades, local church ministry, and/or the cross-cultural mission field. Rather than being a place of relativism and pluralism, we affirm that college can be a wonderful place for God to direct young people toward truth in His Son Jesus Christ, in turn directing them to proclaim Christ within the spheres God has them in.
Fellowship and Service
We affirm that when God reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, He also reconciled us to the rest of His family. Thus, we are a community-sensitive people who are engaged in a corporate pursuit of Christ, a proclaiming of the gospel to the world, and in striving against the presence of evil in this age. Put simply, Christ-centered bonds among fellow believers are central and we seek to give opportunities for those to be furthered and deepened. God desires a choral expression of our gifts, abilities, and faith offered in love for the building up of his church.
The Visible Church
Many college ministries stress Bible teaching, fellowship, praise, and ministry, but are not tethered to the one main instrument by which God has chosen to most fully and integrally reveal Himself, namely, the visible church. The universal invisible church is crucial, but we affirm that the universal church is the sum of her parts. So, we in the college group are committed to ministering to college students as a visible, incorporated, intentional body of believers who sit under the authority of College Church’s pastors and elders who are in turn spiritually vested to preach the Word, serve the Lord’s Table and administer Christian baptism, and who are charged to discipline wavering disciples. Rather than being a liability or overly institutional, we believe the church to be a wonderful gift from God where he moves to grow us and deepen us in Christ by means that are designed to make sense and function within the context of an intentionally united people, accountable to the leadership, body, and theological commitments of a local congregation.
College as Vocation
Rather than being a pragmatic means to an end, we affirm that the college setting provides college students with one main role in society-- to be students. This is the place God has put them to express their faith and to experience His grace. Thus, we strive to design a ministry that does not hinder this lifestyle, but rather fosters it by reminding students that the academy is their life’s vocation right now and that it can be navigated, and should be, with a God-centered, eternal, and Christ-like foundation. The university years can be one of the most significant periods in adult formation, where a biblical life view is solidified, where habits of the soul are developed, where a philosophy of vocation and participating in society are deepened, and where young adults learn to think and to do so biblically. Thus, we endeavor to challenge students to be the best students they can be with the gifts and abilities God has given them. We do this with a view toward developing them into Christian adults who want to radically serve, pursue, proclaim, and enjoy Christ.
Shepherding vs. Programming
We believe that the Christian life is fundamentally about being, not doing. Indeed, there are mandates and conditions to following Christ but these all presuppose and are only meaningful in light of who we are in Christ grounded upon what He has done for and in us. One implication of this is, though we highlight the necessity of making the church central,we will not primarily be an activity driven ministry with an all-or-nothing attitude, but rather a place where students are encouraged to thoughtfully choose the activities where they can most effectively grow and learn to live out that growth in real life choices, situations, and struggles. The means to accomplish this will primarily be the study of God’s Word, committed relationships, prayer, and content based activities (versus methods, programs, and strategic philosophies). Our desire is to see students whose hearts are ravished by Jesus, who thereby learn to walk the rugged road of radical obedience. Right being produces right doing.
From Consumer to Producer
Part of our task is to nurture college students in God’s Word and in learning its theology. But, if we were to simply put forth principles, goals, or methods and leave it there, we would be doing half our labor and offering less than satisfactory discipleship for our students. Part of shepherding God’s people is not being a surrogate theologian. Rather, it is vital that God’s people learn to be theologians themselves. So, we desire to show how the meaning of a biblical text was arrived at, we desire our students to be able to handle God’s word in accurate and insightful ways, and we provide opportunities for them to learn how to think theologically. It is incumbent upon us to grow young Christian men and women from mere consumers of biblical knowledge and theological insight into those who can study and summarize God’s Word with passion, clarity, and accuracy. Thus, we emphasize the importance of knowing God: hard thinking, deliberate steps to studying God’s Word, developing a Biblical and theological vocabulary, being aware of current issues, and of course of applying all of that to the heart and to the will. This will take the shape of a ministry that avoids pat, cookie-cutter, rote answers. We invite the hard questions, the struggle of application, and other real life issues involved in understanding and believing God’s Word. In sum, we proffer a model that stresses both absolute truth and also that God often has something to teach in the art of discovering that truth in His Word.