A (Potential) Bad Decision

Note: It may be helpful to read my introduction to this series in order to have some context and understand my disclaimers. You can find that post here.



This video is wonderfully straightforward. And while there are a couple of things I’m not necessarily interested in (the conspiracy theory mentality is just a little thick in this video, and the promotion for his foundation is beside the point for my purposes), I don’t think I would or could add much to his argument. As someone who is around universities and students for my job every day, I can tell you that this problem is real.

And that probably makes me a really bad campus minister.

But I don’t actually believe it does. I do think there needs to be a market adjustment on the industry of secondary education, but I don’t believe (nor does Mike Rowe) that the institution itself is broken. The university is still an essential place where many vocational pursuits receive specialized training necessary for a given job. I can hardly imagine a world without people trained in medical or legal fields. Engineering allows so much of our world to exist effectively and efficiently. And I need people trained in history, economics, political science, and the like to help lead us.

But what Rowe said in this video is so true. This is not how we’ve been selling university education.

When I was in high school (and I’m not aware of this changing much in recent years), the impression was that college is an absolute must if I want to be “successful” or even simply survive with a family in the future. I got lucky: I went to a very affordable Bible college and was able to, with the help of my family, escape without student loans. But this is becoming more and more of a miracle in today’s experience. And while undergraduate and graduate level training is actually quite effective and useful in many ways, it is not delivering what we were promised. It is developing us as human beings (at least in some ways), but it is not producing jobs.

It used to be true that if you went to college, you were almost guaranteed a starting position in your career field. That is no longer true. Such education used to be affordable; but as you saw depicted the video, this is no longer true. College is no longer (for many) the ticket it used to be, and it is no longer (for many) a wise investment. But we were all told that this is where the path to success starts. For far too many, it is no longer leading to the same destination.

I can tell you that classmates who did not go to college are a few steps ahead if they simply applied themselves and began a practice of hard work. To be sure, their earning potential is often much less than my college-trained counterparts, but the latter are so saddled with crippling debt and had such a slow start on their earning potential that they cannot round the curve.

Meanwhile, an entire generation has bought into a counter-productive narrative (when thinking of the Kingdom of God) that fills them with insecurity and leaves them empty of meaning.

It may be time we quit feeding the same trope of what leads to success and start teaching how to ask a better set of questions. To be sure, I hope our college campuses continue to be filled with people who are convinced of their calling and driven to be trained in their specialized field. I hope these students experience training that is more intentional and a job market that is more balanced with people who have a better understanding of what they do — but even more importantly, who they are.

If we are an organization that believes when we impact the U, we impact the world, then we have to take that logic out beyond the walls of the university campus. To be sure, tomorrow’s leaders are on our university campuses. But they can also be at our trade schools and our community colleges. They can be taking classes in the School of Life Experience. These people, with or without four-year degrees, will be tomorrow’s parents, artists, small business owners, and church leaders. We might even see a world where they can be our political leaders and representatives.

If all of this is possible without being enslaved to crippling debt, this world will be a better place. I hope for people to be found in our university classrooms, but I hope those rooms are filled with more and more of the right people. I hope those who have been fed a line will find the right place in a world that needs their leadership so badly — a place just as fulfilling and necessary.

MAKING AN IMPACT: Character

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the third week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

The next value we will talk about with our MAKING AN IMPACT series is one that is stated in almost every organization, is incredibly important, and is yet a struggle for so many churches, organizations, and fellowships. This is the value of CHARACTER.

Why is this such a struggle for the Christian world? I think the short answer is that we are just a bunch of people who are screwed up. That is true, but how many of us are tired of reading what feels like a continuous news feed of Christian organizations that harbor abusers, struggle with sexual conduct, mistreat women, and succumb to other “moral failures”? It’s exhausting.

I think the answer is that theology matters. I won’t be taking this time and space to pull apart the pieces of theology I think are most responsible for these stories, but I will say that our theology is often the bedrock we build our culture on. The way we understand the nature of who God is and what He is doing in the world, the way we understand the nature of humanity, and the way we define the gospel, breeds a particular culture in the missional communities we belong to. If we foster a theology that believes God is looking for the unflinching devotion to a moral code, we will simultaneously breed a culture that puts on a show, afraid to be vulnerable to the struggle we all experience to become the kinds of whole people God has designed us to be.

So what do we do? Impact Campus Ministries has said — like so many others — that we want to be people of integrity and great character. How will we succeed where so many others seem to fail?

A large part of this will reside in our commitment to community and each other (more on this value in another post). The greatest form of accountability will be the fact that we don’t do life (or ministry) alone. Of course, this commitment is only powerful if we trust each other enough to be vulnerable. We have to work hard to build a culture of openness and honesty from the top of our organization all the way down to the bottom. We don’t want to be people who fight for privacy, but fight for each other.

This isn’t to say that privacy is not important or that wisdom would dictate open vulnerability with all people in all circumstances — it would not. But within our family at ICM, we need to learn how to trust each other with our struggles and our failures. This means we can’t be quick to punish others when they slip up, but we also need to be resolute in our commitment to each other, to help each other become the people God is inviting us to become.

Hopefully you can see how well our value of character works alongside the tension of excellence and compassion. We have to have a commitment to excellence in our integrity, but that will only be achieved if we can be gracious in our failures. I really believe that the destructive and harmful failures in character come as the byproduct of a culture that doesn’t foster healthy growth and compassionate belonging. When those things don’t exist, we begin to hide. When we begin to hide, our lack of character begins to fester until it erupts in something horribly destructive.

Unfortunately, this culture of hiding is often cultivated in our faith communities.

We want to be better than this. We want to be the kind of family — brothers and sisters — who make sure we all have a place to belong and that the space can be trusted. We want to build a culture that says, “I am FOR you!” — and doesn’t doubt the sincerity of that stance. Only then can we be honest about who we truly are and who we are trying to become. And only when we are honest can we find family who help us strive to develop as we pursue character in our organization.

This will be an ongoing struggle. We are far from perfect.

But may God bless ICM’s efforts to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly [together] with our God.