I drive up to the home of Alan and Lauren Henderson at about 4:30 on a Friday afternoon. It is a very cloudy day and the weather channel has shown the threat of severe storms in Tuscaloosa all afternoon. Such is an Alabama summer. One would think that this would be a bad time to meet someone for an interview, but Alan is not just someone to me. No matter what the condition of the weather or what time constraints might threaten, Alan has always made time for me. I walk into his and Lauren’s small, cozy apartment and find Alan on the couch playing video-games. Lauren greets me with a hug, and I feel like I’m at home before I even sit down. Any anxiety I have about interviewing escapes me as I begin to joke around with Alan. This should be a fun experience.
Going to meet with Alan is nothing new for me. I have had numerous meetings with him over the last several years to get advice, moral support, and friendly conversation. Alan is the associate college minister at Calvary Baptist Church, and he also leads worship for many of the services during the week, namely our Wednesday night service, The Well. He had the biggest hand in my joining the church. During my first year at the University of Alabama I was intent on finding a church to join. I did a lot of searching through different churches and campus ministries, going to a different service or activity almost every day of the week. All during that time I also met Alan for lunch on a regular basis.
I have known Alan since I was in seventh grade and he was a college student at the University of Alabama. That was my first official year in the youth group at my home church in Birmingham and he was one of my favorite councilors. I thought he was hilarious, and to this day we tell people that he had an integral role in forming my sense of humor; we are eerily alike. But more than just in humor, I look up to him spiritually. Over the years we have become very close. When I came to college, he took me under his wing and it always made me feel better knowing someone I could trust was here for me while I was away from home. Alan always encouraged me to search for the church I could join that would help me to get involved and serve. Although he was always an advocate for Calvary, he never pressed me to join. He simply became someone I could talk to about my search. Over the whole year I took my time trying to find a church home in Tuscaloosa, but eventually I felt that Calvary was where I belonged. Alan invited me to join and become the leader of a life group, the heart of the college ministry at Calvary. I have had the opportunity to lead freshmen and upperclassmen in bible study for the past two years through Calvary and it has been one of the biggest blessings of my life. I have been at Calvary ever since the end of my freshman year, and I have also grown closer to Alan in that time.
So now, it seems interesting to be doing a formal interview with Alan, especially when our normal conversation consists of a lot of sarcasm and joking. It is as if I’m sitting down to interview my brother. It takes some time for us to get serious about the task at hand. I start off the interview by giving him an overview of the direction of the project and he seems interested and happy to give me information. According to an article in The New York Times, “Across the country, on secular campuses…professors and administrators say students are drawn to religion and spirituality with more fervor than at any time they can remember” (Finder). I would like to see if this is a trend on the campus of the University of Alabama as well, and if so, how Calvary’s college ministry is responding to it. Alan looks at me in way that tells me he has thought about this before.
Starting off, we talk out some of the basics. I want to know some of his general thoughts on college ministry and his feelings about his own position. We begin with why he is a college minister. He answers, half-jokingly, “Well, I enjoy working with college students and getting to mold young minds.” His wife and I both shoot him looks that basically say, “be serious”, and he continues to answer the question more thoughtfully.
“I enjoy being able to be around college students because they’re at a point in their lives when they’re searching for things and they’re not afraid to ask questions, and they like to take things seriously enough to where they actually want to know things. So, it’s a fun stage of life to get to experience with different people. I get to be around people who are fun to be around and get to do things with students, if that’s, you know, athletic activities or music activities…you get to kind of be a mentor for them in those things they’re passionate about. You get to see them grow from their freshman year to their senior year, and they almost become a different person. It’s the maturation process, getting to see that, and that’s really, really neat.”
Spending a good chunk of my time around the college ministry, I know that being a college minister has to be an enjoyable job, but I am also aware that it is not all fun and games. According to Alan, many seminaries offer degree programs for aspiring college ministers, but Alan’s degree is a masters of art and worship studies. This being the case, I wondered what the challenges of the job might be for him. I ask about the more difficult parts of the job. He doesn’t seem to hesitate much in letting me know.
“Ah…college students think that they know everything, so that’s frustrating sometimes. But I think it’s just a process. It’s a stage of life. They think they have all the answers…a lot of them. So that lends to frustration. They kind of take the newest, coolest idea they’ve ever heard and run with it, take it to extremes.”
For the sake of clarification, especially because I am currently a college student and wouldn’t want to misunderstand his meaning, I ask if he thinks college students are extremely idealistic. He is quick to offer up a clearer explanation.
“I mean, no, I don’t think so. I think they have a grasp on the world. I’d say they are far more cynical than idealistic. I mean, they question everything, which I think is good. [Questioning] lends itself to a lot of discussions…a lot of lengthy discussions. But on the whole, I think it’s a good thing for the future. They don’t just accept things just because someone’s told them to. What’s challenging, I think, is that you always have to be on your toes because there are so many questions, and there’s this desire for knowledge. It forces you to constantly learn, just like they’re constantly learning.”
Desiring to get a little more in-depth information on college students and their thoughts, specifically on religion and trends in thinking, I asked him to expand on this idea that they “take an idea and run with it” to see what some of these ideas might be.
“I think it’s any idea. Most students come from a very sheltered life, even if they grew up in a big city. They have been sheltered to the neighborhood or community they lived in. So when they get to college, they’re constantly exposed to new ideas they might’ve never heard before. There’s a segment of the population of college students who will take those ideas and make them this banner that they want to live by. It’s frustrating because some of them might have never researched it, but they just liked the way it sounded when they heard it. You’ll have that group, but then you’ll have another group who wants to question everything. So there’s that constant battle.”
Getting even deeper more specifically into a religious viewpoint, he continues by saying,
“If we’re talking Christianity, there are college students that will just take everything you say without ever questioning. And they’ll do that with anything. If that’s a book they’re reading, if that’s a speaker they hear, if that’s a teacher that they have, they’ll take that and just run. Where as there’s another group of people that question everything that ever happens. They are very cynical about what they believe. So I think, out of those two realms, that’s a difficult thing to mesh, because both can be very good, but then again, they can both be very bad as well.”
By this time I was beginning to see that college ministry was even more complex than I had thought. The kinds of issues and concerns we deal with as college students are brought into the way we approach church, and ministers have to be well-equipped to handle what college students throw their way. I was interested in finding out more about Calvary and their views on college ministry. Alan told me the following,
“They think it’s very important. Calvary was founded to minister to the campus. [College] ministry has always been at the forefront of their objectives as a church. The congregation funds our ministry with money from tithes and offerings. There are always adults who want to teach in our Sunday school department. The church has always been willing to back anything that the college ministry needs, if that’s funds, or equipment, or staff members or anything like that. So not just with their money, but with their time, and with the way they plan out how the buildings are used. Sunday school classes come and cook us dinner Sunday nights. So they’re very generous with time and their resources.”
After hearing all of this and reflecting on my own experience with the church, I was encouraged by just how much support the college ministry receives. Trying to think back to my days of searching for a church, I am reminded that part of the reason I chose to join Calvary and stop my endless attendance at every other ministry on campus was due to this support. Thinking back caused me to think about other students and their search, understanding that not every student comes to college thinking the same things I did. Curious about current trends in thinking, my next question was directed toward “the search”. What is the typical student coming into college for the first time searching for? Alan responded by saying,
“I think students like to experience freedom. I think most of them have been under the “rule” of their parent’s house, and now they come and they don’t have that anymore. They’ll experience freedom in whatever way they want to. You see that some people experience that by being able to choose what church they go to and what they’re a part of. Some people choose that by not going to church. Some choose that by becoming part of a kind of party scene. Some choose to sit in their room not doing anything because they can. So I think that’s one of the huge things. They’re trying to cope with that freedom and trying to choose what they want to be a part of. I think all students want to be a part of something. And I think freshmen and new students coming in, especially, want to find somewhere to be accepted. So wherever they find that acceptance, whether that’s a fraternity or sorority, or if that’s with a church organization, or if that’s with a group of friends who like to go out and party, or an athletic team, or intramural team, or whatever, I think they’ll go wherever they are accepted. Whatever is important to them, that’s where they’ll land.”
“I think college students are searching for everything! I think they’re searching for their purpose, what they’re going to do in the world, and I think they want to give their lives to something more than them, something that’s bigger than them. I just think that a lot of times that doesn’t end up being religion. I think that ends up being, you know, their job, or a club, or some political scene. I just don’t think it has to be religion.”
Even more specifically I wanted to find out about those students who are choosing to follow religion coming in. Reminiscing on my experience jumping from ministry to ministry, I wanted to find out if that is a common trend, or if it is only a select few indecisive students who go through that sometimes grueling process. I wanted to know if students were more often choosing churches to join or if they were involving themselves in campus ministries for their experience. The issue of acceptance came up once again with Alan’s answer to this.
“There is a large portion of students that will go to different things every night of the week because they get something out of it. I think they’ll go to whatever they’re getting the most out of, especially at the very beginning when they’re younger. It’s wherever they’re most accepted and feel they get the most out of. If that’s a church or campus organization or campus ministry…or even a dorm bible study, that’s what they’ll go to. The ones who really want to be a part of something that’s godly will search around and will choose what they want to be a part of. Some people choose a lot of different things because they like different aspects of those organizations, and some will choose one thing and plug everything they have into it. The ones who know they’re just kind of supposed to go to church will normally choose the least amount of involvement they can. So those people will go to one worship service or go to church, but never really get involved because they don’t want to. I don’t think, to them, there is a distinction between church and a campus ministry. I think they see it all as the same thing, but I think, hopefully, they come to the conclusion that those are really different.”
I was able to agree very strongly with this answer. My experience was definitely expressed in his observation as well as many of the people I know. He went even further in his observations of college students and the searching they do when I asked him to compare the similarities and differences of his own college experiences with those of students today; particularly because of the position he is in ministering to and serving college students on a daily basis. He had this to say,
“I think college students are all the same. You know, I was in college from 1998 to 2002, and I think people I was in school with searched for the same things people in school now search for. They wanted to be accepted and they wanted to give their lives to something bigger than themselves, and I think that never changes. That’s just the stage of life college students are in. Now, the methods in which people try and reach them are different. Now people use a lot more technology, whereas then, we didn’t really use a lot of technology, because it really wasn’t that big a deal. Now, technology is a big deal, so we try to use things like Facebook and Twitter. When I was in college it was a lot of letter-writing and email. But now, with social networking sites, we can get stuff out a lot faster than we could when I was in college. The methods in which we reach college students are different, really, more than who college students are.”
I am also very interested in this new generation of students being denoted as the “millennials”. I asked him to reflect a little more on this particular generation.
“They have a lot more offered to them with the way the world is now. They have a lot more information at their fingertips. Stuff was just kind of getting off the ground when I was in college. I don’t know if there’s a huge difference between generation ‘X’ and the millennial generation. Psychological differences, yes, maybe, because they grow up with a lot more than I had, and as we say all the time, than our parents had. So they’re a very self-centered generation. But I think college students are all self-centered, no matter what generation, because that’s the stage of life they’re in. You think about yourself more than you think of anything else. Our job as college ministers, or one of the things we try to do, is to get students to stop thinking about themselves and start thinking about others and they way they can affect others.”
I thought this was an interesting observation. I like that though the world, at least in the corporate sector, seems to be changing the way it does things to accommodate for this new up and coming generation of people, the church does not seem phased by it. According to Alan, college students are all going through a time of extreme change and alteration and the approaches made toward new generations are slight yet fruitful.
The final idea we discussed was the issue of religion. I wanted to know if Alan felt that it was a “hot topic” among college students as well as his own personal views on religion.
“I would say that someone who is religious follows the tenants, beliefs and core values of some faith. By my own definition I would say I am religious because I follow the core tenants and beliefs of Christianity. I don’t know that it’s a “hot topic”. I think in the culture where we live religion is. But I think that if you were somewhere else, I don’t think that, as a whole, religion is this huge thing. I think that everyone wants to have a belief in something, even if it’s believing in nothing, that’s still believing. I would say, I don’t think it’s a hot topic as in everybody talks about it, but I think that when it is brought up in different circles, I think everyone has an opinion on it. So yes, it is in that sense, where everyone has an opinion, but no, I don’t think it’s like “hey, let’s get around and talk about religion all the time.”
Following the interview, I felt much more in tune with the way that Calvary sees college ministry, especially in the current times. Alan is very passionate about his position, and it is very easy to tell in the way he answers my questions. His confidence is not necessarily in having the “right” answers but making sure that he his clear with what he conveys. It is good to see that the ministry I have chosen to be a part of and serve is one that tries to know what is going on in the world and is focused on the lives of college students. When all the questions have been asked and I am putting my things away I agree to stay and eat dinner with Alan and Lauren. This invite is the final item I need to drive home a successful interview. The warm and welcoming feel of my visit is simply and outward showing of the care that comes from the Calvary. It is the kind of ministry I am proud to be a part of.
College Ministry
Calvary Baptist Church
