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Commentary
COMMENTARY: Secular campus is sacred space Omar Al-Rikabi, Oct 15, 2009
Omar Al-Rikabi
By Omar Al-Rikabi Special Contributor
“You’ve got to find a place to hold on to your faith,” my youth pastor once told me before I headed off to college. The conventional wisdom I grew up with in my church was that “non-Christian” universities were just liberal, godless institutions where one would find oneself surrounded by perpetual drunkenness, sexual immorality and professors who would fail you for your faith.
Campus ministry was seen as a sort of “fallout shelter” for a student with faith: a place where you could hold on with other believers and hopefully still be a Christian when you finished school in four (or five, or six) years.
Better yet, why even risk it? We were told it would be better for our faith and our future if we would just go to a Christian college instead. This way we could avoid the sin of secular school while feeding our faith.
But what my pastor saw as a place of danger, I now see as place of promise. I believe the “secular school” can actually be a place of sacred space.
In the college community, students are almost forced to interact and connect with other people, cultures and ideas they might not have otherwise come to know. They are thrown into this mix at a time when they are questioning, wandering, seeking and wrestling with all that they are seeing and learning.
Is there any better time, place and situation for discipleship to occur? We see Jesus doing the same in the Gospels—sharing and teaching with the original 12 in the homes of tax collectors and in the presence of prostitutes. In other words, learning what it means to be a light to the world while already in the dark places.
This is where campus ministry can be more than a “fallout shelter” for students. The campus can be some of the best “wilderness” in which one can discern a call to ministry. Through campus ministries, the church will discover many of her future pastors, missionaries and seminarians.
But we must also look further and deeper than just the students who will be the clergy of the future. The laity are every bit as important to the ongoing life and work of the church. Studying in our midst are also the future lawyers, engineers, doctors, writers, politicians and artists . . . those who will create the very culture that the church will be living in.
To have a place where education moves beyond the classroom to include a community where the gospel, the ideas of the Kingdom, the practices of prayer and Communion, and the call to abide in Christ are a part of this specific season in a student’s life is what makes the Wesley Foundation so important to the campus and the church.
My friend and mentor, the Rev. John David Walt, who serves as dean of the chapel at Asbury Theological Seminary (and is himself a product of the Wesley Foundation), put it well during a discussion on campus ministries:
“College is a season of wandering, and not necessarily in a bad way. It’s kind of a liminal space: a place that’s in-between adolescence and vocation. It is the place where the decisions that will shape the entire future of life become crystallized . . . It is so crucial for what happens [at the Wesley Foundation] to be central in that conversation.”
But let us go one step deeper. During a conversation once with some of our student leaders about church and campus ministry, I asked them what they thought of the idea that they were the future of the church. Some got a funny look on their face, others rolled their eyes and one stated out loud, “But I’m in a church now.”
I quickly realized a simple, yet sadly and often-overlooked reality regarding students. Many do not see themselves as some part of the future for an institution; instead they regard themselves as doing Kingdom work today as part of the active church now. Their parish is their dorm room, sorority house, bio lab or intramural team.
When Jesus told us to “go into all the world and make disciples of all nations,” I’m pretty sure “all” meant ALL. There is a “nation” called the college campus, and the church will be found wanting if we do not see what happens in a dorm room on a Tuesday night as just as holy and valuable to the Kingdom as what happens on a Sunday morning in a sanctuary.
For the sake of the future of our culture and our church, we cannot afford to look down on students and campus ministries as merely a shelter; they are on the front lines. In other words, the future is now.
Mr. Al-Rikabi is a candidate for ordination in the North Texas Conference and director of the Wesley Foundation at the University of Arkansas.
Omar Al-Rikabi
But we must also look further and deeper than just the students who will be the clergy of the future. The laity are every bit as important to the ongoing life and work of the church. Studying in our midst are also the future lawyers, engineers, doctors, writers, politicians and artists . . . those who will create the very culture that the church will be living in. 
