The neglected key to college student ministry is the exhortation of Peter: “Show hospitality to one another without grumbling” (1 Peter 4:9). It actually is that simple. The vision is to build relationships with college students, relationships in which counsel and discipleship and life-togetherness will come naturally and organically. This requires hospitality. It requires welcoming them into your home and life. To put it differently, when you see college students (or anyone, for that matter) worshipping with you, you simply are the church’s ministry to that person.

The previous article in this series challenged college students to pursue mature participation in the life of the local church during the college years: seeking inter-generational relationships, practicing hospitality, and welcoming true accountability. This challenge comes from the conviction that the waning commitment of twenty-somethings to the church is – at least in part – a result of their never having been engaged as real-life participants in the life of the church in the first place. Part of the solution is for college students themselves to refuse to allow the college years to be a poorly-defined in-between time when it comes to their relationship with the church.

This vision for the relationship between college students and the church raises a challenging question for churches themselves. How should we order our lives together so as to encourage this sort of relationship? This article will be presenting that question as a challenge to churches in two different ways.  First, this is a challenge for the students’ home churches: are we encouraging our young people – in the way we live together – to think of themselves as full, committed participants in the life of the body of Christ? Second, this is a challenge for churches that welcome college students in their midst: do we live together in a way that readily encourages students to integrate into the broader church community?

Home church: integrate them before they leave

When college students have difficulty living as mature members of a local congregation, it’s often because they were not prepared to do so before they left for college. Our heavily programmed and segregated approaches to youth ministry can have the effect of cordoning off our young people in their own category, rather than teaching and challenging them to live together with those who are different from them. A youth group can play a very important role in the life of the church, and it is valuable for high schoolers in particular to have relationships with each other. But that must not be the beginning or the end of their experience of the church. While it is important, it must not be central.

Instead, we must seek to live together in such a way that our young people’s experience of the church is primarily just that: an experience of the church as a whole. The church’s ministry simply is youth ministry: word and sacrament, fellowship and service. This is especially important when it comes to the fellowship of the church. Our young people – while they are in high school – need to have genuine relationships with those who are much older than them, those who can offer discipleship and guidance, born of the wisdom of experience. This requires intentional effort on the part of the broader church to build relationships with young people: attending sports events and concerts, speaking with them about their calling as students, having them over for dinner with their families. That is the heart of youth ministry: loving and living with the youth as a true and integral part of the body of Christ.

This is what builds the foundation for mature involvement with the church when they are older. If we want our young adults to love the everyday-life rhythms of word, sacrament, fellowship, and hospitality when they are older, then we must love those rhythms with them when they are younger. And if we don’t, when our young adults leave the church, it will be because we never really had them in the church in the first place.

Host church: provide formal accountability

If we live with our young people in the everyday life of the church while they are younger, then they will be more likely to seek out that sort of life when they leave for college. Churches need to be ready to offer that sort of inclusion in the church’s life. One way to encourage this is by offering some form of formal accountability. Christians need a formal relationship, via church membership, with the leadership of a particular congregation. College students are no exception to this rule. And so, if someone is going to be worshipping with you for an extended period of time, it is important to in some way formalize or commit to that relationship.

Some churches do this by way of offering associate or student memberships: students keep their memberships in their own churches, while also establishing a relationship with the church where they will be worshipping. Indeed, home churches should require this sort of thing from their students while they are away. They need someone who will call them up if they are missing worship, someone who is committed to helping them through trials and welcoming them into fellowship.

Host church: encourage inter-generational participation in the life of the church

While formal accountability is deeply important, more is needed. Such a relationship needs to be lived out. The previous article challenged students to pursue inter-generational relationships in the church, relationships not only with other college students, but those with different life situations than their own. But it is not enough for students to pursue this; churches must welcome and encourage it.

When students are accustomed to centering their life around their own group in high school, it is easy for a church to encourage that pattern in college, offering a college-and-career bible study or fellowship. This can have its place and be valuable in many ways, but if it is all we do, it can have the effect of simply keeping students separate from the rest of the congregation at precisely the time when they most need the broader body of Christ.

Instead, the church must view itself as being – rather than having – a ministry to college students. What students need is what everyone else needs: word, sacrament, fellowship, service, and hospitality. If you want to see the college students in your midst flourish spiritually, then simply be the church. Don’t separate them off into their own category; instead, do the exact opposite. Invite them into your life and home and family. If you want to see the young people in your midst transition naturally into spiritual adulthood then treat them as real members of the church. Love them, get to know them, and live with them.

This simply cannot be emphasized enough. The neglected key to college student ministry is the exhortation of Peter: “Show hospitality to one another without grumbling” (1 Peter 4:9). It actually is that simple. The vision is to build relationships with college students, relationships in which counsel and discipleship and life-togetherness will come naturally and organically. This requires hospitality. It requires welcoming them into your home and life. To put it differently, when you see college students (or anyone, for that matter) worshipping with you, you simply are the church’s ministry to that person. Get to know them. Love them. Invite them over for dinner.

This way of life gives our college students something to love and be loyal to, a vital sense of being part of something bigger themselves. It sets before them examples of marriage and child-raising and retirement and suffering and sacrifice — all of which are necessary for life in the world. And it offers them a network of relationships in which they can serve and be served, living with the church in a mature, all-of-life manner.

The Apostle Peter exhorts us to “show hospitality to one another.” If we want our students to flourish, we must include them in that “one another” life. If we want our young adults to stay committed to the church, then we need to make sure we really had them there in the first place.

Nick Smith is Pastor of the United Reformed Church in Nampa, Idaho.