In October, I visited an old home. Not to the house I grew up in, but to Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa, a Christian liberal arts school of twelve hundred students, set in a town where the edge of things is not a metaphor.
I spent seven of my most formative years as a young adult there. Four were as an undergraduate, from 1992 to 1996. Then came seminary, and when I finished, the college hired me as chaplain, succeeding a mentor who had shaped me more than he knew. My first three years of ordained ministry, from 1999-2002, happened on that campus. Christ Chapel was my first pulpit.
It has been thirty years since I graduated. New buildings rise where there were once empty lots, or cornfields once crept close. Some of the old buildings I loved have done their work and given way, the way old saints do, making room for what comes next. I walked past the places where they stood, like Colenbrander Hall, and gave thanks for the conversations and late nights they held. I went to the baseball field and watched fall-ball practice from a distance, I found my photo in the Athletic Hall of Fame (yes, once upon a time…), I visited a tree that was planted in honor of a friend who had died while while as students together, and I drove past the first home I ever owned.
The sidewalks still felt familiar under my feet. I have reached the age where I can reach back far enough to retrieve not just facts but feelings, the feelings of a young man who had most of his life in front of him and no idea where the currents pulling him forward would take him. I found myself having imaginary conversations with friends who once were so a part of my life, but now feel are lost from time, distance, and circumstances.
That is a strange gift. I recommend it, finding those paths of your own, walking them slowly, and remembering who you once were, if indeed those paths exist.
The faces haven’t changed
I came to Northwestern College to preach in chapel and remembered why I fell in love with this work.
The faces were the same faces. Not the same people, of course, but the same faces. Some curious. Some bored. Some far too cool to care, slouched in the back like they’d been assigned there by the Department of Indifference. Yet, every one of them was leaning in, in their own way, hoping that something true might be said - something real might penetrate the coat of emotional armor. Years of campus ministry taught me that looks can be deceiving. Sometimes the student who looks most bored or indifferent is actually the one who is actually listening on a deeper level. You never know. So always treat everyone like an insider.
I have always loved that work: trying to say something true in a beautiful way to suspicious students. Twenty-year-olds can smell a sales pitch from the balcony. They will forgive you for being awkward. They will not forgive you for being fake. College chapels are the best school of preaching I know.
An hour with the people who keep the flame
Mark DeYounge, the chaplain of 11 years at NWC, invited me to spend an hour with his campus ministry team. I am impressed with Mark. He understands that the ministry is not just about life on campus with students, which is required, of course, but it is also about helping to shape an institutional culture. He knows that it’s the culture, not the program, that does the deeper work in our lives. I experienced from Mark a thoughtful, honest, and compassionate leader, who has poured himself into a ministry with his full self. I experienced that from each of his colleagues and partners in ministry.
Patrick Hummel (Director of Missions), Josh Kuipers (Director of Worship), Natalie Wheeler (Director of Discipleship), Mark Deyounge (Chaplain and Vice-President of Christian Formation), and Tanya Vaas (the all around get'r done administrative muscle and cool kid!),
Together, we talked about the strange, particular calling of campus ministry. It is a unique post to stand at attention. It is not a youth group, and it is not a church. It is a service inside an academic community, one that pays attention to the whole person: mind, heart, imagination, and body. Some who get into this work do it to try and be like the faculty - and always suffer from faculty envy - always chasing approval. Others get into it because they love the young’uns and enjoy the coffee conversations. But those who really succeed in ministry transcend both of these - to see that a wise ministry to a college is able to see their job as institutional culture shapers.
This came up in our conversation together. One of the questions Mark asked me was simple and yet hard. “How can our ministry help shape a culture at NWC?”
This is the right question. A good leader knows that it is the culture that we inhabit that is going to accomplish the most significant formation. I don’t have a corner on the answer to this question, but here is what I told them, more or less, gleaned from my experience.
1. Say it until it sings
Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself! What we repeat is what we remember
The most important words we need to say over and over again. Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself! Culture is built by repetition. Find the words, the key phrases, the metaphors that carry weight, and say them again and again. Say them until they groove into the soul, the way music is pressed into vinyl. Then play that record over and over again.
If you are tired of saying it, take heart. The freshmen are only just hearing it. The seniors are finally starting to believe it. The most important words we have to rehearse every day.
2. Hold something in your hands
Find simple symbols to communicate the difficult messages
Claim your symbols. A symbol says more than words can, and it holds feelings when words run out. A symbol is a physical metaphor that has the strength to carry a heavy load of meaning. A cross, a candle, a basin of water, a stone passed from hand to hand. Choose your symbols with care, because the symbols you claim will steady you in the best of times and carry you through the worst.
3. Make room
Create spaces that communicate what you value
Space preaches. Northwestern converted an old library into a shared home for campus ministry, student development, and its work on belonging. Different offices now bump into each other on purpose, and good work happens in the overlap. The building that once held books now holds people discovering what their lives are for. I can’t think of a better second calling for a library.
NWC has done an impressive job of building new spaces. Like a new learning commons, a new science building, improvements for student experiences, and better living spaces. Their President, Greg Christy, and his team have done the patient work of creating a master plan and then operationalizing it into a transformed campus with new spaces - where each space communicates the values and culture of the institution.
4. Guard the hours
How we use time will determine how time uses us
How a campus spends its time tells you what it loves. Protect chapel on the calendar, and you announce that worship is a primary good, not an elective. Mark and his colleagues are asking what Sabbath might mean for a whole campus, which is about the most countercultural question a college can ask.
Rhythms shape people. So do rituals: opening convocation, Ash Wednesday, Lessons and Carols, the senior sending service, the memorial gathering nobody wanted to plan. Alumni forget the programs within a year. They remember singing “Silent Night” by candlelight until they are old. All of these traditions are about how we use time - and use them to honor the deep down convictions of an institution.
5. Set the table
Keep chapel a space for worship not announcments
Chapel is the shared table. When worship is excellent, voluntary, and theologically generous, it becomes the one place where students, faculty, staff, and administrators sit as equals. The provost and the freshman sing the same hymn, off-key in the same places. The coach and the student-athlete are each called to a shared desire. In worship, all of our diversity finds a unique unity in Christ.
So keep God the subject and object of worship. Don’t let chapel shrink into announcements, care-and-share, or an infomercial for this week’s special program. Chapel sets a community’s vocabulary for hope, lament, and calling more than any mission statement does. I have read a great many mission statements. I have never once seen anyone weep over one.
6. Preach the week you’re actually having
Be honest about the struggles of life
Name the real life of the place from the pulpit and in public prayer. A student dies. A racial incident tears at the community. The team wins a championship. Seniors walk across the stage. A quality campus ministry tells the stories of a place and gives those stories context within the larger context of THE STORY of Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension.
Over time, a community learns that faith speaks to its actual life, not some tidier life it is supposed to have. That is the culture students NEED! What a place chooses to celebrate and to lament reveals what it truly believes. That kind of intentional naming, celebrating, and mourning creates a culture that teaches young adults that it is Ok to have a real life - not a pretend, curated, and fake one.
7. Tend the ones who stay
Students cycle through in four years. Faculty and staff carry the culture for decades. Invest in them with retreats, reading groups, care in a crisis, meals, and a blessing at the start and end of each year. Let me say it as clearly as possible. If you want a ministry to shape the culture, then: LOVE YOUR FACULTY and STAFF! Love those who stay year after year! You don’t always have to agree with them, but you do have to love them! By this I mean show up for them. Celebrate them. Cry with them. Pray with them. Don’t try to fix them – simply see them and be for them!
The professor who feels pastored will pastor a classroom. The groundskeeper who feels seen will see the student crying behind the science building. Your investment into those who are there for the long haul has a ripple effect that can reach countless others who you can’t ever get too.
8. Create Leadership Opportunities
Leaders create leaders. A great college and a healthy campus ministry create a culture by creating opportunities for students to become leaders. Invite and train student worship leaders, small-group leaders, and resident assistants with real theological and pastoral depth. They will carry the ministry into residence halls, locker rooms, and 2 a.m. conversations where no faculty or staff member will ever be invited.
And put calling in the syllabus. When “What is God calling me to?” shows up in a first-year seminar or a senior capstone, ministry has moved from the margins into the bloodstream. This is the heartbeat of a Christian Liberal Arts culture.
9. Argue like family, and open the windows
Make conversations an opportunity for fresh air to come inside
On the questions that divide us, such as sexuality, race, politics, and doctrine, model a ministry of conversation. Be convicted and curious at once. Be charitable without going soft. If chaplaincy becomes the place where people can disagree and still eat lunch together, it will shape how the whole institution argues.
Then bring in voices that stretch the imagination: preachers, poets, artists, and practitioners from other traditions and cultures. Who you invite to the pulpit tells students what kind of Christianity you hope they will grow into.
10. Take a seat and tell the story
Tell the stories that matter to the people who matter
Structures matter, because structures announce what is important. I believe a chaplain belongs on the president’s cabinet and the crisis team, in the rooms where budgets and hiring get decided. Influence on culture follows proximity to decisions.
Then tell the story to alumni, donors, and trustees. Ministry people can see becomes ministry an institution claims as its own. Tell the deep down stories of the institution. Be the memory keeper for an institution, and weave those memories into sermons, into the meetings, into prayers. A quality chaplain does not have to be an expert in every area - but one does need to be attentive to others who are - offer the stories that will give decisions a context for the culture. Budgets, for example, tell a story of what we value, and what we value has a story tell.
Where a place remembers who it is
Underneath all ten is one idea. Campus ministry shapes a culture less by adding programs than by becoming the place where an institution remembers who it is.
I saw every one of these culture creations at work in Orange City. I heard them in the questions Mark’s team was asking. I felt them with old friends and faculty, people whose wisdom and friendship became an anchor that has steadied my life through more than one storm.
Northwestern College is a small space where my life got bigger. It is where I learned that small is beautiful - and that the most significant lessons often happen in places you least expect: that a few hundred faces in a chapel, a handful of professors who take you seriously, and one town at the edge of a wide sky can be enough to form a whole life.
It was good. It was simply good to be there – and I am grateful and proud to be an alum.
So if you have a minute, send Northwestern a word of encouragement. Good things are happening there. God is forming lives there, the way God once formed mine: deepened, stretched, and inspired.
Which brings me to you. Where is the small place where your life got bigger? Who there still remembers the person you were becoming? Maybe this is the week to drive the back roads home, or at least to write the letter that says, “You mattered. I’m still carrying what you gave me.
This blog is excerpted from Trygve Johnson’s Substack, the Kingfisher Study. Read the full story here.
