This all appears to be how you focus your college ministry. We focus on having it be sameness for an evangelistic purpose, that people groups are often reached faster by those who walk alongside of them in the same people group. It seems to me that college ministry may not be the mechanism to create multi-generational interaction. It also assumes the church as a whole embraces discipling of college students which doesn’t always appear to be the case.

As for compartmentalization, we challenge our leaders to create community and explain that it never happens on one night a week and then it is often bonded together deeper along a mission target focus. When they serve together, they love each other.

To try and combat the consumeristic mentality, we challenge all our groups to go through REAP devotion study together and have different people lead the discussion each week, even build it into your group by taking 20 minutes and saying every go Read these verses, Examine what they say, Apply it to an area of your life, Pray over it and then come back and talk about it.

in regards to your second question, i would say that it most likely cannot happen outside of the context of a local church. which is one of the reasons why i think everyone needs to be connected to a local church. however, believers from a church can offer themselves as mentors to college-age people, which means they would be “connected” to a church. my definition of connection has VERY little to do with attendance to any formal gathering. i do believe attendance could come, but usually because they were connected to a person first – – which is the beauty of your “adopt a student” approach.. i talk about this in the book a ton too.

your situation is not unique. i do think no matter the structure we find ourselves in, nobody is going to question us by individually connecting people to each other. and, again, in CM 101 i take this a step further and say that true connection happens “off the church campus.” i say that because too often we think of connection being at a service or in some type of group. these can provide intimate connection with others, but it’s not the only way. i don’t take that approach anymore. i stick to one connection at a time and have seen it REALLY pay off over time. but, time is the price to pay. no mass production is going to happen.

As far as the sameness goes, do you think that’s a legitimate possibility for a ministry that’s not tied to a specific church? Here are a couple of issues I face in that realm: first off, I’m not a pastor of any of our supporting churches, and only two of those supporting churches are even in our small college town. I’ve been very involved in one of those churches for 13 years now, and the other one I am currently interim preacher while they search for a new pastor. But I still don’t have a lot of influence to set a new culture in either one. Both tend toward separating people according to sameness: there’s the typical Sunday School approach with the old people together, the young marrieds together, the youth together, etc. This keeps college students away from the older generations. Second, many of our students either don’t attend any church at all or attend one that isn’t either of the two I have a connection with. Maybe I should make an effort here, but I don’t really know much at all about what goes on in those churches. Do you think a legitimate older-younger discipleship plan could work in that situation?

On the side, as I said before that’s why we’re working on the adopt-a-student ministry at those two churches. It seems there’s almost nothing currently that allows those two groups to legitimately interact with each other, so we’re trying to create a new way to make that happen.

They have an illusion of accountability. I agree with what you’ve said, and there are definitely limitations due to selective disclosure and involvement in each others lives. But I think what you’ve shared as real accountability is very difficult to achieve. Small groups may not get to the pinnacle of accountability, but they can certainly come closer than what we’ve normally got going on in Christian circles. And I advocate that the small group isn’t simply a once-a-week one hour encounter, but that life is shared outside of it as well. Our leaders have generally all come to realize that meeting once a week simply isn’t enough.

They are centered on sameness. Maybe we’re different than other places, but that hasn’t been completely true for us. Sure they’re the same age group and life stage, but we have a wide range of spiritual levels (radically growing in Christ to non-believers) as well as nationalities (obviously many Americans, also Indians and Chinese students).

They can make discipleship more difficult. When you talk here about older mature believers, are you referring to adults? I’m guessing that’s what you mean. I completely agree that connecting college students with adults is one of the great challenges of collegiate ministry, especially ones that are not directly tied to a church. We are trying to establish an adopt-a-student ministry in our local churches to deal with this challenge. I see this from a little bit of a different angle, though. To me, having students disciple other students is key because we’re trying to teach them how to be disciplers. The skills they learn by discipling their peers will be skills they can implement for the rest of their lives – and hopefully ones that they’ll be willing to pour into the younger generations to come.

They can enable compartmentalization. This ties back a bit to what I said earlier – I think a small group meeting needs to be a catalyst for life outside of the group. That could mean serving together, random fun get togethers, intentional one-on-one time between different members or something else. But I think this objection can tie to much of Christian culture as a whole. I think for many people, church attendance is just as compartmentalized. I am more concerned about what students are doing with the other 160+ hours of their week.

They can enable (maybe even create) consumeristic mentality. This is definitely a challenge, and I think it goes along with what I said above. I think in all realms of ministry we’ve got to continually challenge, model and provide opportunities (to an extent, some of it just needs to come from them) for them to be outward focused. I think our natural tendency is to migrate toward the Christian bubble, whether it’s in collegiate ministry or church life in general.

I hope I didn’t come off too antagonistic here, because those are all legitimate concerns in small group ministry. But I think if we recognize that, we can take steps to avoid those challenges and make our groups that much better and more effective.