What is our purpose on this campus?
Is our only goal to get a piece of the Christian pie (i.e., find as many Christian freshmen to join our club as possible)?
Is there more that God wants to do in and through our community?
What would it look like if we believed and pursued the "more" that God has for us?
God gave them scripture verses that guided the discernment process: the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, and the call of Abram in Genesis 12. Students saw themselves as the people building the tower of Babel, laboring to have something to show for themselves, something that can protect them and serve as a sign of their significance. They want to "make a name for themselves."
In the competitive environment of Cal, students are under pressure to perform well academically, score prestigious internships and jobs, and pursue extracurricular activities that will look good on resumes. But the very things that seem to promise joy and peace and fulfillment in the future bring much anxiety, guilt, and sadness in the present. The promise of a tower to protect their lives actually binds them to the smallness of what they can see and build with their own hands. It becomes a prison.
In Genesis 12, we see God promising to make Abram's name great. Abram sets out, journeying in stages, in pursuit of this promise. Along the way, he builds altars. We've been asking what it could look like to build altars testifying to God's faithfulness in different campus communities instead of towers that testify to our own fear and pride.
This sounds awesome, but it's a lot harder to put it into practice. How much has the mentality of "perform according to external standards" influenced the ways staff and students alike have approached their ministries? It goes pretty deep, we discovered during a session in which we asked students to brainstorm a document of communal commitments that they could sign.
This conversation turned into a tense discussion about how we wanted to enforce attendance/timeliness at meetings. A minor issue suddenly seemed very important, with strong opinions on both sides. We realized that we had come into the conversation with a few assumptions:
-This group is subject to rules that are placed on individuals from "the outside".
-These rules define what is allowed and what is not.
-In other words, membership is contingent on meeting these expectations.
Then we reframed the conversation to be an answer to the question, "What kind of community would we like to be part of? What values would that community live out, and how might that look? What kind of meeting would we want to go to?"
This is an example of how we are learning how to approach our endeavors differently. It's a process that requires us not just to be thoughtful, but also to be willing to ask questions when we get uncomfortable--and willing to hear the answers.
This conversation turned into a tense discussion about how we wanted to enforce attendance/timeliness at meetings. A minor issue suddenly seemed very important, with strong opinions on both sides. We realized that we had come into the conversation with a few assumptions:
-This group is subject to rules that are placed on individuals from "the outside".
-These rules define what is allowed and what is not.
-In other words, membership is contingent on meeting these expectations.
Then we reframed the conversation to be an answer to the question, "What kind of community would we like to be part of? What values would that community live out, and how might that look? What kind of meeting would we want to go to?"
This is an example of how we are learning how to approach our endeavors differently. It's a process that requires us not just to be thoughtful, but also to be willing to ask questions when we get uncomfortable--and willing to hear the answers.
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