More Heat than Light: Campus Ministry As Evangelistic Entrepreneurship
Steve Shadrach, The Fuel and the Flame: Ten Keys to Ignite Your College Campus for Jesus Christ (Authentic, 2003)
Reviewed by Peter Schuurman, Educational Missions Leader
September, 2008
This book looks like its on fire. The cover is a close-up photograph of bright orange flames and the title in large, translucent letters: The Fuel and the Flame. Steve Shadrach’s book burns with gospel passion and thus his subtitle: Ten Keys to Ignite Your College Campus for Jesus Christ. This campus ministry handbook (published by Authentic in 2003) strives to inspire, equip, and mobilize a new generation of enthusiastic campus ministry workers across the USA and “to the ends of the earth.”
Shadrach writes from the still glowing embers of his own diverse experience in campus ministry, including para-church groups such as Campus Crusade, Navigators, Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, Student Mobilization, and his work as pastor of University Baptist Church, Arkansas. His goal is to help campus ministry staff take the “fuel” of their lives and offer it to God to fan into gospel flame on the nation’s campuses. In the first half of the book he focuses on the important area of the faith, piety, and character of the campus evangelist and in the second half he offers his own methodology for campus mission (the “four E’s”): Evangelism, Establishing Young Believers, Equipping Students to Make Disciples, and Exporting Laborers to the World.
The book is geared towards a multiplication ministry, a wildfire of evangelism and mission, and the quotes that spot the pages in bold letters turn up the heat: eg. “If we win the university today, we will win the world tomorrow” (Bill Bright) “Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God” (William Carey) “A ship in the harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for” (William Shed) and “God is not looking for nibblers of the possible, but for grabbers of the impossible” (C. T. Studd).
I can imagine Shadrach’s entrepreneurial approach appealing to the idealism in students and drawing the crowds on the campus. He is not afraid to challenge the reader and call her to deep commitment. His prose is packed with energy, personal stories, and very practical advice on everything from how to start “spiritual” conversations with people to how to lead a small group Bible study and even mobilize a larger group for overseas mission. Every chapter is subtitled with a “Seven Steps to Success” promising pragmatics eg. “Six Steps to Get to the Heart of Your Campus,” “The Four Secrets of Winning a Student to Christ,” and “Seven Principles for Launching Reproducers.”
Missing the Heart of the Campus
While I appreciate the enthusiasm and the urge to be practical, I am deeply disappointed with how poorly contextualized is Shadrach’s whole approach. It is as if he has no clue to the consumerism-plagued postmodern academic culture he is calling young missionaries to engage. Think of it by way of analogy: it is as if someone wrote an invitation to campus ministry in India, but said nothing of the history of colonialism and indigenous mission, nothing of the numerous languages and religions that connect with students and professors, and seemed completely oblivious to the poverty, disease, and violence that wreaks havoc in the country. In other words, Shadrach shows little awareness of the scholarly world of academia and the context of American life that permeates it, not to mention the surrounding institutional church.
As a book intended for ministry in the world of education, it by-passes the language and traditions of the academy. Stylistically, its standards are low: the barrage of clichés, the absence of footnotes or bibliography, the hackneyed acronyms, the military metaphors, and the superficial use of Biblical texts—these are all rather shoddy for a university-based ministry. Moreover, Shadrach shows no indication that he has read any of the literature on campus ministry, like The Campus Ministry by George Earnshaw (ed., Judson, 1964) or Campus Ministry: The Church Beyond Itself by Donald Shockley (John Knox, 1973). Or more recently, and from a para-church perspective The Fabric of Faithfulness: Weaving Together Belief and Behaviour by Steve Garber (IVP, 1996) and How to Stay Christian in College: An Interactive Guide to Keeping the Faith by J. Budziszewski (Navpress, 1999).
There are no professors recognized in this book, and no university administrators (not to mention chaplains!). His overview of campus ministry focuses on revival movements that began on campuses like Samuel Mills and the “Haystack Five” and C.T. Studd and the “Cambridge Seven”. His most revered champions are missionaries overseas and otherwise heroic evangelists.
This is largely due to a severely truncated view of mission. For Shadrach, the mission of God in the world is reduced to evangelism, and to some degree, evangelism without the church. He quotes Walt Henrichsen: “If you are at college for any other reason than to be a missionary for Jesus Christ, you are there for selfish, sinful reasons.” He says himself: “If we’re not fishing for men, we’re not following Christ.” There is little room to be an artist like Rembrandt or a composer like Bach, not to mention a Mother Teresa who cares for the sick and dying.
Loving the Multiversity
I could continue in this vein of critique, but let me summarize by saying this: God created people to love learning and thus to love the university. For believers, this love includes naming the careerist, materialist, technologically reductionist idols of our time and calling people to serve the one true God by bringing all their gifts and resources to bear in participation with his world plan of shalom. Campus ministries that celebrate the Great Commission without reference to the broader calling of the cultural mandate and creation care become like parasites to the campus, drawing students out of a fallen but God-ordained institution and into a sub-culture thick in piety but sadly mimicking our culture of technique over wisdom, image over substance and “bigger is betterism” with its complimentary high pressure marketing.
Christ came to restore all of God’s good creation and right now the soul of the university is in grave danger. Schooling is being reduced to market training, a cheap pluralism rules campus culture, the U.S. military machine explodes with power, and the planet is choking on the dust cloud of our over-production. Campus ministries ought to be the place to engage these issues with Christian passion and wisdom, in close partnership with the broader church, God’s parable of his new world.
That said, let me pull back for a moment. Besides being a poor example, what does this kind of para-church work have to offer Christian Reformed campus folk? I am reminded of the words of a pastor at the Canadian CRC’s 100th anniversary celebration in Guelph in 2005: “We have a lot to give and we have a lot to learn. We have been arrogant about what we have to share. We have been reluctant about what we have to learn. We cannot be a club for people like us—people who think like us, talk like us. We have lots to learn.”
The fact is that while para-church groups have exploded across the country, CRC campus ministries remain on the same number of campus as they were 30 years ago.
Chaplaincy on the other side of Christendom
This is not articulated in the book, but this is what might be offered by books like The Fuel and the Flame and more recently Jason Ma’s The Blueprint: A Revolutionary Plan to Plant Missional Communities on Campus, Regal, 2007: a sociological indictor.
As campus ministers following in the tradition of university chaplains, we have inherited a legacy of campus engagement born in the entitlement of Christendom, a time when church and state reinforced each other. While we eschew this model in general, in the DNA of our position there is a temptation to see our work as centripetal—that is, benefiting from institutional privilege (of both academy and denomination) to draw in the mostly Christian and faith-literate crowds. In this light, we might wait for the students, staff and faculty to approach us and join our community on campus. We might expect to be appreciated, if not tolerated; we might expect the church to supply all the resources we need; we might expect a chaplain-centered community rather than a student-centred community.
What these books indicate is an end of Christendom and its concessions and a call to a centrifugal ministry, a missional movement that goes outward to the margins, inviting and challenging the campus population to consider the call to join in God’s drama in Jesus Christ, his new economy of love, his cosmic restoration project. The university is a place of intellectual life, indubitably, but it is more fundamentally this: a place of people-making. It is where our youth are socialized and cultural leaders are shaped; and right now, it offers little in terms of a faith identity.
So campus ministry must focus on the heart of the university and become a student ministry first and foremost. It must be a Christian learning and leadership centre, a student-led community of faith, hope and love. We may not agree precisely with the narrowness of the “four E’s” but we do need a similar trajectory: to bear witness, call students to faith, and then equip and send them to be agents of renewal in God’s world.
Dallas Willard has said Christians can be practically paralyzed by God’s grace and sovereignty, and the Great Commission can become a Great Omission. This is certainly a travesty that plagues the mainline denominations. We need to teach all that Jesus commanded and baptize new disciples (another word for student!) We need to feed off the blue sky dreams and “get up and go” of today’s students. We can offer the fuel of our Reformed tradition to fan into flame a mindfully missional love of the planet and its people.
Shadrach challenges us, calling us to offer a self-sustaining life-giving vision, not just membership in an organization. We have this vision gifted to us in a mighty way with our Reformed, Biblical approach to faith and education. I know being Reformed is seen as a liability by some in our midst. But in a culture of displacement (see Brian Walsh’s new book) such theological particularity (when passionately re-interpreted for today) can be an asset, a strength, a gift.
Shadrach further insists on the more holistic idea of student training and mentoring, not just information teaching. I believe we are learning this apprenticing approach in a more intentional way with our growing list of “emerging leaders”. Add to this strategy the justice-pursuing vision of Shane Claiborne in The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical (Zondervan, 2007)and the postmodern church-connected wisdom of Jamie Smith’s Whose Afraid of Postmodernism? (Baker, 2005) mixed in with the student guide The Outrageous Idea of Academic Faithfulness by Don Opitz and Derek Melleby (Brazos, 2007) and you will have a more dynamic, contextualized, and God-honouring campus movement.
We all have much to learn from each other on campus, and respectful, energetic learning and debate can mark our ministry journey. We can offer this growing educational ministry as a laboratory of mission for the broader church as it, too, struggles to find its way in a new world on the other side of Christendom.
