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I was thinking a couple days ago about the first quarter I started teaching regularly here at CL. The freshman girls that year had formed a special bond. As I was just kind of learning how to do this, giving my first, uneven messages, they all sat together every week, right across the front…and they all dressed alike…and wore their hair in identical side ponytails…and frankly, I found them mildly terrifying. And for the first few months there was only one freshman guy, a seemingly quiet, introverted boy who sat all the way in the back. Well, those women are graduating in a couple weeks…and so is Kiho. And they don’t wear side ponys any more (at least Kiho doesn’t)…and I’ve come to call many of them friends…my life, the life of my family, this ministry and this campus have all been substantially enriched by their years here. And that little core group has been joined over the years by a number of fine men and women who will also graduate this year and have also had remarkable runs. And we are genuinely thrilled for you. Graduation is a really fun, exciting time and you totally deserve to celebrate and be celebrated.
But graduation has always reminded me of friend who once told me about his last day in the Army. He and a handful of other guys who were also done that day went to a one hour seminar on how to integrate back into the civilian world…and then they simply weren’t in the army any more. Reflecting on that day, he looked at me in disbelief and said, ‘It takes 6 months to join the army and only 1 hour to unjoin.’ After 4 years of a rigorous but counter cultural lifestyle, they were going to face a new-normal, and the army thought that the least they could do is provide them an one-hour of thoughts on that process.
I have often thought about how finishing up college is a similar shocking experience of plunging into a new normal…except without the one hour exit seminar. You don’t even get an exit seminar. And that’s not ok. Now, we are way too late in the quarter for me to stand up here and talk for an hour…So I’m going to give you 25 minutes. These are a few of thoughts that I have compiled over last few years of watching people make the transition well and poorly and from over a dozen substantial responses I got from a request I sent out to last year’s seniors. As usual, I have a lot of thoughts and quotes from last year’s class that I couldn’t squeeze into the talk. So I have put them online.
You see, there are two big transitions in our culture where the church is just getting killed. The first and toughest, you have made it through. The transition from high school to college is strewn with carnage of faith. It is like the banks of Normandy…many just don’t make it...they walk away from Jesus for good. This is why Amanda and I do what we do. That’s why we have joined the effort on this front.
But the second big transition is more subtle. It is the transition from college to church. And here the losses are not to unbelief…but to ineffectiveness. Fewer people take themselves out of the faith, but many take themselves out of the game. So there are three big ideas I’d like to offer you about how to Navigate the New Normal. First…
I. Learn to Work with God
Many (maybe most) of my friends who were serious about their faith in college went into full time (usually support raising) ministry. There was a perception that only second class, materialistic Christians get ‘secular’ jobs. And while that is great, I soon realized that I had not been given any theological resources for how to do anything else without feeling like a spiritual failure. I had no theology of work.
Usually, if you hear work talked about in church it is an exhortation to not work too much. I have heard the value of work generally pitched in three ways in Christian circles (in order of increasing compellingness):
1. People Like to Eat: The verse you hear get kicked around is the one where Paul says: ‘Anyone who doesn’t provide for his family is worse than an unbeliever’ – So man up and go to work. It is an unfortunate consequence of the fall so push thorough it. It sucks, but the world is fallen and you need to keep your family in Top Ramen.
2. Pastors Like to Eat: You see, by working hard, you produce excess resources that you can use to fund full time ministers who can devote their energies full time to the work of the gospel (the real work). You have the responsibility and privilege to become silent partners in their ministry by getting out of bed and going to the cube farm year after year.
3. You are a Missionary: Full time Christian workers lose most of their connections outside of the Christian community pretty quickly. They have the training but no access. This is actually the primary frustration of most of my friends who are in full time ministry…they got into it to introduce people to Jesus, but their circle shifts so that they know very few people who don’t already know him. By getting a secular job you are a ‘secret agent,’ you ‘infiltrate’ the secular world, you have the access. Your work is a platform for ministry. By working with integrity and looking for opportunities for the gospel to take root, work provides you with spiritual opportunities.
Now, there is an element of truth to each of these, but they are all fundamentally flawed. Even together, they paint a fundamentally impoverished picture. That honestly sounds like a pretty terrible way to spend your life. These motivations are not going to do it. Just a couple weeks ago, I had a student ask me ‘how do you do it? How do you go to work?” You are going to have to find meaning in those 50 to 60 hours per week or it is going to diminish you. You need a theology of work.
Remember, Adam and Eve they had jobs in paradise and I believe we will have jobs after the resurrection. Our culture has adopted the Roman and Greek view of work: Leisure is good and work is bad. But the Hebrew, view of work could not be more different.
As I said earlier this year: Work is a pre-fall ordinance. It was part of God’s good creation BEFORE the fall. Work is normative…full time ministry is the exception. We were made to work. We were made to join God in bringing order out of chaos. To join God in his initiative of making things and caring for the people and earth he made. God made work, the fall made it hard. But good, useful, diligent work is part of God’s intent for human flourishing. So you have to learn to make your work into worship. What is it about aerospace engineering that brings order out of chaos? What is it about occupational therapy that rolls back the effects of the fall? What is it about working in a coffee shop while you look for something in your field that declares the coming kingdom?
You have to learn to work with God.
II. Become the Church
You’ve got to get in a church. The local church is the basic functional unit of Christian life and practice is the ‘missional community.’ Whether or not you flourish in this transition really depends on how soon and well you integrate into a missional community. As I mentioned, last year’s seniors had lots to say about this transition, and I am going to quote them throughout this talk, starting with Monica, who said:
“Find a church and get involved ASAP.”
Christianity simply cannot be done alone. It wasn’t deigned to be done alone. But getting in on the community and the mission is harder in the next phase. It is harder for a couple reasons. First, because there are a lot of weird churches out there:
Joey and Laura ‘Welcome the Birds’ video
You have to find a church that is serious about the Scriptures and the big ideas that have been important to the Church always and everywhere. And you have to find a church that translates these into action. Finding a church that believes true things, (that majors on the majors) and puts them into action is non-negotiable. But too many wander for too long looking for a sort of ‘College Life for grown ups…” Here’s what Natalia said about this process:
“It took me soooo long to find a church because I was being (obnoxiously?) picky. Don't get me wrong, I think it's important to find a church where you're being challenged, however, I had a bad habit of writing off most churches I went to because it was "too this" or "too that"... and then realized that the church is made up of imperfect human beings and I was looking for perfection.”
But once you find a good church, your job is not done. The harder part is to become part of that church. And that is surprisingly difficult. You see most local churches are pitched to the leading/giving generation…the forty and fifty something crowd. Here is the sad truth. Churches are run by middle age people with money to give, children to care for and limited energy for innovation. A 22 year old does not fit their paradigm…shoot, a 28 year old hardly fits that paradigm. So most churches are ignoring our most energetic and creative people leaving them on the sidelines until they make some money and make some babies and fit the paradigm.
The question is, do you have the discipleship level to make community and mission happen anyway? You have got to find a way to get in on 1) Community and 2) Mission. And so let me take those in turn.
1) Community: Finding and maintaining community will take more intentional effort on your part outside of the college environment. This frustrates a lot of people. But the #1 piece of advice from last year’s seniors was that you have GOT to make community happen…because dominant theme that emerged when people talked about their struggles transitioning to life after college was loneliness.
“…feeling lonely and wishing you were still in college…”
“… season of loneliness …”
“…extended loneliness…”
“…it seemed like I was wandering into the future alone, defenseless…”
“…I began to feel lonely “
“...In the loneliness…Sometimes if feels like you've fallen off the face of the earth…”
“…every single person in our class (yes, even the ones who are engaged and married!) has talked of feeling lonely post-college. I mean, even if you stay, everyone else leaves…I don’t think I have ever been as lonely or felt as much like a failure as I did in the 6 months immediately following senior year. ”
And this was my experience, and the experience of my friends when we graduated almost 15 years ago. Now, most of those quotes were followed with thoughts about how loneness was an opportunity of a new kind of spiritual growth…and it is, I also experienced that, but that is a special temporary sort of grace…God’s normative environment for our flourishing is community…
Now, this is kind of a downer. Why would I tell you this? 2 Reasons
1) It helps to know you are not weird when it happens…and…
2) To press upon you that you have GOT to make community happen
Listen, one of the reasons I am a Christian, is because Jesus seems to get me. He seems to understand what human beings need in a deep and insightful way. And one of those things is other people.
New York Times columnist David Brooks was surveying some recent psychological research in a column a few months ago and marshaled an impressive amount of evidence that significant relationships with ‘other people’ (of the non-digital variety) is the most important factor in human flourishing.
“According to one study, (he says) joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income.” – David Brooks – New York Times
But here is the thing, until now, there has been a generational ministry set aside for you in the church…a structural mechanism in the church for grouping the other people like you together for natural community. Community was there, you just had to find it. That ends now. In college, we have urged you again and again…”Find Community.” But in the next life stage, community isn’t found. It’s forged.
Now as it turns out, I never had to learn to be very good at that…because I married someone who was amazing at it. We lived in 3 cities (slide - map) in the first 5 years after college…and we developed close friends in each place (not as close or ubiquitous as our college friends, but close enough for us to smile nostalgically every time we think of them – slide - pics). How did she do it…she was constantly inviting. Constantly taking risks of rejection. Constantly asking people to do stuff together. And here is the crazy thing. My wife is an introvert. She loves being alone. But she knows she needs people even if she doesn’t feel like being with people.
So she was constantly cooking meals, inviting friends to concerts, running around after church and inviting all of the people anywhere close to our life stage to lunch EVERY SUNDAY, creating every opportunity she could manufacture for connection. Because after college, community isn’t found, it’s forged.
But here’s the other thing about friendship. The very deepest friendships that we have had since college have not simply emerged from our desire to have friends…they have developed from sharing a common passionate purpose. Community emerges from mission. Which leads me to the second part of getting into the Church which is harder after college than it was in college:
2) Mission: You will probably have to start ‘at the bottom’ in ministry. When I was in undergrad I was the student leader of our campus ministry (that was roughly half the size of College Life). Junior year our campus pastor had a brain aneurism and the para-church staff worker was pulled from campus because he couldn’t raise enough support. When I came on as the student leader my Junior year, we suddenly went from 2 adult leaders, to zero. So for a year and a half I essentially ran a Christian ministry of over 100 students. But Amanda had the really distinguished college ministry. Amanda led small groups every single semester after her freshman year, most of them for spiritually curious students with no spiritual background and she walked with nearly a dozen people as they found faith in Jesus during her time in college. Then we graduated, got married, joined the church and looked for a ministry. We went to the leaders and asked them to put us to work. They looked at us, their eyes lit up, and they said, “You know what we really need, we need bodies to staff the nursery for the early service. We can’t seem find people willing to get up that early.”
This is not uncommon. Because of the insane pace and turnover in campus ministry, it provides students great opportunities to do REALLY significant ministry and many of you have developed fantastic ministry skill sets. Some of you have led small groups, developed kingdom projects, imagined exciting new initiatives, some of you have preached, others have led worship or…I mean, Tony, Alex, Deiter, Lenna and Kiki have made these events happen every week (and these events that are bigger and take more planning than 80% of American church services). But these skills and gifts are generally not recognized quickly by the local Church. They often look at you and see your age. So Amanda and I had a choice. We could do what needed to be done, or we could take our ball and go home.
So we staffed the nursery, and before long we ran the nursery, and after a couple years we were asked to lead a small group, and after a couple of years we were asked to run a ghetto youth ministry, and a full decade and a theology degree later we were asked to serve on an elder board and I started teaching sporadically in different ministries…and finally, a dozen years after college, Dan Seitz took a risk on us, and finally here we are in a great ministry, doing the kind of thing I pictured us doing right out of college. But it started with earning trust by playing blocks with Evan, a 3 year old who used to come to church so sleepy, dazed and confused, he was still holding his cold buttered toast…and would just stand there holding that toast watching me build block towers until he finally pulled it together enough to actually take a bite of the toast like 20 minutes later. But some of my college friends were offended by ‘starting over’ in ministry…and they never started. Most of them were taken out of the game.
The local church requires patience and humility…but I really believe that with all its flaws, it is God’s primary vehicle for his kingdom. So find a good local church (actually, forget that, it doesn’t exist, find a tolerable church and learn to love them), stay at it, and prove your value to them by doing whatever they need done as well as you can.
If you wait for the church to discover how productive, innovative and creative you can be…you will wait a long time. They will inadvertently waste your 20’s, unless you refuse to let them…so refuse to let them.
So you are going to have to forge a community AND a ministry (while lovingly submitting to, learning from and esteeming the leadership of that church). The sooner you stop seeing the old people in the church as your adversaries and start embracing them as mentors…the sooner they will embrace your contributions…Because you need the perspective and vision of the older generations But they need your energy and innovation. Win them to that understanding by your humility and eagerness. Finally…
III. Build or Venture
I remember one morning my senior year. I was walking to a final deeply sleep deprived (which, unfortunately, described most mornings of my undergraduate experience). And as I was trudging up the steep hill our little campus was built on I thought of all the people who told me to enjoy college because they would be the best days of my life. And I remember thinking “Shoot, I hope they are wrong.” And you know what, they were. Once we made it through those rough first couple of years transitioning to the church, ministry and marriage…our 20’s were better than our college years…and the ministry and family years of our 30’s have been better still.
I actually feel really bad for the people who told me that college would be the best days of my life. It means they got stuck. They failed to embrace and enjoy the blessings and challenges of each life stage for what they are…they just processed them through the lens of ‘less freedom’ ‘fewer friends’ ‘more hours in a cubicle’ ‘more poo on my shirt’ (which happens when you have kids, or before that if you are an agg major).
If college turns out to be the best days of your life…your life sucks. You need to get a life. But the transition between life stages whether it is HS-College, or College-after college or to suddenly becoming responsible for tiny human beings, it shakes you up and asks you what you’re really made of.
You don’t have to know where you are going to make ground. Who you become is a function of what you try. You won’t know where you are headed until you try a path.
“Be content with your season of life and maximize your time in it.”-Monica
And your post-college twenties are your chance to either set up future decades to be reliable foundational members of your community and church or to take on risky ventures that won’t be available later on. So don’t waste them. Whatever you choose to do, make sure you move forward. It doesn’t have to move you towards a particular goal, but this is either a time to build or it’s a time to venture. You either need to be building for the long term (save for a house even if you don’t have a girlfriend, get the hard degree you will need so you don’t have to go back when you have kids, build a career you love, get the theological development and skills you need for lifetime of fruitful lay ministry), or it’s a time for venturing (get in on a church plant, join a mission initiative, start a business)…venture on a risky, exciting initiative that could fail, but it’s ok if it does, because no one is counting on you to eat. But do something. It is a time to build or to venture. Which of those you choose has a lot to do with your personality and your gifting. But floating is not an option.
I don’t do long quotes often, but Shauna Niequist, an author from Chicago, put this pretty well:
This is the thing: When you hit 28 or 30, everything begins to divide. You can see very clearly two kinds of people. On one side, people who have used their 20s to learn and grow, to find God and themselves and their dreams, people who know what works and what doesn’t, who have pushed through to become real live adults. Then there’s the other kind, who are hanging onto college…with all their might. They’ve stayed in jobs they hate, because they’re too scared to get another one. They’ve stayed with men or women who are good but not great, because they don’t want to be lonely. They mean to find a church, they mean to develop intimate friendships…But they don’t do those things, so they live in an extended adolescence, no closer to adulthood than when they graduated.
Don’t be like that. Don’t get stuck. Move, travel, take a class, take a risk. There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don’t lose yourself at happy hour, but don’t lose yourself on the corporate ladder either. Stop every once in a while…with your journal.
Ask yourself some good questions like: “Am I proud of the life I’m living? What have I tried this month? What have I learned about God this year?...Do the people I’m spending time with give me life, or make me feel small? Is there any brokenness in my life that’s keeping me from moving forward?”
Now is your time. Walk closely with people you love, and with people who believe God is good and life is a grand adventure. Don’t get stuck in the past, and don’t try to fast-forward yourself into a future you haven’t yet earned.
This is in line with what Gail, one of last year’s seniors said was the most helpful thing for her in the transition. She said that loosing the 10 week evaluation cycle left her drifting, overwhelmed by the new time scale of her ventures. She said that disciplining herself to set and revisit a series of short and long term goals that was really significant to help her get a handle on the life stage. So, you want to Navigate the New Normal of life after college? 1)Learn to work with God, 2) Become the church and 3) Build or Venture…
…and that is fine for seniors. But what about the rest of you? Well, we probably won’t give this talk again next year…so you should probably consider this your exit seminar. But there are a couple ways that these ideas can inform your college years.
Thoughts for Underclassmen
1. Hit the Summer hard.
Its good training. Get in a church, work hard, keep up the disciplines, set aside the video game console and find something useful to do whether or not you get paid, make intentional contact with CL friends in your area and practice making new friends outside of the campus environment.
2. Get Momentum into the transition.
Several people told me that having that next thing already lined up when they graduated was the most helpful thing for them in the transition. So, Juniors, spend THIS summer deciding what grad schools or internships you want to apply to (even if you have NO IDEA what you want to do or if grad school is even for you). Set aside a couple hours a week to prayerfully surf these web sites. Take initiative in the process of deciding. And find a vocational mentor early on who can help you think about it (btw Natalia, Michelle was just telling me how you are doing this for her). The deadline for many grad schools and missions opportunities is January 1 and it comes and goes before many seniors even notice. How might you want to build or venture...you need to think about this early if you are going to get momentum into the transition. Don’t give up on the year after undergrad until it is upon you because it seems overwhelming. Put intentional thought and energy into what you want to do...and then send out a variety of applications that will help you build or venture.
Because you will NEVER have more energy or capacity than you do right now. Seriously, I fall asleep most nights at 9:30 whether I want to or not...it is currently past my bed time...I am on the verge of falling asleep right now mid sentence...and I'm not even THAT old. Now is the time to do the ‘hard thing’ whether it is grad school, or peace corps, or missions, or to taking a REAL, sustained shot at an artistic dream, or to do a ministry internship in Wisconsin with Adam Darbonne (which is a possibility – if you’re interested come talk to me). Years in your early 20’s – before you have kids - are incredibly precious in retrospect. You WILL wish you did more with them. Get purposeful momentum into the transition.
Finally, undergrads…
3. Leave it on the Field at College.
I think the best predictor of how this transition will go for you is how you handle your senior year. If your senior year is largely spent looking ahead, you may be the kind of person who does a lot of ‘looking back’ once you are out of here.
I want to close with a quote from one of the funniest people I know…Bronwyn Murphy. I am convinced that the Murphy’s could be a sit com…I’d watch that. They are hilarious. And there would probably be so much sports talk in that sit com, that it could probably air on ESPN. But it would also be the one of the most insightful things on television. So Bronwyn weighed in on this transition for me, and it got real…listen to what she said.
One of the biggest tragedies I have witnessed is graduating seniors refusing to finish strong (classes, ministry, relationships) in the present because they are so focused on the future. Once they graduate, they become inefficient and frankly joy-less in the present as they long for what was in the past (roommates, fellowship, relationships, DC late night)…Both miss entirely the blessings of God in the present.
But if you embrace your senior year for all of its complexity and melancholy and ‘leave it on the field’ in your classes and ministry, then you are probably the kind of person who will find God’s best in a new, totally different situation. If you practice thankfulness, if you wage contentment…you will build the spiritual muscles that will help you through this transition…and the ones coming…the joys and boredoms of parenthood…the estrangement and grace of a difficult season of marriage…the terrors and beauty of adult children…the horror and adjustment of a serious illness…the melancholy and faithfulness of getting old.
It starts now…with embracing THIS season…like a grown up…balancing vocation, community, family and ministry when you come back in the Fall. I’ll see you then.
Note: I have accumulated footnotes and deleted sceens from this talk in a seperate post
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