From Deconstruction to derivation you have to deal with a lot in college that is hugely complicated.
But stuff like this, while tough, will probably not be the most complicated thing you will negotiate in college…or the most rewarding. The most complicated thing you will negotiate in college will almost certainly be your relationships. Because people are REALLY complicated:
Today we are taking up the question “What is college for? One more time…
...If you remember the answer we proposed from John 1…”college is a time to grow in grace and truth.” And we are going to zero in on growing in grace and truth in a second specific arena …moving from your studies to your relationships
No that is a huge topic, so tonight we are going to zero in on three spheres of human relatedness:
1. Friendship
2. Community
3. Romance
And it will shock you to learn that I have a lot to say about these…so we are going to get right to work. Let’s start with friendship:
1. Friendship
Interestingly the big findings in the recent psychological and sociological research on friendship are seemingly incongruous. The first finding is that the value of friendship is grossly underestimated in our culture. And John Green – my favorite vlogger agrees. Check out this clip from his thoughts on Valentine’s day.
(0:44 – 1:30) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma9AnIfaE30
I’m convinced that one of reasons that long term romantic relationships struggle is not because multi-decadal monogamy is impossible, improbable, or disappointing …it is that we expect our romantic relationships to carry too much relational freight in our culture. The bottom line of a lot of the recent research is that friendship really matters.
Recently researchers at Virginia Tech recruited a bunch of students and fitted them with weighted backpacks at the base of a steep hill.
(OK, first of all…Seriously? I mean, I love the hard sciences…but sometimes I feel like social scientists have more fun…hey, here’s a heavy backpack, go climb a hill)
Anyway, they asked the students who were wearing the heavy packs to estimate the steepness of the hill…but here was the variable…some of them stood alone and others simply had a close friend standing next to them. Listen to how they reported the results:
The students who stood with friends gave lower estimates of the steepness of the hill. And the longer the friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared.
When Dr Karen Roberto, the director of the center that conducted this study was asked about the results here’s what she said: “Friendship is an undervalued resource. The consistent message of these studies is that friends make your life better.”
So, friendship matters. Now I don’t think that’s a really controversial hypothesis. I’m not sure it takes a ton of peer reviewed research to convince you of that. But if it is self evident that friendship makes your life better, it is a little hard to make sense of the second big finding on friendship in recent research in the social sciences. And that is that friendship is on the decline. Recent studies [1] in both the US and France demonstrate that we have fewer, less substantial relationships than they use to. Now why is that, if friendship does, as Dr. Roberto claims, make your life better why is our culture characterized by a decline of friendship?
Well, it’s because real friendship with real people with real drama turns out to be hard…because, if you recall, people are really complicated. And while college is supposed to be a really easy place to make friends, it might not be as easy as it seems.
College is set up for disposable relationships. You will get a new set of beautiful, interesting people in your life every 10 weeks…so relationships can become expendable, especially if they get just a little hard…instead seeing a little friction as an opportunity to grow in grace, you can just trade in a growing friendship for a new acquaintance. And so college can become a series of …”single serving friends”
And so, friendships that last, that have the chance to do the work in your life that they were intended for, have got to be characterized by Grace and Truth.
Grace for the other and truth about yourself. In particular, Jesus offers us two resources to help us forge our friendships in grace and truth: Self Skepticism and Shared Purpose:
The first resource Jesus offers to help you forge friendship in grace and truth (and frankly the one I’ve found most helpful self skepticism.
Because a little self skepticism is the only way we can really get at self knowledge in with so much self interest swirling about us.
And that is why Philippians 2 is one of the texts I have found most helpful in building long term friendships:
3Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. 4Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.
We are predisposed to prioritize our own significance and our own interests…but becoming a good friend requires the active practice of being skeptical about both our significance and our interests to try to clearly see the interests and significance of our friends.
And so the active cultivation of forgiveness, generosity and repentance (which are the tools of relational grace and which emerge out of holding loosely to our own interests and significance) are the only real way to cut through the drama that erodes friendship…and they are the only real tools to move friendships from disposable alliances of mutual convenience to long term enriching fixtures in your life.
I corresponded about this with a student who recently graduated a couple weeks ago…listen to what he said: My living situation sophomore year and was awful for this reason exactly. There was no grace, whatsoever. So everyone kept score, “selfless” acts were only really attempts to get ahead and strong arm someone into cleaning the dishes the next time, or something like that. By contrast, my living situation junior and senior year was fantastic because there was grace and forgiveness when people messed up and also real acts of selfless love.
So to grow in grace and truth in our friendship we need to cultivate a little self skepticism and actively seek the interests of our friend…and secondly we have to realize really significant friendships have to be built on something bigger than the desire to have friends. Friendship has to be built on a shared purpose:
CS Lewis tackles this idea in his book: The Four Loves “That is why those pathetic people who simply “want friends” can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends…(Otherwise) there would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice…Those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travelers.”
In college most people try to build friendship based on Affinity - am I like or do I Iike this person…do they seem likely to make my life better. But robust, meaningful friendships tend to be built on common Purpose – the way this works out practically is that you will end up with friends you might not have chosen. A relationship built on shared purpose can generate affection and affinity pretty quickly, but the opposite isn’t nearly as true.
And that is why war buddies have more enduring friendships than drinking buddies…
And that is why, if you belong to Jesus, your most meaningful friendships will emerge from:
2. Community
Community is mostly an association of purposeful friendship…friendship oriented in the same direction…
[3]
The topics of friendship and community overlap but not entirely. You will have friends who are not part of your Christian Community and there will be members of your Christian community that matter to you but aren’t really friends. [4] But it is that middle area, where purpose and affinity converge…that will be the building ground of the relationships that will define your life.
Jesus following is irreducibly corporate. Now I could have gone a number of places to demonstrate this in the Scriptures
“they continued to meet together” Acts 2:46… But actually, it is silly to proof text this principle. Because the truth is that every meaningful expression of Jesus following in the NT is in community. Jesus following is irreducibly corporate.
Dan, Laeya and I have done this long enough that we can tell you with real confidence, that the quality of your college experience will be correlated with how soon you integrate into a Christian community and how committed you are to it. The benefits of Christian community to you are numerous. I say this all the time and I don’t intend to stop saying it any time soon: “If you spend your time here on the margins of Christian community, you are ripping yourself off.” Getting into a Christian community is in your self interest. But here’s the thing. That the social and spiritual benefits you will accrue by being part of a Christian community in college are not the best reason to do it.
The best reason is more fundamental…
When you join a Christian community, you are not just signing up for a club that will enrich your life…you are enlisting in a cosmic mission.
A Campus Christian community is an extension of Church…which is more than just a few socially awkward people going into an ideological bunker to escape the scary secular world…it is an outpost of Jesus’ kingodm…think about that…we are more than just a few people struggling to figure out calculus and chemistry who meet in a cold lecture hall after hours to sing a few songs and listen to some dude who has too many degrees and appears to cheer for an unlikable east coast bb team…we are an colony of Jesus’ kingdom…an outpost of God’s purposes.
Christian community is about more than making friends or fitting in or meeting your felt needs…it’s about being in on the mission.
Growing in grace and truth in community begins with understanding the theological reality of what Christian community is…and having grace for the broken people that God uses to cobble together that grand reality.
“Soon or later those of us who follow Jesus find ourselves in the company of men and women who also want to get in on it. But it doesn’t take long to realize that many of these fellow volunteers and workers aren’t much to our liking, and some of them we actively dislike….Jesus doesn’t seem to be very discriminating in the children he lets into his kitchen to help with the cooking….I often found myself preferring…the company of my sovereign self. But I soon found that my preferences were honored by neither Scripture nor Jesus. I didn’t come to this conviction easily, but finally there was no getting around it: there can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience in following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life apart from an immersion and embrace of community. I am not myself by myself.” (“Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places” 226) [5]
But here’s the thing, it is going to take a little tenacity. Communities have an intrinsic paradox… More valuable social circles are more difficult to penetrate. Shallow social networks with loose connections are easy to get into but do not have the pay off. So if you are new to CL (or maybe you’ve been around for a little while, but still don’t feel like you belong here)…I want to make you a deal.
We are committed to try to make room for you in our lives…but you have to be a little tenacious about finding that room.
And the most important aspect of that tenacity is to join a SMALL GROUP. It is not too late. Pick up a list in the back and just take the risk to show up this week.
Which brings me to a question…what is the difference between a Clique and a Community. Clique is a pejorative…but surely a small network of close relationships isn’t a bad thing…so what is the difference between a clique and a community…a community is a clique with open doors.
And for those of you who might be trying to break into this or another community, realize that if the first couple people you run into doesn’t have open sites on their relational lego, it doesn’t necessarily make this community cliquish or unwelcoming. [6]
There are a lot of great Christian communities on campus. We would love it if you chose to make college life your home. But frankly, IV, Cru, and a number of others are fantastic. I know I said this a couple weeks ago, but I’ll say it again. What you need to know, is that more important than which one you choose is how committed you are to the process of belonging. Really get in there. Join a small group…and and you will find that you will not only get in on one of the outposts of God’s kingdoms…but before long, you will make some of the best friends in your life…which leads me to:
3. Romance
When I was talking to my wife about this talk and about how much ground I needed to cover, she said: “Come on, there’s really only one thing they want you to talk about in a ‘relationship’ talk.” So let’s get on with it:
Romance is a special instance of friendship and community. To think it is a totally separate category is to miss the point of it all together. It is in the deepest part of the overlap of friendship and community…of shared purpose and shared affinity that you should be looking for romance.
The problem is, that that is not where most students look:
And we are not getting a lot of help thinking about this well from our pre-eminent cultural story tellers:
And our campus culture isn’t really helping either.
As part of her PhD research a few years ago Donna Fritas surveyed >1000 college students from 7 different institutions and conducted >100 face to face interviews to collect their thoughts about love sex and romance on campus. She recently published the results through Oxford Press in a book she called “Sex and the Soul”. And here is one of her big findings:[7]
“In public, women maintain a lax attitude about no-strings-attached hookups, but in private, they express ambivalence and even dismay that they allow themselves to be pressure into sexual behaviors that often make them feel used an unhappy.” 99
“When pressed, few students express a desire to hook up randomly on a regular basis – though most accept that hookups are the most likely way to find a long-term romantic partner…and even greater number wish for more respect and awe about sex from their peers.” 156
It turns out that when left alone with a journal or one-on-one with a researcher, the vast majority of students are dissatisfied with the sexual economy on our campuses.
But they play along…because they are afraid to be left behind…and because there isn’t really an alternate script.
Back to the original question “What is college for?” which I argued is just a sub question of “what are you for?” Let me suggest…not for that. How do we do our romantic relationships as part of our pursuit of growing in grace and truth…well, we have to start by saying “not like that.”[8]
And our text is pretty emphatic about this:
“But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people.” Eph 5:3
…in other words, that is not what you are for…and despite all the messages you will hear from peers and mentors in this place…that is not what college is for.
But just because we know how not to do it doesn’t mean that a Christian approach to romance is self evident. In fact the more Dan and I watch Christian romance play out the more we have come to believe while a few students do figure it out, our movement on the whole has no idea how to do this. And it can lead to some awkwardness…which has been recently captured in the website: Hey Christian Girl.
I was talking about this with a good friend recently who is closer to your age than mine …and we agreed that this is hilarious and kind of gets at the weirdness of Christian dating. But we also felt like it only told half the story. So we decided to start a website of our own…one that collected Christian break-up lines. We are calling it “Good Bye, Christian Boy.” Here the first post we worked up:
If I was going to condense the 120 minutes or so of talks I’ve done on this topic in the last few years into a couple ideas I’d go with these two:
-Romance is the means by which we transform a friendship into a missional community.
Now, I realize that this is a huge departure from the sitcom/romcom model we were raised on. But Dan and I really believe that the best building ground for a romantic relationship is a friendship that is characterized by a shared driving purpose and mutual affinity In that order…
Second
-Major on the friendship (don’t be in a hurry to label it – or kiss it)
The healthiest relationships Dan and I have observed over our years in college ministry are the ones who prolonged the friendship stage of the relationship and postponed labels and physical exploration.
And so the best thing you can do to negotiate romantic relationships with grace and truth is to develop a number of friendships with young men or women that you admire based on shared purpose and shared affinity in that order…and over time…real time…months to years…see if one emerges as unique and reciprocal. The best romance emerges out of really good friendship. It takes patient evaluation and gradual self disclosure…don’t short circuit it by prematurely exchanging labels or saliva.
And to pull that off, you are going to have to grow in grace and truth.
____________________________
[1] According to a study documented in the June 2006 issue of the journal American Sociological Review, Americans are thought to be suffering a loss in the quality and quantity of close friendships since at least 1985
[2] Which incidentally why the Scriptures uses the metaphor of family instead of friendship. Becoming a person of grace and truth requires doing that in the context of others who are doing the same, who can provide us access to truth and opportunities to extend grace. But that is going to require some self forgetfulness. It is going to require the active discipline of decentering.
But your life will be enriched on a long enough time scale by the diversity…affinity can be boring and is a personality feedback…by surrounding yourself with people like you, you tend to think that the world is (or at least should be) composed of people like you…Diversity also can challenge you to grow in grace and truth.
[3] In my first version of this diagram I had a typo – under ‘study groups’ was ‘Lap Partners’ - there has got to be a joke there
[4] This includes mentoring on both ends (finding a mentor and being a mentor). Mentoring relationships can turn into friendship (which has been one of the unexpected benefits of college ministry for us) but doesn’t have to be valuable. Not all valuable relationships are reciprocal. Our culture is obsessed with egalitarian relationships..where all relationships are equal partnerships. But that’s just not always the way it works best. Some of the most valuable relationships are asymmetrical…with a clear direction of giving and receiving. Benefiting from these relationships requires humility and self skepticism.
[5] I actually find Peterson pretty helpful on this topic:
Many Christians find church to be the most difficult aspect of being a Christian. And many drop out. There may be more Christians that don’t go to church or go only occasionally than who embrace it warts and all. And there are certainly plenty of warts…So why church? The short answer is because the Holy Spirit formed it to be a colony of heaven in the country of death. …Church is the core element in the strategy of the Holy Spirit for providing physical presence and human witness to the Jesus inaugurated kingdom of God in this world. It is not that kingdom complete, but it is a witness to that kingdom. (Practice Resurection)
Church is difficult. Sooner or later, though, if we are serious about growing up in Christ, we are going to have to deal with church. I say sooner…many Christians find church to be the most difficult aspect of being a Christian. And many drop out. There may be more Christians that don’t go to church or go only occasionally than who embrace it warts and all. And there are certainly plenty of warts…So why church? The short answer is because the Holy Spirit formed it to be a colony of heaven in the country of death…Church is the core element in the strategy of the Holy Spirit for providing physical presence and human witness to the Jesus inaugurated kingdom of God in this world. It is not that kingdom complete, but it is a witness to that kingdom. But it takes both sustained effort and a determined imagination to understand and embrace church in its entirety. Casual and superficial experience with church often leaves us with an impression of bloody fights, acrimonious arguments and warring factions. These are more than regrettable, they are scandalous, but they don’t define church.
Church is an appointed gathering of named people in particular places who practice a life of resurrection in a world in which death gets the best headlines.” (Practice resurrection)
“People can think correctly and behave rightly and worship politely and still live badly – live anemically, live individualistically self enclosed lives, live bored and insipid and trivial lives.” (229 CPITTP)
[6] Listen, freshman, Jesus doesn’t redshirt. There are no redshirt freshman in College Life, Cru or InterVarsity. In the kingdom, freshman play.
I thought of this the other day when I was talking to Ryan Gross. Ryan is a freshman who grew up in Davis and went to First Baptist in high school. He got recruited to UCD for soccer and I asked him if he was going to red shirt. He said…”our coach doesn’t really red shirt”…and it turns out to be a good decision because through four games he was leading the team in points.
And this is not unlike several of the CURRENT freshman…During welcome week there were several new freshman young women who actually got out and pounded pavement with Sarah Johnson. They were among our early season stat leaders. Because Jesus doesn’t red shirt. Freshman play.
[7] I wrote an extended piece about this book which is here http://stanford-gibson.blogspot.com/2012/01/relationships-part-4-sexual-snapshot-of.html
[8] When I was young, all the progressive people were saying, ‘Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses.’ I was simple minded enough to believe they meant what they said. I have since discovered that they meant exactly the opposite. They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. All the others, we admit, have to be bridled. Absolute obedience to your instinct for self preservation is what we call cowardice, to your acquisitive impulse, avarice.” CS Lewis - We Have no Right to Happiness
[9] One of the best variations on this theme is the one where the hey girl/boy approach is applied to Foccault photos and quotes:
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