Churches realize they need to reach young adults in their community, and a vision of winning and sending young adults out as disciple makers is paramount.
To execute fruitful discipleship, churches must be willing to develop flexible strategies that consider the lifestyle of college students. Assumptions often are made that can hinder effective discipleship.
Here are two assumptions that guarantee fruitless discipleship efforts:
1. Students know and live the basics of the faith.
Thousands varying in age, gender, ethnicity, religion and upbringing exist on a single college campus. If a church desires to engage in fruitful discipleship, it cannot afford to assume that anyone understands the gospel or knows how to live the Christian life.
Every college minister must know the spiritual climate of his or her students and be willing to adjust any and all efforts to better meet their needs.
Making these adjustments requires more time and effort than assuming discipleship is happening with current efforts.
However, in the end, these adjustments will produce fruit.
2. Students are available for discipleship.
Discipleship plans made without understanding the life and schedule of a college student are bound to be fruitless. Many arrive on campus under considerable pressure from their parents.
Much of their schedule is determined by parents, classes and other commitments to help advance them professionally. Most feel exhausted by all that is scheduled for them, so they find little desire to schedule much themselves.
Herein lies both a problem and a solution.
Churches should not assume that students will partake in all discipleship efforts that may be good for them. Most students won’t fit nicely into a discipleship strategy; however, a church that can coach students to manage their lives and schedules well opens the door to discipleship.
Since young adults often have poorly developed faith foundations, aren’t effectively living out what they do understand and are busy and overwhelmed, there must be a fresh understanding of disciple-making.
Fruitful young adult discipleship contains structure in vision but flexibility in execution. Most students can’t (or won’t) meet for coffee every week at 6 a.m., but they will call at 8 p.m. to ask about something they read in Scripture or a conversation they had with a friend.
Students may go home two weekends out of the month, but they will want to talk through the dissension in their family first thing Monday morning. These issues can either result in disappointment or discipleship.
Students will forget, slack off and even fail. But if they do all these things in the context of a church that understands them, discipleship can truly be fruitful.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Cole Rogers and originally published by Baptist & Reflector.
