EDITOR’S NOTE: This is Part 2 in a three-part series on the spiritual challenges college students face their freshmen year of college. See other stories in series here.
For Jessica, her first semester off to college appears to have been — somewhat as expected — a blur of classes, activities, a few surprises and filled with opportunities to make new friends.
As a freshman at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, she joined the school’s choir group, pledged a sorority, played intramural softball and has been actively on the hunt for a church to join.
Like many Christian college students around the country, Jessica has experienced how getting plugged into a local church community can be especially challenging.
RELATED: Stay tuned for future coverage on Jessica and other college students The Baptist Paper is following during their first year of college. Click here to read the first installment of “Freshmen & Faith.”
“I still want to check out all of my options before I settle, or at least most of my options — at least the ones that I’m interested in,” said the freshman psychology major. “I’m still looking for a church that I really want to commit to.”
In August, Jessica departed the Memphis area, where she’s a member of Bellevue Baptist Church, to attend the Southern Baptist-affiliated school. While she grew up in a Christian home, she shared how she — again, like so many other Christian college students — is learning what it means to be on her own without a family and church leaders around to help hold her accountable.
‘Struggle with consistency’
Jessica acknowledges that finding time to stay in the Word in a new environment of deadlines, responsibilities and social opportunities has been more of a challenge than she expected.
“I struggle with consistency a lot of times,” she noted. “I knew it was going to be a little bit difficult. But I was disappointed in myself because for the first month or so I didn’t really have a quiet time, to be honest. … It kind of felt like more homework.”
For now, she added, she’s focusing more on her prayer life and seeking the Lord’s direction as she nears the end of her first semester.
She also said she was surprised when all three of her other roommates chose different churches to attend.
“That is not what I expected at all,” Jessica noted, pointing out she initially assumed they would find a church that they all enjoyed attending. But in those early weeks of college, everyone seemed to settle on a different view of what the “right fit” looked like — and three of the four joined different sororities, with one deciding to skip the Greek life altogether.
While Jessica is still figuring the first year out, her initial challenges may seem somewhat tame compared to a lot of college students. So far, she can probably count on one hand how many people she’s met on campus who are openly agnostic or atheist.
She acknowledges her college experience is probably different than most.
Different worlds
Good luck if you head to the Northeast to find a college dorm suite with all four roommates going to church every week. That would probably be as rare as a unicorn sighting. Just ask Brian Musser, a Baptist campus minister at Drexel University. He has served on the campus for the past 18 years.
Most kids who grow up in the Bible Belt, he noted, have had a completely different spiritual journey than those at Drexel.
College ministry in other parts of the country — especially up north where there are far fewer evangelical churches than the South — is much different, Musser said.
“Here in the Northeast, if your faith survived high school, college might not be that big of an issue,” the Philadelphia native has noted (see related story). Musser raises his own support through the North American Mission Board in partnership with the Baptist Resource Network of Pennsylvania-South Jersey.
Musser also has a daughter who began her first year of college at Temple University. “We see people leaving the faith long before they ever get to college,” he noted.
Jon Rice, who came to faith as a student at Drexel when he was a student there years ago, works part-time in campus ministry with Musser.
“I think, just in general, universities have always been a place where people start to ask big questions — they try to find out who they are,” Rice said. “And it is the perfect space where you thrive in helping people talk through those questions. Now is where the iron is hot.”
He added, “Sometimes students come in from a Christian background being very set in, ‘These are the pillars of my faith.’ And in a secular university — or maybe even a Christian university — they encounter a different perspective.
“And now they either end up deconstructing or trying to figure out if their faith is real. …You are going to encounter students with very different ideas of how faith plays out.”
