Be the Change Breakfast 9.26.26

Part 2: Keynote Address by the Rev. Ethan Lowery

My first call out of seminary - where I still am - was a campus ministry restart. The ministry had a thirty year history and was shared between three churches, but it had essentially folded during COVID. I had a board that had no idea what their job was. I had one returning student who was so burned out from holding the ministry together that she was about to quit. I learned that 80% of the people in my three sponsoring congregations couldn't event tell me the NAME of my predecessor. And in fact, I looked around at the ecosystem of campus ministries - the charming Baptist ministry with a taco truck and a drum set, the tender and stable progressive main line ministry run by the Methodists, the absolute machine of a Catholic ministry with five staff and two buildings. . .the pantheon of non-denominational and parachurch organizations and I remember thinking "I'm not sure we need another campus ministry here."

But. . ..I just started doing what I know how to do. I started by having coffee with anybody that would meet with me - anybody who was even marginally a student on my roster, all the students that signed up at the club fair. I got a list from my sponsoring churches of all the parishioners at their churches who worked as faculty or staff at the university, and started writing to them one at a time for a coffee. . .If you listen to enough people describe their lives, describe their joys and their challenges, describe their longings, if you give them the space to name the things that their actually quite embarrassed about or hadn't the courage or the invitation to name, if you give them the space to offer up the gifts that they'd never have the space to share before - then among this network of people you've gathered some patterns will emerge.