In the last few weeks I've been challenged with this thought: It is the church's job to call students into adulthood.
Freshers arrive at uni spanning a vast range of maturity and we are given 3 or 4 years to help them make the transition in fully fledged grown ups - what a challenge!
Working with students can be a real joy but there are times of frustration. For me, this is often around students making bad choices or not stepping into all the potential I see in them. If our goal is to help them move into adulthood, what can we be aiming for?
1. Students connecting individually with God is a real key to this.
Are we giving them the time, space and tools to connect with God both in groups but also on their own? Is our student community on a journey of hearing God's voice more clearly and having the courage to act on it? Consider taking your students on a retreat day, giving them exercises on their own to connect with God. It's also important to help them find ways of connecting with God in busy periods - after all, that is what most of their lives will probably be like!
2. Making good decisions.
Discipleship has quite a few balancing beams to walk down. We don't want our students to make decisions that they will regret so we emphasise the behaviours they should stay away from but don't actually give them a chance to connect with God and do the learning for themselves. Or we want them to feel accepted and loved so we emphasise how much they are loved by God (and us!) and daren't really challenge them on their day to day decisions. But making good decisions and learning how to commit and follow through on those is key to a flourishing life. Mentoring can massively help this and also sharing life at a level where they see how you make decisions and can learn from that.
3. Having a vision that is beyond themselves.
This can be as simple as serving at church or babysitting for a family. Or it could be about them getting a vision to change something massive in the world. Either way, it is about drawing the focus away from themselves, learning to sacrifice their own wants for those of others and laying their lives down for Jesus. Some people get this early on in life and others need a bit more help on it!
So pray for your students! Ask God to mature them and to give you the pathways to facilitate that.
"When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me." (1 Corinthians 13:11)