First week of campus! Always exciting and nerve-wracking. We spent the first week on campus tabling for a club fair, giving away water bottles and candy and asking people to fill out spiritual interest surveys. At the end of the week we had our outreach at the beach, where Albert taught free surf lessons.
The club fair was definitely the first time I got to see how ministry operated very differently at a small, commuter college like UHH instead of the huge university campus that is ASU. At ASU, 0 week (the week before classes start) is one of our most important weeks of ministry. Everyone pitches in on this crazy, hectic week when thousands of students are flooding the campus for the first time. Every day of 0 week we hand out free snow cones and water bottles at the center of campus while passing out surveys. Then every night of the week we have a welcome event. One night we’ll have a huge game of cops and robbers across all of campus, the next night a barbeque, and the next a “Tour de Cru,” where we all bicycle around Tempe together. Over the course of the week we hand out hundreds of freshman survival kits, and it’s an intense week for all sixty or more of us on leadership.
This first week on UHH was quite different. We had our STINT Team of nine people and one staff member to reach the campus of 4,000, and pretty much no budget to speak of. The club fair that we attended at the campus center plaza was in the main thoroughfare of campus, but only about a dozen clubs were advertising. We offered a few water bottles, candy, and highlighters to people who would fill out our spiritual interest surveys. Occasionally people would pick up a water bottle or highlighter, but virtually no one took the candy.
We ended up getting 200 surveys filled out, which was great since we set a goal of reaching 120 students in the first week. But more than that, tabling was an opportunity for us to see the student population and what we need to be aware of when doing ministry here. One of the things I noticed was that there are a lot of toddlers at UHH. You rarely see students with their children at ASU, but it’s not uncommon here. You can also tell really quickly that UHH is a commuter campus, because no one really hangs out on campus so UHH is pretty much empty after 2:30. There’s also a much higher percentage of students from outside the country or from U.S. territories. We’ve met students from Japan, China, Guam, Micronesia, and American Samoa.
For us, these aren’t just statistics. This greatly affects how we reach out to students and how we try to build a sustainable movement for when we leave. A student who has a tight-knit family community and a part time job while going to school won’t be interested in a midnight game of capture the flag the way a new freshman at ASU would. We have to adapt our schedules, the events we run, and the way we present material so that we’re actually showing love and care to the students in a way that’s relevant to where they are in life.
Because almost everyone on our team has come from a large, public university, doing culturally relevant ministry at UHH is pretty foreign to us, even though we’re still in the U.S. We’d all really appreciate your prayers that we would be able to have wisdom in caring for the students at this campus. Mahalo!
No comments:
Post a Comment