Sabbatical Reflections: From Strangers I could judge to Colleagues I could delight in

 "What is the question for your Sabbatical?" I was asked in one of my first conversations with someone connected to campus ministry in the Netherlands. I mostly knew the answer: I wanted to pay attention to how God works, and grow in the spiritual practice of actively waiting on God. But that wasn't what I wanted to focus on in this conversation: I had come wanting to know more about how this pastor’s particular church denomination approached campus ministry, so I could judge them against my own. Instead, I felt judged: I stumbled to express myself well in Dutch; I was pushed on why we haven't focused more on student well-being; and wasn't my understanding of God too small? 

The primary project of my Sabbatical was to visit different campus ministries to be inspired and gain new ideas. But I think I also went with the assumption that I would come back with wisdom (that I would be asked to share) and the reassurance that how we were doing things here is good (and even better than there). The preliminary research I did seemed to confirm my feelings of superiority. I discovered that almost all of the church denominations had decreased or limited the funds for campus ministry, and few of the current campus ministers had been there long enough to live through the changes that the pandemic brought to ministry. When I looked through the websites from ministries, few of them mentioned God or even Christianity, and many pastors were life-coaches or another generic term. 

And then I started sending out emails to different campus ministers, asking if I could stop by to meet them and hear more about their ministries. My emails were met with affirmation and curiosity. They welcomed my questions and were curious about my own ministry and what I was learning with this project. The gracious hospitality humbled me, and the conversations shifted from my completing an agenda that was based on knowledge and affirmation of what I had been doing, to being open to what the Spirit might teach me. How could I not shift perspective once I shared with others the joyous delight of recognizing a partner in ministry, something I treasured from my connections with other Christian (and) Reformed campus ministries and at my local campus?

Campus ministry is complex and exciting, and it was a joy to feel welcomed by and able to affirm others who share in this calling to serve God in this way. Who else but a campus minister could fully understand what it is like to need to constantly try new things, some of which will inevitably fail? Or who would recognize how hard it can be to trust in God working when many of our interactions with students are brief, mere stepping stones on a faith journey which we might never get to see?

Some quotes from Andrew Roots' When Church stops working

With a group of other campus ministers, we're doing a book group on Andrew Root's, When Church Stops Working. We started the conversation with each of us asking why we're interested in the book. Many of us had heard of Andrew Root and appreciated him. Others of us related to the sense of overwhelm by the push for more in all areas of our lives. And for me, it's about needing help in being able to imagine things differently (as the last quote highlights).
As part of my preparation for the conversation, I highlighted a few quotes that I found helpful. They are as follows:

Chapter 1:
p 2, 5 "There is a feeling of not enough: too little influence, too few people, too fragile belief...The solution is [more]: the right balance of resource management and effective innovation, which makes our church grow sustainably."
But p. 6 "The problem is wicked, meaning there is no actual solution, in which case we need to despair. Or those books misdiagnose the problem." 
Pages 9-12 give overview of the 3 types of secular. While I think they're important to know to frame the conversation, I found the way they were written to set up a mildly annoying (and false) tension around how the secular age is the problem, so that the authors could come in and say well, actually not, and surprise look how God works in and through it. He uses more helpful language on page 13. "In this book, we want to reimagine the church within the secular age. We believe God continues to act in the world, and because God acts in the world, we believe it is possible for the church [+ ministry] to flourish."
p 14 "Because the secular age separates the secular and the sacred, making belief private and the immanent the agreed-upon public reality, the church has a hard time imagining what a public faith that witnesses to the transcendent looks like." I'd argue that our institutions suffer similar difficulties in not knowing what to do with religion/spirituality. 
 p15 speaking on a personal level "We obsess over work-life balance... Efficiency is often the solution... We think we can do more than we actually can...The busyness we experience comes from the feeling that we need to accelerate every part of our lives." 
p 16 "Our diagnosis is that the opposite of acceleration isn't dead or slow. The opposite is more resonance.... Resonance is all about connecting with the world, with the people in our lives, and finding a meaning that is greater than what we can see and explain. Resonance is about the sacred, the public, and the transcendent."

Chapter 2:
p21 In our origin/hero stories, "it is inevitable that they will triumph. This triumphalism fits well with the secular story we live in: more is better." This might explain why it feels like we can't be honest about the complicated reality but can only tell success stories.
 p 23-4. "The real origin story starts in Acts 1 [not the triumphal version of Acts 2] with waiting for God to act. God is the hero, and the church waits.... Waiting, as practiced by the disciples and advocated by us, is not inactive.It is responsive. God acts and we respond. What we are saying, though, is that the secular age blinds us to God's action, and so all we are left with is our action.... We have no way of imagining what it would look like for God to act in our lives.... If we are to take our own origin story seriously, we need to see that God's people only act in response to God's act."  
Diagnosis (again) of the problem: p 29, 31: "We run and run and run, exhausting ourselves and those around us in the process.... Busyness dominates us. Acceleration causes fatigue, filling our lives till there is no room left, even if the thing we want to add could be valuable. We don't blame church leaders for this. They are moving fast, not so that they can get ahead but simply so that they don't fall behind... Acceleration, the busyness we feel, is a symptom of our frustrated search for meaning."
p 32 "You can't wait when you are busy, caught up in your own project... when we are not waiting in a ready stance, we can miss the important things."
p 35 In Genesis, "[Sarah's] imagination can't see what God is doing because what God is doing is so far out there."
p 36 "Whether we cannot see God because the secular age has malformed our imaginations or because it has made us so busy that we cannot see God, when we try to talk about the experience of seeing God, language fails.... We are so used to doing that having an encounter with God surprises us."