Is Your Ministry A Bridge-Builder?

While it’s been a couple of weeks since we hosted Andrew Marin on campus, some of the things that he talked about continue to swirl about in my head.

One of the phrases that he repeated, in several different conversations, was that we needed to be people who build bridges… and not armies.

Armies are groups that are made up of people who look, think and act the same.  There is nothing different about its’ members, everyone believes the same, and the group ultimately thinks that everyone should believe all of the same things, and act in all the same ways, that they do.

This creates an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality and serves to divide — and not unite.

It can be incredibly harmful.

People, and ministries, that are about bridge-building are looking to do the hard work of connecting with, and relating to, people who are DIFFERENT from them.  Bridge-builders will intentionally seek out the perceived ‘other’ with the desire to INCLUDE them as a part of their shared effort.

This is obviously much more challenging than building an army.

It necessitates respecting the ‘other’ and their beliefs — no matter how different from your own they might be.

It requires validating the journey of the ‘other’ and believing that God can work in ways that are outside of what we expect.

It does NOT demand that we discard our convictions and personal beliefs for the sake of coming together, but it does beg that we keep them in proper perspective, recognizing that we likely have much more in common than we do uncommon.

Yet when we’re trying to get students to ‘choose’ our ministry, over another, we likely point to those things that make us unique — different — or ‘better’.

And as a result we end up creating armies.

Whether by intention… or not.

And so I find myself wondering…

• WHO are the perceived ‘others’ on our campus?
• WHO are the people we distinguish ourselves from… and in so doing, create an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mentality with students?
• WHO are the people that God might be calling us to start building bridges WITH (not to — we cannot build bridges without people from the ‘other’ camp).

Andrew Marin’s work is primarily focused on helping to bridge the Evangelical and GLBT communities… and this may very well be some of the bridge-work that your ministry needs to engage in.

Maybe for you it will entail reaching out to some of the other ministries on campus — crossing denominational lines — and making allies with other ministry leaders.  I know that students on a couple of the campuses I have worked on have been shocked when they’ve seen me eating meals with ‘other’ ministry leaders on campus… some even remarked thinking that they didn’t think we liked each other — even though they had never heard or seen anything that would give them reason to believe such a thing.  They had assumed that because we represented ‘different’ ministries that we must not like each other.  I think this is sad.

Maybe your rift is with members of the faculty.  Sometimes we can be a landing place for students who are struggling in a class, because professor so-and-so is too hard, or they are against Christianity, or they are pushing them beyond their comfort zone in their faith… and how we respond to those students will ultimately make its way back to the faculty.  I have my own experience of trying to rebuild bridges with faculty members that were destroyed by ministry leaders that came before me.  This is not the kind of divide we need, only adding to the challenges of our ministry efforts on campus.

Or maybe, for you, the tension is with the Office of Student Affairs or Student Development.  While I believe they can be some of our greatest allies and resources on campus, they can also feel like competition.  The students who are involved with us are often involved with them as well.  Great students and student leaders are noticed all over campus, and sometimes we can put them in a place where we are asking them to choose: ‘us’ or ‘them’. Again, this isn’t healthy or helpful.

While we may never have set out with the intention of building an army… you can probably see how easily it can happen.  And how different it is from being a ministry that builds bridges.

So, what do you think?

• Is your ministry building bridges OR an army?
• Are you willing to do whatever it takes to become a bridge-building ministry?
• What, if anything, is holding you back?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!  Please take a moment to share a comment in the comment section below.