The campus is a place through which a considerable number of Americans pass each year, a place where this mentoring community can be established, nurtured, and sustained. As such, campus ministry represents an important locus for the churches' learning.

The experience of mentoring in modern campus ministry supports the contention that young adults are receptive to

any network of belonging that promises a place of nurture for the potential self, even if (and sometimes especially if) its forms are demanding. A place that offers confirmation of one's potential competence and specialness, while also confirming a solid belonging that exempts the fragile self from having yet to stand alone in any real sense, meets the yearnings for agency and communion in their young adult forms.

It is helpful to respect these "yearnings" as legitimate vocation.

A Ministering Community

For much of its post-war history, mainline campus ministry has been conceived by the churches as an arena for countering the tendency of youthful membership to leave the institution or for cultivating "future" membership or leadership. Both are valid institutional concerns, but each represents a mission impulse that seeks to serve the needs of the institution and only secondarily is concerned with the actual needs of the young adult. Total ministry of the church implies respect not only for the diversity of race, gender, and status of ordination (baptismal, episcopal, presbyterial, and deaconal), but also implies respect for diversity of age.

Youth and young adults are ministers of the church by right of baptism. If Christians believe that God calls each person to fullness of life, then such fullness includes the experience of life's passage into maturity. Thus, progression through the several stages of human development represents legitimate response to vocation. Respect for that vocation translates into respect for the youth or young adult on terms appropriate to maturational status. That being the case, youth and young adults are not the future ministers of the church; they are ministers to the church and of the church in the present.

Students are fulfilling a vocational imperative on campus. One of the important ramifications of the question posed earlier--why are you here?--when posed to the student is that it can be useful tool in discerning whether study is, indeed, the true vocation for that person at that time. Is the student on campus to fulfill a parental expectation? Is the student studying against the hope of future financial security? Is the student enrolled in the discipline she most desires, or is she pursuing the most marketable option? Are there other experiences that might prove more beneficial to this person than the experience of campus? These questions, posed by college advisors, insightful faculty, and campus ministers, are essential to student vocational discernment.

But as the determination is made that the student is truly called to that vocation, the student meets the vocation of higher education: "to inform and nurture the young adult imagination." This vocational mission is consonant with the vocation of the student: informing and nurturing one's imagination is the student vocation. By extension then, the vocation of campus ministry includes the informing and nurturing of the student imagination. Campus ministry's vocation and primary concern is not young adult church attendance. Campus ministry's vocation is developing faith in young adults, and, increasingly, in students of every age. In this regard, campus ministry is a colleague in the vocation of the university: ". . . we want to educate a given kind of person, we hope for a people who will take responsibility for their own meanings, and thus continue to read and write and think throughout their lives."

A Community of Imagination

Those campus ministries which seem to have served the student constituency most responsibly are those that have also served students most responsively. Informing and nurturing the young adult imagination begins in some appreciation for where they are. Parks identified the young adult mentoring community as "a network of belonging anchored in the strength of worthy and grounding meanings." The primary expression of the Christian faith community in the American culture is still the parish and the denomination. Campus ministries need that foundation if they are to provide "the strength of worthy and grounding meanings."

But the parish and denominational community, for its part, must acknowledge and respect that young adult mentoring communities need "a sense of distance both from the young adult's past and from the larger society with which the young adult must still negotiate terms of entry." In some instances, those are one and the same. Indeed, it is the expectation (realistic or otherwise) of most parents that their young adult offspring will, after achieving that critical distance from the conventional past, be enticed to make peace with it and fully enter it as an adult. However, campus ministry in the role of young adult mentoring community may well assist the student beyond the conventions of the past and into a future of a distinctly different character.

The Gift of Difference

This distinctive characteristic of the young adult mentoring community is requisite to making that place "that offers confirmation of one's potential competence and specialness, while also confirming a solid belonging." n a conversation she had with a student from a large university when she was teaching at a small college, Parks described her work with a first-year class at the smaller school, which included work with students on many hard questions fraught with potential for conflict and despair for such young adults. The student from the larger university, a senior, was shocked that first-year students were not devastated by the questions. But the senior student was accustomed to the large university, where much teaching was done in vast amphitheaters and student contact with instructors often limited. It was a campus of high-rise dormitories and little opportunity for intimate friendship beyond a roommate. Parks, on the other hand, was working within a small college where conversation was encouraged and where intimacy, and the smaller scale, increased the tolerance for engagement with conflict. These factors actually made possible a greater tolerance of conflict and enabled a more profound engagement with difficult questions.

The modest scale of campus ministry affords a similar setting for young adults. In fact, another of the consistencies in the mail received from former students reflected that this sense of proportion was a key ingredient in their own development. Even in relatively large campus ministries, involving over a hundred or more students, the essential work of the ministry seems to take place in the small-group setting, where interpersonal relationship is one of the most important learning resources. The vocation to ministry, then, may be a vocation to smallness, to intimacy--especially in times and situations where intimacy is in short supply. Christian ministry, as practiced by Jesus and presumably transmitted accordingly, is intensely personal and thus intentionally modest in its embrace. That is not to say that large ministry is always wrong, but rather to suggest that preoccupation with size can blind us to the virtues of ministry that provides important, even essential, experiences of intimate community where conflict can be experienced and mediated. "Small churches provide places where people can share in an intimate community. . . . The members want to know about each other, to care about each other, to share one's pains and celebrations." Nor is this feature of ministry unique to campus; the present American experience tends in many places to resemble that of the impersonality of the large university campus, suggesting that all modern Christian ministries might evaluate efficacy on merits other than the total head-count.

A Matter of Pacing

Parks also noted the value of the "pause" necessary to young adult mentoring. She rightly observed that when higher education left its roots in monasticism, it neglected to take with it a proper reverence for silence. This is not to suggest that campus ministry must recapture the monastic ethos, though some have attempted and even done rather well at it. The occasional retreat, especially to a monastic center, can provide both pause and conscious conflict since the very experience is alien to the mainline Christian young adult experience. But there are other programmatic dimensions to derive from the value of pause. To expect campus ministry always and everywhere to be "on" and to be visible in high-profile--even frenetic--programs, is to underestimate the potential contribution campus ministry can make by providing the young adult with an unprogrammed time in an otherwise over-programmed life.

Campus ministry that balances activity with hospitality more nearly fulfills the mentoring functions. For example, pause consists not only of meditative silence but also of respite from customary demands. In conversational programs at Brent House, students are invited to dinner--and to bring spouses or friends. Though the substantive discussions of the program are valuable, and the presenting purpose for the students' being there, the students often remark that they particularly enjoyed the mealtime and the opportunity to visit quietly and casually with others. The provision of the meal, and a comfortable and attractive place to share it, are among the more expensive aspects of this campus ministry. But the ministry is in service to a young adult mentoring process that includes pause as an essential component in the mix. The practice of simple hospitality does more than entertain, however. It serves also to inform, to image a way of being in the world.

Imagining and Imaging

In the "community of imagination" students need access "to images (1) that give fitting form to truth, (2) that resonate with their lived experience, (3) that capture the "ideal," and (4) that recognize and name the dynamic character of ongoing transformation." Providing such accessibility, as we have noted, can be particularly difficult in the parish setting. Nor is it necessarily easier in the non-parochial campus ministry. Each of the four requirements of "image," contains seeds for difficulty.

Images that "give fitting form to truth" require that one be open to diverse images and points of view, that one resist the temptation to narrowly define truth, or make exclusive claims for truth. That is not to say that the campus minister or campus ministry community cannot hold an exclusive or particular view in itself, but rather that campus ministries do not serve the young adult in the exploration of a mature faith when they make the choice and deny the young adult that experience. Campus ministries are under obligation to help the young adult explore the myriad images of truth. In that exploration they should be prepared to "witness to the truth that is in us," explaining how and why such images as they hold to be true are forms that accord with their own experience of truth. But the young adult experience may be different, and to that difference one must continue to be open.

Sharing the exploration thus invites the young adult to offer criticism of the faith community's images. The young adult seeks images "resonant" with lived experience. In conversation each learns the relativism of all experience. It is tempting to denigrate the experience of the young as insufficient, when in reality, their experiences are only different. The "truth" of parental affection, and biblical images that characterize God in parental terms, may resonate with my particular experience of mother and father. Yet, even advanced age can be humbled and cowed in the face of young adult (or children's) testimony of contrary experience, experience that reveals the limitations of my experience and opens new images--even unthinkable images--in the truth of parental abuse.

Images that capture the "ideal," then, are of tremendous importance to the young adult. In this regard, campus ministry has the specific gift of particular faith to contribute to the young adult experience. Drawing upon the collective experience of faith communities, campus ministry does offer access to images that capture the ideal--an ideal that is often couched in paradox, as is life itself. Access and admission to a conversation that includes the expanse of the biblical tradition and its witnesses (historical and contemporary) can open the young adult to "the motion of life and its transformations--particularly the dialectic between fear and hope, shipwreck and gladness, death and resurrection, bondage and freedom." Beckoning, and welcoming, the young adult into that tension is the vocation of campus ministry and constitutes an important part of the young adult's own vocational journey.

The very dialectic of vocation is such that vocational "call" is itself communicated via conversation. We "call" one another. The young adult communicates in many ways the desire to become more and more adult. Response to that desire is not only a response to the young adult, but is also a response to the God who calls the church into relationship with the young adult. In responding to one another we are also responding to God. The delicacy of discernment, however, requires that the church be attentive to the many different voices that call out to it. Thus the process of vocational discernment is also of that paradoxical dialectic.

Campus ministry involves the entire community of church and university in conversation. Campus ministry, often described as a ministry "marginal" to both the church and the university, is actually beyond the margins of each. As such, it represents a place apart, within which campus and congregation may share the vocational process, the struggle to be a faithful people.