{"id":3293,"date":"2009-07-08T11:19:56","date_gmt":"2009-07-08T15:19:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=3293"},"modified":"2009-07-09T12:22:45","modified_gmt":"2009-07-09T16:22:45","slug":"keeping-students-connected-to-the-orthodoxchurch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2009\/07\/keeping-students-connected-to-the-orthodoxchurch\/","title":{"rendered":"Keeping Students Connected to the Orthodox Church"},"content":{"rendered":"

AOCA<\/a> | Fr. Kevin Scherer | Summer 2009<\/p>\n

\u201cKeeping Our College Students Connected to the Church\u201d is a tagline for Orthodox Christian Fellowship (OCF). You\u2019ll find it throughout our literature and even on our stationery. It says concisely what we believe to be our primary mission. I\u2019ve spent hours thinking about it, talking about it, and wrestling with it. To be honest, I think it needs some unpacking, some clarification.<\/p>\n

When I see the word \u201ckeeping,\u201d I wonder whether some people unconsciously expect OCF to handcuff students to the church pew\u2014because we know what\u2019s best for them! The word \u201ckeeping\u201d conveys the idea of preservation. The question is: What are we preserving? It\u2019s helpful, I think, to reflect on the why, what, how, and who of keeping students connected to the Church. <\/p>\n

If I were to ask you why we should keep our students connected to the Church, you would probably respond by underscoring the importance of community. We want our students to remain connected to the communities we value\u2014our families, ethnic identities, and religious heritage. Deep down inside, all of us know that communion is what life is all about: communion with family, friends, and God. In fact, we know that our fundamental human need is to be in communion with one another.<\/p>\n

To many students, however, the idea of \u201ckeeping\u201d or \u201cpreserving\u201d anything can be interpreted to mean \u201ccontrolling.\u201d Developmentally, college students are in a stage of personal rediscovery. They need to own things for themselves\u2014they need to challenge what\u2019s been passed down to them. Although we often characterize their behavior as selfish and immature, in reality they are undergoing a deep personal struggle to know and experience what is true. Our mission is to help them discover that it is communion with God, through life in the Church, that gives real meaning and significance to life. When they make this realization, they will instinctively \u201cpreserve\u201d and remain connected with those persons and communities that value communion with God as the central priority in life.<\/p>\n

So, if communion with God is the motivation behind why we should keep students connected to the Church, what does that look like? Attendance is the first thing that pops into most people\u2019s minds. But we all know that just because someone shows up at church, it doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re connected\u2014you can lead a horse to water, but you can\u2019t make him drink. We must resist the temptation to reduce the idea of communion to attendance\u2014in doing so, we reduce the entire Christian life. Keeping students connected to the Church should not be about forcing, guilt-tripping, or manipulating them into the pews, but about facilitating the kind of exploration that leads to the personal conviction that communion with the Church is life-giving. Why would we want them to have any different kind of connection to the Church?<\/p>\n

The hard question is how we do this. How do we help students make these connections and realizations? How do we help them make the kind of personal discoveries that lead to deep moral conviction? To be honest, it\u2019s probably easier and more helpful to identify what doesn\u2019t work. Yelling, nagging, lecturing, and judging will never produce the kind of self-discovery we hope for. Students want us to respect their personal journeys, and we should. They need people and communities that can provide safe places for them to share what they really feel and think, regardless of their maturity level. It is unconditional grace and non-judgmental love that make a community life-giving! When students find these kinds of communities, whether it\u2019s a church, a family, an OCF chapter, or a group of friends, they encounter the very character of Christ.<\/p>\n

It should be said here that it\u2019s impossible to create this kind of environment where there is a spirit of anxiety. I know\u2014we hear all the time that the world is an increasingly evil and corrupting influence on our students. Our initial reaction is fear. Fear leads to control. Control leads to anxiety. Anxiety can create distance and shame between us and the students we love\u2014it can even break our communion with them. Hopefully, our failed attempts to control lead us to surrender to God\u2019s almighty love for them.<\/p>\n

All of us\u2014parents, grandparents, godparents, and pastors\u2014need to be reminded that God\u2019s parental love for these young souls infinitely surpasses anything we can provide. We can trust that God will never stop loving our students and working powerfully in their lives. From their conception until their last dying breath, God\u2019s perfect love is a constant. He pursues them even when we believe they have lost their way. This kind of divine security means that we can focus on the things we can control, like creating safe and loving contexts where students feel comfortable exploring questions about faith, morality, relationships, vocation, and a variety of other topics.<\/p>\n

Students want to be able to confess the reality of their lives\u2014their thoughts and actions\u2014and not just to a priest. Confession is a normal part of human development. Students are looking for authentic individuals and communities that can handle the reality of their complex and challenging lives. They want to find safe places where they can test their ideas and questions without being judged. They\u2019re looking for contexts that give them permission to mature at an individual pace. They resist, and even resent, individuals and communities who try to control their emotional and spiritual development.<\/p>\n

Who is ultimately responsible for keeping our students connected to the Church? All of us are responsible for the next generation, and with some thoughtful reflection, each of us can play an important, even powerful, role in the lives of our students. The best way to effect this is for each of us to understand the responsibilities and limitations of our individual roles. Parents must own up to the fact that they are the primary nurturers of their children\u2019s faith. Parents cannot pass off to the Church what is uniquely theirs.<\/p>\n

The Church, on the other hand, must take seriously its role in creating a supportive and resourceful environment. The parish must be a place where it is obvious how every divine service, ritual, and program is connected to the person of Jesus Christ. We cannot assume that families will or can make all of these connections on their own. Grandparents and godparents have an obvious responsibility to our students as well. Their lives and experience are to be living witnesses of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. They must be careful, however, to come alongside parents and not above them. Parents, like students, want the safety to make mistakes and still be respected for their role.<\/p>\n

. . . more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AOCA | Fr. Kevin Scherer | Summer 2009 \u201cKeeping Our College Students Connected to the Church\u201d is a tagline for Orthodox Christian Fellowship (OCF). You\u2019ll find it throughout our literature and even on our stationery. It says concisely what we believe to be our primary mission. I\u2019ve spent hours thinking about it, talking about it, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[43,15,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-moral-issues","category-orthodox-christianity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}