Secular College Students Find Ordinary Christianity Persuasive

I serve as a campus minister at one of the most prestigious and secular universities in the South, and I’ve noticed that many students have become disenchanted with secularism.

What once defined the college experience—personal autonomy, sex, partying––has lost its allure for many university students today. Researchers report how younger generations take fewer risks and live more isolated lives. Moreover, many college students now see secularism’s promises about individuality, freedom, and self-defined meaning as destructive and fraudulent. Despite all the ideals secularism offers, reality tells a different story: anxiety, loneliness, and a sense of meaninglessness are more prominent among college students than ever.

Christians have a great opportunity to speak into the vacuum left by secularism’s collapse. The visible beauty of ordinary Christian living is a persuasive apologetic for today’s students. It may encourage even skeptical students to reconsider a faith they’ve dismissed.

New Preevangelism

“I’m not religious, but my friend invited me and I’m curious to learn more.” I’ve heard some variation of this statement multiple times in the last year. In this way, Christian hospitality works as preevangelism. It can capture nonbelievers’ imaginations and evoke their God-given sense of longing. It can, in Pascal’s words, make people wish Christianity were true, and thereby give us an opportunity to tell them it is.

Christians have a great opportunity to speak into the vacuum left by secularism’s collapse.

But what does this kind of community look like? How can it be nourished? And what sort of ordinary Christian practices might speak to students’ particular longings? Our campus ministry has adopted at least three.

1. We address loneliness by practicing hospitality.

Sam Allberry says, “The gospel, it turns out, is divine hospitality.” Perhaps nothing in our polarized and angry world is more compelling than the welcome of Jesus Christ embodied in the welcome we offer one another. For college students who face the daily anxiety of loneliness and isolation, a gospel-shaped welcome is persuasive.

The students in our ministry invite their non-Christian friends to our weekly large-group gathering. Because many students are skeptical of visiting a local church, our campus gatherings serve as a “front porch” and a low-barrier entry into Christian community. At these gatherings, we teach from the Bible and leave time for questions to prompt discussion at the end. This generates curiosity for the nonbelieving student and helps our Christian students begin conversations they can continue as they walk back to their dorms. In this way, we equip our students for the work of hospitality; we don’t simply do the work for them.

2. We address meaninglessness by regularly communicating biblical hope.

Many university students today struggle with a deep sense that their lives are meaningless. There’s no longer a shared narrative that unites them to others. They’re aimless. They need to be moored to truth outside themselves. They need a story that will provide a foundation for their deep longings for justice, morality, meaning, and identity. Christianity is that story.

I regularly talk with students about the world’s brokenness and their desire to see it restored and made right. In these conversations, I get to share about the hope Christianity offers. I often point students to Revelation 21:1–5. It’s a stunning vision: God himself wiping away our tears, pain, and mourning; death passing away.

Even skeptical students are aware of the world’s brokenness. We show them why it’s broken and how it’ll be made right. When we regularly rehearse the drama of Scripture from creation to our future restoration, we invite students into a story worth giving their lives to, one that speaks directly to their loss of meaning.

3. We address misunderstandings of identity by encouraging Christians to live with Christlike character and gospel honesty.

Throughout his epistles, Paul describes Christian conversion as a change of identity. We’re no longer who we were; we have “put on” a new self and are a “new creation” in Christ (Col. 3:5–15; 2 Cor. 5:17). Colossians 3 says our old way of life has died and we’re now hidden with Christ in God. As a result of this union, we ought to live in a way consistent with our new nature by putting on meekness, patience, kindness, and humility (v. 12).

We invite students into a story worth giving their lives to, one that speaks directly to their loss of meaning.

But Christian identity goes further than merely giving us a new way to live. We also model honesty when we fail. The gospel doesn’t promise we’ll no longer stumble, but it says that when we do, we can confess our sins and stumble into Jesus’s healing arms (1 John 1:9).

By living out of their new identity and receiving God’s grace when they fail, Christian students can model for their skeptical friends that a believer’s identity brings true change without the fear of being ultimately canceled. When a whole community of Christians lives in this way, it’s compelling.

Compelling Community

In our modern world, students are less likely to have “thick” community, where friends and family help to bear one another’s burdens. But thick community is ordinary for Christians. When we model it for students, they find it compelling. As a college minister, that’s freeing. I don’t need to reinvent the wheel for our students.

Instead, we practice hospitality, teach the Bible, and encourage believing students to live out their gospel identity. As these students practice ordinary Christianity, the growing number of college students exhausted by secularism may awaken to Jesus’s beauty.