Preaching to college students is one of the most exacting of homiletic
responsibilities. This is the case not so much because students are
critical as because they are the world in the making, and the tomorrows
will be just about as religious as they are. By some means the message
must be put across to them.
Preaching to such a constituency is no longer the task of the few. Almost
every preacher has more or less of it to do because the influence of the
college now reaches everywhere. In the university centers we deal with
students in large groups, but in the smallest country community one finds
at least a few. A sermon must be as worthwhile for the few as for the
many. So the problem is one of general interest.
The presence of students in his congregation should be a great blessing to
a minister. It is a high challenge to him to do his best work. The mind of
the student is alert, and his work, so far as it goes, is with current
data. Therefore, the man who interests him must be wide awake and well
informed. For such an influence any minister should be deeply grateful.
Great numbers of college students and graduates are in the churches. Still
greater numbers are not unwilling to be, and will be when the motive is
clear. But the reason must certainly be established. Will the student
derive benefit from the sermon? If not, he is not interested and that is
the end of it. If so, he is interested and will respond. This is only as
it should be.
The average student likes to be preached to and dealt with as a human
being. True, the species includes a few mutations who like to think they
belong to some other order of creation, but most students know better and
the rest will have abundant opportunity to learn better.
The college student is nothing but a boy or girl from the farm dwelling,
the village home, or the city mansion, translated into a campus setting.
The law of adaptation operates, and certain temporary colorations, habits
and appendages develop, all of which will pass with the next change of
environment. These youngsters are still flesh and blood however and it may
be said of them as it may be said of anybody that their need is for the
universal gospel preached in the most honest and interesting possible way.
The student is dealt with as such during the days of the week. His
professors may be depended upon not to let him forget that he is a
student. When the worship hour comes he is glad of an opportunity to
forget it for the time being and to occupy the honorable position of
a human being made in the spiritual image of his God.
It is a great mistake to preach to students in the terms and imagery of
campus life. The preacher who starts in to show his audience how much he
has engaged in athletics, how familiar he is with fraternity and social
life, and how finally he has solved the old and largely imaginary problem
of the conflict between science and religion, will only succeed in making
himself ridiculous. Students do not come to church to hear about things
concerning which they know more than the preacher does. They come to hear
about things of which he is presumed to know more than they do. Therefore,
the safest as well as the most helpful thing he can do is to keep
to religion.
It is also a mistake to suppose that the student mind reacts unfavorably
against serious things. It may appreciate the witticism which helps to
illuminate a serious point in the discussion, and a first class reductio
ad absurdum nearly always clinches a proposition, but mere buffoonery will
make a small and brief appeal. The person who attempts thus to denature
the gospel he preaches will not meet with permanent favor.
This is the case because the student mind is essentially serious. One
might not think so after a superficial observance of student actions,
but it is so nevertheless. The very laughter and jesting one hears in
student circles often mask the most earnest questionings, the deepest
longings, and the most serious attitudes.
So long as one keeps himself, as he should do, within the limits of honest
conviction, and so long as one speaks, as he should speak, in the spirit
of love and good will, no other class of people in the world is so ready
to have him be brutally frank as are college students. In fact, they
discount him if he shows any evidence of evasion or accommodation. They
may be right about some things and wrong about other things, but they are
honest in all things, and they expect him to be the same.
Any one of the fields of thought and knowledge is a serious matter with
the honest investigator. It is so dealt with in the classroom and the
laboratory. To the student religion is just one more field to be explored.
If he does not care to explore it, he does not bother. If he does care to
explore it, he does not regard it as a joke. The person who thus
approaches it with a sincere purpose should receive honest help.
All this leads me to the point where I can say that one of the fine things
about the student mind is that it has discarded all traditions and
prejudices. It approaches any matter with a disposition to find and face
the facts, whatever the consequences may be. It is a real _tabula rasa_,
upon which one may write—provided he has a stylus that is sharp enough.
Surely this is an opportunity to bring delight to the soul of the honest
preacher. The most deadening thing in the world, intellectually and
spiritually, is the practice of preaching platitudes and maintaining
traditions which are proven, outworn, or unimportant—maybe all three.
The most uncomfortable position in which any sincere preacher can find
himself is one in which such a type of service is demanded.
The preacher to college students finds himself in no such position. He may
go anywhere he likes within the limits of the field of truth. He has no
traditions to maintain. He is bound by no trammels of creed or dogma. He
is not checked by any barriers of prejudice. His way is open. He has but
to walk in it in the spirit of reverence and honesty. He is dealing with
adventurous minds whose one concern is truth. The mind of Jesus was such
a one, and such an audience really challenges a preacher to approach
questions in the spirit of the Great Teacher.
This is the process that is going to break down the artificialities and
fan out the chaff of unreality from religion. Perpetuating systems is
poor business, but adventuring in the field of truth is a high privilege.
That is what the preacher to college students must do. Granted that it is
in the field of religion, his one test for homiletic material is the
question whether it is true.
One of the most common mistakes made in the popular and superficial
analysis of the student mind is the assumption that it is essentially a
radical mind. This often becomes the basis of a great homiletic error in
preaching to students.
A comparative few students are radical, just as are a comparative few
taken from any group one might mention. But with the mass it is not so.
The great majority of college students are probably more conservative than
the majority of people outside the university world. They think carefully,
act with deliberation, and go quietly about their way while a few
exceptions to the rule take the soap box and loudly demand the immediate
reversal of all things.
I should say that about the last place to go to start a revolution of any
kind would be the average college campus. Yet the campus mind is alive to
the evolution that is going on in everything—including itself.
The student mind would be properly impatient of a static or reactionary
viewpoint, but it is little concerned with wildeyed radicalism of any
kind. The preacher who is most likely to reach its processes is the one
who is honest, fearless, and open-minded, and yet who is conservative in
the sense that he abandons a position only when he has found sufficient
reason for believing that another one is better. The preacher who shows
a conservatism which takes care to be progressive will commend himself
and his message to the student hearer.
The presence of students in one’s congregation should save him from the
pitiful fate of ceasing to grow, and thereby becoming old. They are an
advancing race, and it is his privilege to advance with them. If he does
so, the day will come when he can look back across the years and find
satisfaction in the thought that he has had a real part in the making of
the history of his and succeeding times—that of building the solidness
and savour of ancient truth into the life of the new world.