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Responding pastorally to student questions

Shiao Chong, former Christian Reformed campus minister to York University, recently posted about his experience with questions and concerns around evolution. While questions around evolution have decreased among most of the students we work with, his wise pastoral response to that question provides a helpful guideline as we respond to other questions we receive around such things as AI, sexuality, and vocation.

Chong writes that it matters first of all “WHO you are talking to about this issue makes a big difference as to how you talk about it. For sure, talking to atheists about this issue is different than talking to Christians about it. And even among Christians, there are differences too . . . . For example, talking to evangelical students, especially those who came from an anti-evolution background, tend to be filled with tension, anxieties, and sometimes even animosity!”

In asking how he, as “a Reformed campus pastor, should speak about evolution and human nature to Christian students from an anti-evolution background” he answered as follows:

“I should speak of human evolution by addressing the underlying theological and ethical fears or anxieties that students have about accepting human evolution. In particular, I need to assure them that human evolution does not undermine biblical authority. Secondly, I need to assure them that human evolution does not undermine humanity’s role as the image of God. And finally, that it does not undermine any of the Christian ethics that rely on human dignity as the Image of God.”

He goes on to explain further what he means by that.

Such a response is deeply pastoral in that it helps people see how God cares for them and encourages them to trust God and the Bible, even as they ask hard questions about what to believe and how to live.

– Brenda Kronemeijer-Heyink

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Comparing campus ministry to trees

Biblical scholar Elizabeth Robar, in a recent communication from Scriptura wrote about the metaphors of grass and trees in Psalm 92. There it says that the wicked spring up like grass, but the righteous flourish like a palm tree and grow like the cedars of Lebanon. As both seem to flourish, she asked what the difference was. The answer she gave was time.

Grass grows quickly and “looks wonderfully successful – but it doesn’t last. A tree, however, can last forever, even as “growth happens slowly, season after season.” And as Psalm 92 points, such trees can “still bear fruit in old age.”

This is an encouragement to us doing the work of campus ministry, where we throw out seeds: some become grass, some become choked by weeks, and yet still some become trees where we only see the fruit years later. As Robar notes, Psalm 92 invites us to recognize that “The work, repetition, waiting, disappointments, and joys of an ordinary life can all become places where God forms people who are rooted enough to bear fruit for decades.”