The Gospel and the Student Part 2: How thick are students?

I don’t mean “how dumb are they?”, I mean “how thick are they as a social unit”?

You see it is worth thinking about reaching particular groups (as opposed to individuals) only if they have a sufficiently thick social cohesion. So for example, it is meaningful to think about mission to Aboriginal people, or to Lebanese migrants and so on because that is a thick social identity.

Conversely, shopping at Woolworths, liking The West Wing, or reading The West Australian are thin social identities, and probably not worth building mission strategies around. Tricky ones are youth tribes, like Emos, where the identity appears thick, but tends to be for a short period of time (3-5 years).

Then there are groupings whose significance have changed over time. The Anglican church, for example, has traditionally been built on the Parish System, seeing that your geographic location is the key to your social identity. True for many years, and still true in many contexts today, but in a modern western city, much less true than it has been in the past.

So, what about students? Well, modern evangelical student ministry was born and raised in places like Cambridge: places, that is, where students left home, moved to another place, rarely worked part-time, and lived in college communities. In Cambridge student social identity is about as thick as it can get.

But what about Australian students? Well, here is one of the issues. Some students (residential College residents, Med students, students in competitive performing arts institutions like WOPPA) have very thick social identities, and mission to them as a unit makes sense.

At the other extreme you have part-time students and students in huge courses (Arts and Science) whose student identity is thin, and who have other more meaningful ways of grouping their tribes.

So, what does all this mean for student evangelism in Australia? Some brief comments:

1. Looking across Australia, student ministry has been most fruitful amongst thick units like residential colleges and Med courses.

2. This might due to the fact that the kind of student ministry we do is derived from a Cambridge model, and so works best in situations most socially analogous to Cambridge.

3. Could there be other configurations of social identity that are meaningful for students that we miss because we assume “Science undergad” is thicker as an identity than it really is?

4. In some cases, has “student” thrown us of the scent, and we need to discover the social identities that transcend student identity.

3. Instead of accepting the status quo, could Christians be at the forefront of building thick community where the University and social forces don’t do it for you?

For example, many Arts students have an impoverished educational experience because the ideal of education-in-community never realizes itself at Uni. Could we get involved in building community for Arts students in the form of book clubs, discussion groups, community residential arrangements and so on, in order to a) be a blessing to the Universities and their students and b) create a context where evangelism and ministry can flourish?

Your thoughts?