A Presbyterian experiment in Dunedin bridges the gap between youth ministry and church. Amanda Wells tells the story of Studentsoul, a church based on the University of Otago campus, which began in 2001 with 20 people and today counts more than 200 part of its community.
Run by the Rev Helen Harray, studentsoul encourages students’ personal growth and leadership potential.
Says Helen: “There’s nothing else in the church that’s filling this transition period. It’s a dark hole.
“If you give the ‘whatever generation’ the safe environment and trust them with their incredible leadership, they stop being apathetic and take responsibility”
Says one student: “studentsoul has made me believe in the Church.”
Not only is studentsoul retaining students with Presbyterian backgrounds who head to the city to study, but it’s also starting to draw others from different traditions.
And studentsoul has created a core of leaders who says they are proud to be Presbyterian and who are seeking opportunities to serve the Church as they grow into their leadership potential.
Recently the first studentsoul leader has been accepted for training as a Presbyterian minister. Twenty-four-year-old Malcolm Gordon starts at the School of Ministry in 2007.
Malcolm says he wants to be part of a new dynamic emerging in the Presbyterian Church, while appreciating the importance of the denomination’s heritage. “Change needs to be an organic process”.
Helen says the current generation of students has grown up with a strong focus on interactive entertainment. “We’re not capturing them by the traditional means of talking.”
But she says that analysis of learning styles has implications beyond generational boundaries, with Christian education often struggling to reflect different learning preferences.
Her focus on interactive worship has been informed by a book called The Dirt on Learning , from United States company Group Publishing, which covers different styles of learning in relation to Christian education. Helen will spend time at Group Publishing’s Colorado base during study leave between September 2006 and January 2007.
She says today’s student generation is after teaching that includes practical “how-tos”.
For example, a service on anger incorporated aspects of psychology, as well as providing a theological point of view, then moved into an exploration of the practical impact this could have in terms of relationships with flatmates.
“Giving them relationship skills is the key. It’s about trying to teach this generation how to do it better.”
Studentsoul meets on Sunday evenings in the University’s student union building, which is set up café-style, with students sitting around small tables. Services are structured to take into account the way that we process information. “People remember beginnings and they remember endings. They lose what’s in the middle”. So services are organised around defined segments, including clips from movies, short dramas, time for “get to know you” chat, worship, a short message, and small group discussions of the message that feed back into a large group discussion.
For example, students walked into one service to find a lidded bucket sitting on each table. During the service, Helen asked them to open the bucket. Inside they found lollies, party things like streamers and hats, surgical gloves, and the elements for communion (cups, star-shaped bread and juice). The service focused on the parable of the wedding feast, with participants taking the part of the guests and the service concluding with an invitation to the feast and communion. Helen says the group celebrates the sacraments regularly, usually incorporating some kind of response and interactive element.
Studentsoul’s ministry has grown mostly via word of mouth, aided by advertising in Southland and Otago churches. In the early days, a group from student hostel Salmond Hall started to attend and this link was strengthened when Helen become the Hall’s chaplain. By the end of the second year, about 50 people were attending regularly, and a strong core group had developed.
Today average weekly attendance is about 100 people, with about 200 part of the student soul network. Studentsoul has become one of the biggest student Christian communities in Dunedin.
But Helen says studentsoul isn’t in competition with established Christian clubs on campus and there is some crossover of membership. However, the growth of studentsoul has affected other churches in Dunedin, such as the Baptist and Apostolic churches near the university that had previously picked up large numbers of young people from Presbyterian backgrounds.
Studentsoul has a special relationship with St Stephen’s Presbyterian in Leith Valley. Helen says the support of this parent church, as well as of Dunedin Presbytery, has been a vital component in studentsoul’s success. Perhaps surprisingly, students who become involved in studentsoul often start to attend Leith Valley in the mornings to hear more traditional Biblical preaching.
Studentsoul has developed students with leadership potential through what Helen calls “Gel” groups. These provide a structured way of introducing students to facilitation skills, as well as providing space to reflect on their evolving development. “It’s about observing what is happening, and being open and honest about it”.
The Gel groups grew out of a leadership camp held at the end of studentsoul’s first year and have developed into a three-year programme. In 2006, the first group to complete the three years started to look at presentation and speaking skills, with some of this group also becoming leaders of Gel groups themselves. About 30 students have been involved in the Gel programme this year.
Having gone through the three-year Gel group system, this year Malcolm Gordon is leading on of the first-year groups. He says the Gel groups mean being intentional about leadership development. As well as identifying leadership potential, studentsoul creates places in which leaders are needed. Students develop awareness of how they function in a group, why they react to certain people in certain ways. Malcolm says students find this approach a refreshing contrast to their day-to-day focus on external information.
Studentsoul could not continue without having students as part of its ministry team and heavily involved with organizing and leading services, says Helen. “They carry it”.
This dynamic has been nurtured despite the fact that in student ministry, with students coming and going every three or four years, “you’re always starting again”. Some participants have chosen to stay in Dunedin after finishing their undergraduate study and have become key leaders.
Helen says it is hard to see the leaders that she is nurturing find their place in a traditional parish; instead their drive is to plant new, studentsoul-like gatherings that draw those of their own generation. “They’ve got to be given some resource to get out there and do what they do best. We’ve got to think outside the square and find the ways to resource this.”
Anticipating the start of his training next year, Malcolm says he recognises that the parish church in which he eventually commences ministry may not share the dynamic of studentsoul “but that’s okay as long as I’m not expected to keep it that way”.
Malcolm started going to studentsoul in 2003 after being invited along by a friend. He was immediately given a job to do: “I became the sound guy”.
Involvement is part of studentsoul’s ethos, he says, because people need to feel they are needed and “not spectators”. Studentsoul cannot be experienced as a social club at which you are entertained, he says, because of this “culture of need and dependency”.
For example, one weekend in September, there was a big concert on the Saturday night, three teams were heading out to take services in different churches on Sunday morning, the Sunday evening service was happening as usual; “and we’re not short-staffed”.
The studentsoul model could prove vital for the Presbyterian Church, he says, as it bridges the gap between healthy youth involvement and young adults dropping out.
“The only place that that’s being done is studentsoul. Perhaps it needs to be a goal of the Presbyterian Church to have five studentsouls in the next 10 years.”
At the moment, studentsoul has a plethora of leaders with this vision and passion, Malcolm says. “Personnel are always harder to find than money. People who have vision and ownership of ideas are worth gold.”
The future of student soul is difficult to predict, Helen says. The project “felt pretty vulnerable” for the first two to three years” and still faces multiple funding applications on an annual basis.
At the moment, studentsoul is funded by grants from the Synod of Otago and Southland and the Presbyterian Foundation. Helen says other funding opportunities are being considered but that it is difficult to find the necessary time and expertise to pursue them.
Now that the group has grown beyond 100 regular members, there is the need for more paid staff. “If we had more resources, we could do a lot more. We’re at a crucial point.
“We really need to put this in place in other centres, tertiary institutions and help them plan how to bridge build into communities and plant their own churches.
“The seed is there.”