[ecm] FW: Campus Peer Ministers
Rob Lundquist
rector at stpauls-fc.org
Wed Nov 9 15:27:03 EST 2005
Hmmm, interesting...
R+
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The Rev. Robert Lundquist, Priest-in-Charge
St Paul's Episcopal Church
1208 W Elizabeth St, Fort Collins, CO 80521
970-482-2668 FAX 970-482-8318
www.stpauls-fc.org
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
_____
From: Luke Fodor [mailto:lfodor at episcopalchurch.org]
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2005 8:56 AM
To: rector at stpauls-fc.org
Subject: Campus Peer Ministers--Do you have them?
Dear Friends,
Copied below is an article from the New York Times about peer ministry,
which interviewed Episcopal peer ministers at the University of Chicago.
Our office sponsored two campus peer ministry training sessions this summer,
read about it at: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/49065_64573_ENG_HTM.htm.
October 15, 2005 Religion
Peer Ministers Lead Search for God in College Dormitories By MAREK FUCHS
Although it has long been common for a college student with a problem or a
question to amble down the floor into the room of his resident assistant, a
growing number of students have the option of dropping in on a campus peer
minister. Unlike the resident assistant, trained and deputized by the
university's housing department, peer ministers get their training from the
campus minister and most often deal with the spirituality of their fellow
students.
Picture a resident assistant for the soul.
At many colleges, like the College of New Rochelle in New York, peer
ministers, just like the resident assistants, arrive on the campus early for
a weeklong orientation. They practice listening and counseling skills and,
to varying degrees, receive religious education. At some colleges,
individual religious groups run their own peer ministry programs; at others,
like the College of New Rochelle, the program might be based in a particular
religion (in this case, Roman Catholic), but are also ecumenical in spirit
and open to many comers. New Rochelle, which had about a half-dozen peer
ministers in 2000, has 19 today, including two who are Buddhist and four who
do not identify themselves with any denomination.
At the orientation of the group, which promotes a large amount of charity
work, Helen Wolf, the director of campus ministries, spent time trying to
balance a strain of secular humanism among the peer ministers with more
traditional threads of religious thought. The forms of peer ministering
abound, although the names sometime vary. Hillel, a Jewish student
organization, runs several peer-minister-style programs. One places recent
college graduates at about 70 campuses, including places like the University
of Kansas, to help students discover their Jewish identity. Another involves
pairing Jewish students who have more religious education with those looking
for it..
Peer ministers sometimes play an evangelical role for their faiths.
"Being a peer minister here isn't about tallying up baptisms or
proselytizing the incoming freshman on the way to chem lab," said Padraic
Bartlett, a sophomore at the University of Chicago who works with the
Episcopal group on campus, based in Brent House. "We don't bellow, Cotton
Mather-style, the perils of damnation at our classmates."
More commonly, Mr. Bartlett said, peer ministers lend an open ear to
classmates who are discovering themselves spiritually. And even if they
bring no one new to the flock, the Rev. Stacy Alan, chaplain at Brent House,
said the church was well served.
With clerics and lay leaders aging, a new generation of leader is being
groomed in the form of the peer minister. At Brent House, they have the
option to give sermons.
Mariel Fernandez, a sophomore who also works as a peer minister at Brent
House, said fellow students approached her not only on everyday issues like
homesickness, but also on religious ones.
When a fellow sophomore spoke to her recently about how she was a Christian
who observed the holidays but did not see faith playing a large role in her
life, Ms. Fernandez urged her to attend services.
"A lot of students deliberately see college as a place to cut off everything
from home, which means religion, too," said Ms. Fernandez, who sees part of
her role as encouraging a reconnection. This frequently involves answering
questions from students who see her strongly held faith as a bit of a
curiosity and encouraging them to try a service.
Ed Franchi, executive director of the Catholic Campus Ministry Association
in Cincinnati, said the wide use of campus ministers represented a
flattening of hierarchal structures since the 1960's, within religious
organizations, on college campuses and in society at large. Mr. Franchi, who
said there had been a sharp rise in the number of peer ministers in the last
decade, described their prevalence as part of a recognition by many faiths
that "for the college-age group, peer relationships are important in
everything, particularly in faith." "Even the schools that are icons of
Catholic education are realizing that large professional staffs of campus
ministers can only go so far," Mr. Franchi said. Iona College, a Catholic
institution in New Rochelle, has about a dozen peer ministers, each of whom
has at least one open-door night in his or her dormitory room each week.
"For 18- to 22-year-olds, there is a countercultural element to the search
for God," said Carl Procario-Foley, director of the Center for Campus
Ministries at Iona. "Students have to know what other students are doing -
and not just the religious geeks, but others, too."
There are also more pedestrian reasons for the turn toward peer ministers: a
professional campus minister might not be available 24 hours a day, but a
peer minister living in a dormitory most often is. For Catholics
especially, peer ministers have been picking up some of the slack in
religious education among students who are less likely than their parents to
have gone through Catholic grammar and high schools. There are about 11,000
Catholic ministry sites on college campuses around the nation, Mr. Franchi
said, with about 5 to 12 peer ministers in each. Even at the University of
Notre Dame, where there are about three dozen campus ministers on the staff
and priests and nuns living in dorms, there is a form of peer ministering.
Brett Perkins, director of Protestant Student Resources and Catholic Peer
Ministries, said the admissions office passed along to him the names of 150
to 200 incoming freshmen who had shown leadership in religious settings.
"They flag them," Mr. Perkins said, "and invitations go out. They are
already seen as leaders, so we don't need to procrastinate." The added hands
and eyes on the spiritual life of college students has shifted the role of
campus ministers and clerics, Mr. Perkins said, making them freer to
concentrate on sacramental life, as well as administration.
It is all quite a way from the lone resident assistant, parsing out rules on
overnight guests. At the College of New Rochelle, Kathryn Tyranski, a
senior, became a peer minister in her freshman year after working as one in
high school. Initially, however, she felt insecure about counseling older
students in any way. But with a year under her belt, Ms. Tyranski said, she
began to play a larger role in other students' spiritual lives by her
sophomore year.
On the Chicago campus, Ms. Fernandez said she was delighted with what she
saw. "These days," she said, "girls can be acolytes and college students can
be ministers. Whatever the world is coming to, I have to say that I like
it."
* Copyright 2005
<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>
<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html> The New York
Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/> <http://www.nytco.com/>
Luke Fodor
Program Assistant
Young Adult & Higher Education Ministries
Episcopal Church Center, 5th Floor
815 Second Avenue
New York, NY 10017
1-800-334-7626 ext 6158
212-716-6158 (direct)
212-490-6684 (fax)
lfodor at episcopalchurch.org
www.episcopalchurch.org/myp
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