Helping Young People Prepare for Higher Education (3)
Originally given as a workshop at the 50th Annual Conference of the Keystone Christian Education Association and as a breakout session at the 82nd Annual Convention of the American Council of Christian Churches. Updated and revised.
Staying Spiritually Strong While in Higher Education
As young people head off to places of higher education, Christian mentors should offer solid, biblical advice to help them stay strong.
Find a Good Church
High school students can be prone to think: “When I go to college, I will surround myself with friends that love God and will keep me accountable. This is all I need to stay strong in college.”
Josh Gibbs explains:
There are a number of reasons this plan doesn’t actually work, the foremost of which is that friends won’t keep you accountable. That’s really not what friends do. Friends will let you get away with murder. Friends will turn a blind eye because they’re afraid of losing your love. . . . It should also be said that while friends (of any age) will not keep you accountable, friends in their late teens and early twenties really won’t keep you accountable. They’re about as permissive as it gets. They have no natural authority, little experience, little to lose, and tend to assume the best about their peers . . . Long story short, you can’t expect college friends to keep you accountable because college friends are basically engineered to be incapable of offering tough, sound wisdom.1
Something more important is needed than “good friends” to stay spiritually strong in higher education. Young people need to be encouraged to find a church which is rich in orthodox doctrine and practice. It is usually best for these students to attend a church like their home church. Young people should then become accountable for faithful attendance.2
Mature Christian leaders may also recommend that young people avoid churches with trendy names, such as Village, Lift, Elevate, Renovate, Pulse, The Journey, The Crossing, Cross Point, Life Point, and Community Life Center.3 Young people should learn that the word “church” is a good thing to see in a title, as well as a denominational affiliation or fellowship.
Closet Prayer and Devotion
High school graduates should also be encouraged to develop a private time of prayer, Scripture reading, and meditation, even at a Christian school of higher education. Rev. William White gave excellent advice to his son who was entering a seminary in the mid-1800s, that is still worth repeating today:
You are most in danger from a failure to cultivate a devotional spirit. A Theological Seminary, in its external arrangements — its buildings — its lecture rooms, and its recitations; the intercourse of its students in the dining hall and upon the campus, is so much like a college, that the spirit of the college is very likely to prevail. The critical study of the Bible is likely to supplant the devotional. That all the young man says and does, even his sermons and his prayers, should be subject to the criticism of his fellow students and professors, although useful and necessary, may yet become hurtful to his spirituality. Now, whatever else he neglects, he must not neglect the throne of grace. Fail in all else sooner, than in the cultivation of deep spiritual piety. Fail in this, and whatever your attainments in other respects may be, should you live to enter the ministry, comfortless and useless you will live, labour, and die. Mere intellectual endowments, leading to popular applause, more frequently entangle, bewilder, and ruin the young preacher than all other baits of the devil combined. As to such endowments, Balaam possessed them in a very high degree, and Satan, the master of Balaam, possesses them in a higher degree than he. If he thus gain popular applause, he should not forget that it was to Simon Magus, “that all gave heed from the least to the greatest,” and that it was of him the populace said, “This man is the great power of God.”
One has truthfully and beautifully said, that ‘prayer is the breathing forth of that grace which is first breathed into the soul by the Holy Ghost.’ Every offering then, not made in the spirit of such prayer, is destitute of the purity and fragrance of heaven; and is not only unacceptable but hateful to God; so that prayerless study, prayerless preaching and visiting are worse than useless. What does not come from God never returns to him. All our services not baptized by the Spirit, freely given in answer to prayer, will be less acceptable to God than the offerings of paganism.4
Maintain a Healthy Connection with Home
Young people should maintain a connection with their parents at home, especially if they go away for higher education. If they are able, communication with other godly members of their family and home church can also be profitable.
Wise leaders may counsel parents to refrain from constant, daily communication with their children who are at a great distance to allow a healthy independence to develop. Unfortunately, many parents these days run interference with professors, stunting their children’s growth. Young people, at this stage, need to learn how to work out their classroom problems on their own.5
Develop Strength to Stand for Christ
Lastly, young people should develop the strength to stand for Christ and flee temptation, especially the temptation to grumble.6 Young people are often prone to thinking they know more than their professors. Children ought to cultivate a heart of gratitude for what the Lord has given them and a humility to sit at the feet of experienced teachers.
Conclusion
The material listed in these articles is not fool-proof. Nothing a mere man can offer is guaranteed to be infallible. Rather, it is hoped that this series offers biblical principles to assist Christian leaders in guiding young people as they prepare for higher education. Finally, be “praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for [these young people]” (Eph. 6:18), “[t]hat Christ may dwell in [their] hearts by faith; that [they], being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that [they] might be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:17-19).
Jonathan Peters serves as an administrative assistant at Reformation Bible Church and Harford Christian School (Darlington, MD). He and his wife, Andri-Ellen, also lead Venerable History Tours of local battlefields. Jonathan was interviewed on the Pennsylvania Cable Network’s Battlefield Pennsylvania: Battle of White Marsh (2019), and he also transcribed and edited Our Comfort in Dying: Civil War Sermons by R. L. Dabney, Stonewall Jackson’s Chief-of-Staff (2021).
Previously in this series:
Helping Young People Prepare for Higher Education (1)
Helping Young People Prepare for Higher Education (2)
- Gibbs, “How to Pick a Church When You Go Off to College,” CiRCE Institute (August 11, 2022): https://circeinstitute.org/blog/how-pick-church-when-you-go-college/. [↩]
- Ibid. [↩]
- Thomas S. Rainer, “Contemporary Trends in Church Names,” Church Answers (June 18, 2018): https://churchanswers.com/blog/contemporary-trends-church-names/. [↩]
- William S. White, The Gospel Ministry, in a Series of Letters from a Father to His Sons (Philadelphia, PA: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1860), 26-29. [↩]
- Gibbs, “Do Not Email Me: Teaching Students to Talk with Adults,” CiRCE Institute (August 23, 2022): https://circeinstitute.org/blog/do-not-email-me-teaching-students-talk-adults/. [↩]
- “Dear Incoming Freshman at a Christian College: Avoiding Pitfalls & Redeeming the Time,” G3 Ministries (September 4, 2023): https://g3min.org/dear-incoming-freshman-at-a-christian-college-avoiding-the-pitfalls-redeeming-the-time/. [↩]