Report from the Director of Campus and Outreach Ministries

One of the best parts about my job as Campus Minister is that I get to spend my days thinking about and working on how to build community. Through gatherings and newsletters, I have opportunities to foster the kinds of connections that create belonging. In a world that feels increasingly fractured and broken, I spend my energy finding ways to knit our students, faculty, and staff together into a communal kinship of love, resiliency, and hope.

In mid-March, our experience was not dissimilar to the experience of other communities. The pandemic’s arrival threw the world’s biggest wrench into our many plans. Retreats and outings were cancelled, in-person events were no more, and our beloved Thursday night Emmaus gatherings were put on indefinite hold.

As our community waded through collective grief, confusion, and anger, I struggled to make meaning for myself and others. What does community mean when you can’t physically gather in community? How do you feel connected when our collective physical safety means we must stay separated? Where do you belong when those you belong to seem scattered to the winds?

Throughout the disorienting spring semester, students became one of my most important touchstones. I was continually amazed by their ability to hold the pain and uncertainty of the moment, and yet still reach out into the community to make connections, to share openly, and to pray with and for each other. We all wrestled – and continue to do so – with the separation and isolation that social distancing brought into our lives, but I was amazed to watch our students embrace the reality of our new virtual community, and transform a seemingly flat platform into a vibrant and rich source of connection.

Students filled our online Zoom small groups within a few weeks of the beginning of shutdown. They brought all of themselves into those spaces to join their fellow students with compassion and care. I learned so much about how to care for a community in crisis by letting them take the lead on articulating their needs and seeking to have those needs met. While strong and compassionate leadership in a crisis is a must – and we are continually blessed to have Dean Drummond’s leadership during this strange and serious season – it is also important to have a community that knows how to bind itself together for support and love in moments of darkness. As the layered crises of our current world stacked themselves around us last spring, into the summer and now in the fall of a new academic year, the transformative spirit of grace that permeates our community through screens, phone calls, texts and socially-distanced walks fills my heart with hope for our future.

I will carry their example forward in my ministry. They have shown me how the bonds of love are always – always – stronger than fear and hate. They have taught me how to meet the moment in the most unprecedented time of our history. Whatever the future holds, I am grateful to have their example to guide me.