Higher education has always been a crucial forming ground for the next generation leaders of this country.

While many universities were founded as Christian schools, the reality now is quite different. Pastors often fret about sending their young people to college because they often “lose” their faith there and walk away from church. The expansion of atheistic thought on college campuses is very real. I asked Tom Thatcher to help us re-envision the role the church may have in higher education.

At first glance, the question seems like an oxymoron. It implies, at the very least, that ‘the church’ and/or individual congregations ever ‘envisioned’ a role in higher education in the first place, when in fact the opposite has often been the case.

Stories abound of young adults leaving the church youth group to quickly fall victim to professors, and a total university culture that actively discourages faith expression. At the same time, many faith-based universities struggle to keep costs affordable while working with dwindling endowments, a situation that makes the Christian college experience inaccessible to most.

Many people will attend secular colleges and universities are typically major employers for the communities that house them, how can the church begin to (re-)envision its relationship with the higher education community?

1. Define Reality

It is important for the church to understand the social position of the university relative to its/their own social position, both now and particularly in the near future with the maturing of Gen Z. Regardless of our excuses, the influence of colleges will increase, and the influence of churches will decrease. Preliminary studies show that the general distaste for institutional affiliation evident among millennials will become a defining characteristic of those born since 1995.

Churches must embrace that the emerging generation will prefer not to be affiliated with any organization unless they have to be. This will be true of organizations where ‘membership’ might define one’s identity or imply that one must believe or think in a particular way—e.g., churches.

This trend will impact church membership and attendance over the next three decades in a significant way. Specifically, fewer and fewer people will associate themselves with a church, even if they self-identify as Christian. One-fourth to one-third will answer the question, ‘What is your religious affiliation?’ with a single word: “None.”

But while affiliation with a church is always optional, Gen Z’s will be forced to affiliate with universities and, later, corporations simply because they must do so to acquire skills and make money. This being the case, we should expect participation in traditional religious activities, like attendance at weekend worship to decrease, while college enrollments will continue to increase. The latter will be true of both traditional undergraduate students (aged 18–25) and also, and increasingly, of adult learners enrolled in degree completion programs (accelerated or online) and graduate programs.

2. Attempt Actual Perceptions

Congregations that seek to engage the higher education community should attempt to understand actual perceptions of the church in higher education. Actual perceptions here mean what universities actually think about the church and churches, distinct from the ways that pastors tend to think that colleges think about them. While it is true that most college faculty are not active in the faith community and that many are actively opposed to traditional Christian beliefs,, it is also true that even secular universities often welcome partnerships with faith-based organizations because these organizations assist them in reaching their enrollment targets.

Colleges can only achieve their goals by attracting and retaining students. Many colleges are welcome the efforts of churches and faith-based organizations to help students feel more comfortable, more at home, and more engaged in the university community. Rather than continually re-drawing the ideological battle lines between Christianity and the college classroom—an approach that has never worked and can never work—congregations should ignore them and instead consider ways to partner with universities for the mutual benefit of both organizations.

3. Contextualization

Once channels for dialog are open, churches should consider what the word church does and could mean in a university context. This is contextualization: determining what forms and content are essential and which can be discarded to bring the gospel to a people group.

Traditional college students often live on campus; both residential students and commuters are generally deeply engaged in campus life; both traditional and adult learners are normally balancing their studies with work and family responsibilities; for both students and employees, the rhythm of the college calendar is the rhythm of life.

Churches that seek to engage university populations will consider ways to make their programming more accessible to college students and employees—taking the gospel to these individuals where they live and expressing it in ways they can understand.

These churches will consider ways to address their message to the real issues and concerns of individuals enrolled in, and trained by, universities.

The Church can never win the war with the university, except by ignoring it. Rather than bemoaning how college tends to push people away from the church, churches that wish to re-engage should consider ways to adapt to the university cycle and culture.

Individual congregations and faith-based organizations should consider ways that they can partner with universities in service of their common interest in serving and developing people and ensuring their successful entry into the workforce. Such approaches will require a new way of thinking about the relationship between the church and the college, a way of thinking that combines the shrewdness of a serpent with the gentleness of a dove.15

The Holy Spirit forms missional communities to incarnate the gospel in places, to bear living witness to Jesus Christ. Re-envisioning the role of the church in the public sectors of life gives us the opportunity to form witnessing communities in the middle of the marketplace, to become a sign and foretaste

An Excerpt from the book, “Church for Monday” by Dr. Svetlana Papazov.

Svetlana Papazov is Lead Pastor and Founder of Real Life Church, President/Founder of Real Life Center for Entrepreneurial and Leadership Excellence, a first of its kind model of church and business incubator that educates in entrepreneurship, leadership and faith praxis.