Clergy: Helping Students Make The Spiritual Passage

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"You're the Minister." In this nonevangelistic approach, ministers deal with student interests and problems that are mostly secular: sex, rebellion against authority, concern about jobs, the "meaninglessness" of life. Rather than hand down dicta from the pulpit, the clergymen try to help the students work out their own problems in their own way, without departing from the necessity of teaching that there are absolute rights and wrongs. Dealing with an undogmatic generation, some also see the merits of relativism. "You can't tell them what to do," says the Rev. Harwood Bartlett of Georgia Tech. Many campus ministers encourage students to take on spiritual responsibility of their own. When one University of Minnesota student reported that his roommate had a drinking problem, Episcopal Chaplain G. Russell Hatton replied: "Then go have a few drinks with him. You're the minister. You're the one who has to help him."

Such behind-the-scenes service is often necessary, suggests Episcopal Chaplain John Pyle of the University of Chicago, because "there is a general feeling of anti-institutionalism" among students. But beneath student skepticism, many campus clerics see evidence of a genuine but unformed faith. Although they encounter some convinced atheists, more often the doubter is like the University of Houston graduate student who told a Baptist chaplain that she "had hated God since she was six" because a minister told her that "God had taken" her father when he died. Now, says the Rev. DeWitt Baldwin of the University of Michigan, "the students say simply, 'I just don't know what to believe.' They're seeking meaning, but don't feel that the church is giving good definitions."

For many students, doubt and rebellion seem to be essential phases of the transition from an inherited faith to one of their own, and campus chaplains believe that their job is to help the students make this spiritual passage. For that reason, the chaplains are neither worried about low chapel attendance nor dismayed that relatively few students remain openly loyal to the faith they grew up with. "The fruits of the campus ministry," says Atlanta's Bartlett, "sometimes come five years later."