In my last post I talked about the need for college students to invest their lives in a local church because the church needs all of its members, the church is a God-ordained institution, and the church exposes students to people of all ages. In this post, I want to look at the relationship between college students and the local church from the opposite direction. Why does the local church need college students?
Last week as part of our Welcome Week activities on campus, our fantastic student engagement team hosted an event that included dozens of churches from the surrounding area. Each one of these churches was interested in recruiting students to plug into their various ministries. They offered Bible studies, college ministries, and even potential jobs as ways for these students to invest in the local body of believers. From my interaction with these churches last week, I believe they see the value in having college students as part of their congregations.
Incorporating college students into the life of the church, however, comes with some inherent challenges. First, students do not typically stay long. No matter how much we joke about the time it might take for a student to graduate these days, the reality is that somewhere between 2 and 6 years will be the average stay of a college student at your church. Certainly some will find jobs in the area after graduation and stay indefinitely, but most will move on to another location after college. Second, most college students are not strong financial supporters of the church. This is primarily driven by their stage of life and access to financial resources. For the most part, whatever money they do have is tied up in tuition and living expenses with little to give to the local church.
Despite these challenges, there are good reasons for churches to actively embrace college students even for the brief period of time they will be around. Let’s look at three of these reasons.
Time and energy. College students have seemingly boundless energy for all sorts of activities. They want to get involved in something that makes a lasting difference, so why not utilize them in the various ministries of the local church. Yes, their time is precious, just like anyone else’s; however, when utilized well, college students can direct their time and energy to the work of ministry and advancing the Kingdom of God. In the last couple weeks of having students back on campus, I’ve met numerous students who spent their summers serving churches and various ministries. Many of these are majoring in subjects beyond the traditional scope of ministry-minded students. This opportunity for undistracted devotion to the work of the Lord is similar to Paul’s instructions to the young, unmarried individuals in Corinth in 1 Corinthians 7:32-35
Passion. A common theme among college students is a great passion for things that are meaningful to them. They take on projects and pursuits with exuberance and work diligently to see them through to completion. As we age, we often get sidetracked by increasing responsibility and the concerns of life that weigh us down. This is where college students can be a great blessing to the local church. First, they can utilize their passion for the things of God to accomplish much in the life of the congregation. Second, they can be a great encouragement for some of us who find our passion and excitement waning to pursue the work of the Lord with renewed vigor. This youthful passion should not be discouraged. Instead, let us encourage it just as Paul did with Timothy when he wrote, “Let no one look down on your youthfulness, but ratherin speech, conduct, love, faith andpurity, show yourself an example of those who believe” (1 Timothy 4:12).
Opportunity to mentor. One of my favorite experiences through the years has been going back to a former church and having the pastor remind the congregation that I am an extension of their ministry. Their investment in my life was invaluable to me, but they also see it as essential to their ongoing ministry. This is how we should view college students. Although they may only be with us for a season, churches can mentor them and reap the benefits of expanded ministry as they go out to serve around the world. Older church members can invest in the lives of these younger college students and help them grow in their walk with Christ. When they leave a few years later, they will take those lessons wherever they go.
I am thankful that the churches around my college saw value in students years ago when I was new to campus. I am also grateful to see those same churches and many others seek to invest in this current generation of college students.
I recently arrived back on my old college campus. No, I’m not starting a new degree. I’m back here for a new job. In some respects, it has been a reunion because there are many faculty, staff, and administrators still here 19 years after I graduated. But I experienced another reunion that I wasn’t fully expecting on our first Sunday in town. This reunion was with people at the local church I faithfully attended while I was a student.
On our first Sunday visiting a church, we ran into some old college classmates who had planted their lives in town. We went to the service and acted like typical visitors—sitting near the back in relative anonymity. Midway through the service I realized that the couple sitting in front of us had volunteered in the college ministry 20+ years ago. I whispered to my wife that I knew who they were. At the end of the service, I set out to introduce myself to them and started by saying they probably didn’t remember me. They interrupted me before I even got started and called me by name and asked how I had been after all these years. They wanted to meet my family and proceeded to introduce us to others as their longtime friends. We then ran into several other people who had been members of the church dating back to my days in college.
I had never really thought about this type of reunion as we were preparing to return to Mississippi. We planned to visit the church, and I knew in the back of my mind that we would encounter old friends, but I was surprised by the magnitude of this reunion. All but one member of the staff had come since I had attended the church, and I knew the church had grown quite a bit in those years, but in many ways it was still the same church.
This reunion reminded me of why it is so valuable for college students to be a part of a local congregation. Just this past weekend students moved back to our campus, and churches hosted breakfasts and lunches on Sunday attempting to persuade students to join with them during their college years. But why join a church (or at least invest your life in a single church) for these brief years of college? Why not just hop from church to church based on which one is offering a free meal that week? Why not just jump to whichever church is the first to find the next big trend?
Here are a few reasons why college students need a local church:
The church is a body, and it needs all its parts. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul uses the analogy of a body to describe the church. Every member of the church has certain spiritual gifts, and each member has a specific role to play in the body. We cannot all be the head, eyes, hands, or ears. We need legs, feet, knees, and toes as well. In fact, Paul makes the argument that the “less presentable” members of the body are just as important as the “more presentable” members. College students have specific spiritual gifts that the local church needs, and the church has members with spiritual gifts that can edify, train, and mature college students. This is a two-way street. You will never see a toe running down the street on its own. In the same way, new students shouldn’t try to navigate the Christian life without the rest of the body.
The church is a God-ordained institution. Sometimes I will hear people say that they can worship God from their dorm room or on the intramural field or out in nature. This is true—we can worship God anywhere—but God has commanded us to be faithful to gather with an assembled body of believers, which is the church. Solo Christianity is not a new thing. People were trying to live this way during New Testament days. This is why the author of Hebrews exhorted his readers to “consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near” (Hebrews 10:24-25). Assembling together in the God-ordained institution of the church is part of God’s plan for growing our faith.
The church exposes you to people of all ages. For many students, the college years are time surrounded by people of virtually the same age, particularly if you live on campus. That’s part of the draw of college for many people. And this time in college may provide numerous opportunities for Bible studies, accountability, and spiritual growth among your peers. However, one of these days you will graduate, and you will no longer be a part of that campus. Imagine coming to campus every week for a club or ministry event and introducing yourself to the new group of students saying, “Yeah, I graduated 12 years ago, but I just like to come back and hang out with these people.” At some point the campus leaders will probably ask you to move along because you aren’t in the right stage of life. That isn’t the way God designed the church. In the church, we expect a multi-generational gathering of believers where we can encourage and challenge one another to grow. I discovered just a few weeks ago that the church I attended as an 18-21 year old is happy to have me and my family plug right back in now that I’m in my 40’s. And it’s easier to do so because I was part of this multi-generational family even while I was in college. This is exactly how God intended it.
For new and returning students everywhere, but especially on my campus, let me encourage you to find a local church where you can invest your life. You won’t regret it.
One of the big new stories coming out of Congress this week was the failure of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act to receive the necessary 60 votes in the Senate to come up for a final vote. The bill was intended to protect infants who survived abortions. Medical professionals would have been required to “exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child as a reasonably diligent and conscientious health care practitioner would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age.” In addition, the bill would “ensure that the child born alive is immediately transported and admitted to a hospital.”[1]
By a vote of 53-44, the Senate has failed to pass the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.
The failure of this bill comes on the heels of high-profile legislation in New York that legalizes abortion for the entirety of a pregnancy. As we can see from these situations, the lines regarding abortion are growing starker. On one side, there are people who continue to work for further limits on abortion and even to ban it entirely. On the other side, there are people who are working to expand access to abortion up to the point of birth or beyond.
What the failure of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act and the passage of New York’s Reproductive Health Act tell us is that those who support abortion are moving closer to what was once considered an extreme position. This position is one of supporting abortion at any moment up to birth and perhaps even after birth.
The progression of this view can easily be seen in the work of Peter Singer. Dr. Singer is the longtime professor of bioethics at Princeton University. His writings on issues of life espouse infanticide and abortion. However, he also offers great insight into the debate regarding the right to life. Here is how he casts the argument over the search for a point at which new human life achieves personhood and thus has a right to life:
The central argument against abortion, put as a formal argument, would go something like this:
First premise: It is wrong to kill an innocent human being.
Second premise: A human fetus is an innocent human being.
Conclusion: Therefore it is wrong to kill a human fetus.
The usual liberal response is to deny the second premise of this argument. So it is on whether the fetus is a human being that the issue is joined, and the dispute about abortion is often taken to be a dispute about when a human life begins.
On this issue the conservative position is difficult to shake. The conservative points to the continuum between the fertilized egg and child and challenges the liberal to point to any stage in this gradual process that marks a morally significant dividing line. Unless there is such a line, the conservative says, we must either upgrade the status of the earliest embryo to that of the child, or downgrade the status of the child to that of the embryo; but no one wants to allow children to be dispatched on the request of their parents, and so the only tenable position is to grant the fetus the protection we now grant the child.[2]
Singer notes the difficulty in determining “a morally significant dividing line” between conception and birth. He then suggests that if one cannot be found, then the embryo must be upgraded to the status of the newborn child or the newborn child must be downgraded to the status of the embryo.
This is the main sticking point in the discussion today about abortion. At what point must abortion be outlawed. For a couple of decades, the idea was that abortion would just not be allowed in the final trimester of the pregnancy. In recent years, those restrictions have been backed up closer to the point of viability. Abortion proponents have reacted against these restrictions by pushing for relaxing the restrictions to the point of birth. Some have even proposed that an abortion could be completed after a baby is born. This position may seem extreme, but it is the logical conclusion of Singer’s argument. Singer writes, “It seems peculiar to hold that we may not kill the premature infant but may kill the more developed fetus. The location of a being—inside or outside the womb—should not make that much difference to the wrongness of killing it.”[3]
Since the location of the infant—“inside or outside the womb”—does not make a difference to Singer, then where does he ultimately draw the line? He goes on to write, “In attempting to reach a considered ethical judgment about this matter, we should put aside feelings based on the small, helpless and—sometimes—cute appearance of human infants. . . . If we can put aside these emotionally moving but strictly irrelevant aspects of the killing of a baby, we can see that the grounds for not killing persons do not apply to newborn infants.”[4] Singer ultimately suggests that infanticide should be legalized for the first month after birth even though he admits that the month-old infant still does not have the rational capacity to be threatened by this policy.
There was a time when Singer’s views were considered extreme, but that time has passed. Those who support abortion are finding Singer’s logic sound and are willing to accept his position. In the past they might have found his logic sound, but they were swayed by the “emotionally moving but strictly irrelevant aspects” of the argument.
Just when we thought the battle over abortion was turning in the direction of life, we find a new extreme position entering mainstream thought. Therefore, we must redouble our efforts to protect the most helpless and vulnerable members of our society.
Over the last couple of weeks, the abortion debate has come to the forefront of cultural issues in ways that few could have anticipated. On January 22, the forty-sixth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law New York’s Reproductive Health Act. This bill guarantees access to abortion through the third trimester. In celebration of this action, Gov. Cuomo ordered that the tower on One World Trade Center to be lit up in pink. In the days that followed, Virginia Delegate Kathy Tran introduced a bill in the Virginia General Assembly to relax abortion restrictions in the third trimester. Embattled governor Ralph Northam endorsed the bill, but it failed to pass in the Assembly. Other similar legislation is being worked on in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Vermont.
What has been most interesting in this current cultural debate is the honesty with which supporters of abortion have spoken about these bills. In the years immediately following the Roe decision, the typical response of abortion supporters was that they wanted abortion to be safe, legal, and rare. They seldom spoke of the realities of abortion and never dared to mention how much access they wanted. Today, proponents of these legislative measures are being very honest about aborting children up to the point of birth. Gov. Northam has even been accused of defending infanticide due to comments he made in an interview that suggested a doctor could refuse care to a newborn and allow the child to die.[1]
The arguments being made by abortion proponents primarily deal with radical autonomy and self-ownership. They make the case that a woman should have absolute rights over her own body without any concern for the child growing in her womb. In a press release following his signing of the Reproductive Health Act, Gov. Cuomo stated, “Today we are taking a giant step forward in the hard-fought battle to ensure a woman’s right to make her own decisions about her own personal health, including the ability to access an abortion. With the signing of this bill, we are sending a clear message that whatever happens in Washington, women in New York will always have the fundamental right to control their own body.”[2]
Most of these abortion proponents would probably argue that a right to control one’s own body is enshrined in the founding documents of the United States. This is generally understood to be drawn from the “penumbras” and “emanations” of the Bill of Rights according to Griswold v. Connecticut and out of the 14th Amendment’s restriction on the state from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Applied to the abortion issue, these ideas regarding the right to privacy form the foundation of the Roe v. Wade decision that opened the door for abortion on demand.
John Locke
Even though most abortion-rights proponents do not make the explicit connection, the right of self-ownership is typically attributed to the work of John Locke in The Second Treatise of Government.[3] Locke writes, “Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself” (V. 27). There is no doubt that John Locke’s work was very influential upon the Founders of the United States, and language from the Second Treatise appears directly in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. However, are we correct in inferring a right to self-ownership of our bodies from Locke?
Locke’s premise of self-ownership is based on the idea that an individual in the state of nature has liberty to do what he wishes with his own property and possessions without depending upon the will of another man. It is in the state of nature that we find inherent rights to life, liberty, and property. It is at the intersection of the rights of liberty and property that we find those who make the claim for absolute liberty in self-ownership.
How does this apply to the abortion debate? Abortion proponents generally adopt an understanding of absolute liberty in self-ownership that would allow them to do anything they want with their own bodies. Therefore, the choice to end a pregnancy on the basis of self-ownership is the natural consequence of this absolute liberty. No person or governing authority has the right to limit this freedom. As a result, the woman can choose to have an abortion without consulting the father, the government, or the unborn child.
With Locke’s words that “everyone has property in his own person” ringing in the background, abortion-rights advocates declare that neither the government nor the citizenry can tell any woman what she can or cannot do with her body. They call for absolute liberty regarding the body based on self-ownership.
Considering Locke’s influence on our most important founding documents, it may seem that there is a solid case to be made that the Founders implied self-ownership in the language of the Constitution. However, there is a glaring problem regarding its application to abortion—Locke himself did not view self-ownership as an absolute right. Locke explains in the Second Treatise:
But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence, though man in that state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone. And reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. (II. 6)
According to Locke, then, self-ownership is a limited right. One cannot destroy himself or another creature in his possession without a nobler use than mere preservation. Aborting the life of an unborn child for the sake of convenience or because the child is unwanted does not meet Locke’s test of a nobler cause.
Locke further clarifies, “For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker, all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order and about his business, they are his property whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure” (II. 6). Right here Locke denies absolute self-ownership and actually places the true right of ownership in the hands of God. It is the Creator who has absolute control over the body, and we are stewards of our own bodies.
If the limitation of self-ownership by Locke were not enough, he makes another argument that would deny an absolute right of self-ownership as justification for abortion. Later in the Second Treatise, Locke addresses the question of parental authority and the duty that parents owe to their own children. He writes, “The power, then, that parents have over their children arises from that duty which is incumbent on them to take care of their offspring during the imperfect state of childhood” (VI. 58).
Notice that while parents have authority and power over their children, it arises from the duty and obligation they have for their children’s care. This arises during what he calls the “imperfect state of childhood.” As evidenced from other discussions regarding the authority of parents, Locke considers this imperfect state to be the time during which a child has not developed the full rational capacity to make his own choices.
Interestingly, many abortion proponents make the case that the reason why a child in the womb can be aborted is that he has not developed the rational capacity to be a person. Since they believe personhood is achieved, then they declare that the child in the womb has no right to life. His life can be terminated without consequence.
However, Locke seems to disagree. He believes it is incumbent upon the parent to fulfill her duty toward the “imperfect” child, which would include protection of that child’s life. At this point, we have a clash of rights. The mother wants to exert her right of self-ownership, but the unborn child has a right to life. Since the right of self-ownership is not absolute, the child’s right to life trumps self-ownership. In Locke’s view, parental obligation requires that we protect the rights of the child, the chief of which is the right to life.
Therefore, invoking Lockean self-ownership is not consistent with abortion. If the “penumbras” and “emanations” of the Constitution speak of a right to privacy and self-ownership, they most assuredly speak in Lockean terms. His influence on the Founders is undeniable. If Locke’s ideas are the ones speaking about self-ownership, then we need to consider his thoughts in their context. As we have seen, Locke’s understanding of self-ownership is not absolute, and he places an incumbent duty on parents to protect the rights of their children. Taken together, these ideas nullify a right to abortion based on a supposed right to privacy and self-ownership.[4]
Last week I attended the March for Life in Washington, D.C., for the first time. It has always been on my list of events in which I wanted to participate, but for various reasons I was never able to do so until this year. The March for Life is held every year around the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision handed down on January 22, 1973. The first march was held in January 1974, making this march the 46th annual event.
Joe Cater provides a little history on how the march got started. He notes:
The annual event was started by pro-life activist Nellie Gray. Following the Supreme Court decision in Roe in 1973, Gray retired from her federal career and dedicated the remainder of her life to the protection of the unborn.
In October 1973, a group of 30 pro-life leaders gathered in Gray’s home in Washington, D.C., to discuss how to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Roe. According to the March for Life organization, “There was a fear that January 22 would pass as any other day rather than allow for a moment to reflect upon how legalized abortion had hurt women and taken babies’ lives over the course of the year. That was the day that plans for the first March for Life began.”[1]
After attending the march, here are a few impressions that I want to share regarding the event and the pro-life movement at large.
The March for Life is a symbolic representation of what the pro-life movement seeks to accomplish. The march begins on the National Mall in the midst of the iconic monuments that represent freedom and liberty. From the gathering point for the pre-march rally, one can see the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. For many Americans, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln represent the American ideals embedded in our founding documents. Some of the most famous words of the Declaration of Independence read, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The March for Life begins on the hallowed ground on the Mall among these monuments with reminders of the equality and unalienable rights of all people. Then the march proceeds towards the seats of power following a path along Constitution Avenue, turning in front of the United States Capitol, and stopping in front of the United States Supreme Court. Taking a message of liberty for the unborn from the monuments to the two branches of government most capable of intervening in the atrocities of abortion, the march makes a symbolic statement.
The March for Life is an event for people of all ages. I was struck by the numberImage via Wikimedia Commons of young people at the march. I expected to see adults of all ages who had planned for weeks—even months—to attend the march, but I was not expecting to see the number of youth and college-aged people at the event. While it is difficult to offer statistics or even total numbers of people in attendance, there was definitely a youthful flair to the march. The people holding the sign at the front of the march looked to be college students. There were countless signs declaring, “I am the pro-life generation!” Honestly, I was not prepared for the overwhelming number of young people at the march, but I was extremely grateful. If progress is going to be made in the pro-life movement, it must include each subsequent generation. Involving young people in these types of events is crucial to the success of the movement.
The testimonies of women who regret their abortions are powerful. As the march reached its final destination at the steps of the Supreme Court building, the organizers hosted more than thirty people who gave testimonies about their own abortions or how they had aided someone in getting an abortion. The testimonies that I heard were both powerful and heart-wrenching. The narrative surrounding abortion by pro-choice advocates is that abortion is safe and life will simply return to normal after an abortion. Such was not the case for the people who gave their testimonies at the end of the march. Stories of depression, medical problems, and regret were common. No one’s life simply returned to normal. Many have battled regret and pain for decades. These testimonies need to be heard. The truth about life after abortion needs to be communicated effectively.
The future of the pro-life movement depends on getting the message across that children are a blessing from the Lord, life begins at conception, and the unborn have a right to life. The March for Life is one avenue for communicating this message. Let me encourage you to be a part of this event in the future.
Ethics as Worship 