#36: How Campus Ministries Help Students Flourish: Affirming “The Priesthood of All Students”

My guest today is Timothee Joset, author of The Priesthood of All Students. He has been a student leader in campus ministry in Switzerland and internationally, including serving on the International Fellowship for Evangelical Students (or IFES) governing Board for four years. Timothée holds a Master of Arts with majors in Literature and History from the Universities of NOO – ka – tel Neuchâtel, Switzerland and Berlin, Germany, a Master of Theological Studies from Tyndale Seminary, Toronto and a PhD in theology from the University of Durham. For several years he has also helped give leadership to “Dialogue and Truth,” an initiative to support undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral students in integrating their faith and their academic disciplines. Finally, he’s the incoming IFES Engaging the Universty Coordinator.

In this podcast we discuss:

• Timothee’s long experience in campus ministry as a student, staff, senior leader, and IFES historian, and a brief summary of IFES’s campus ministry
• Why the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers is an important way to understand how campus ministries should operate — “Immediacy, Mediation, and Participation”
• The importance of treating students as students
• Understanding the university as a “foreign land” as a way to discern, value, and engage appropriately in the university context
• What we can learn about flourishing in the university from the Nation of Israel’s exile (cf. Daniel chapter 1)
• The importance of engaging the university in all its dimensions (as a complete “ecosystem”)
• Why the term “parachurch” is a problematic way to identify campus ministries
• A better missiological understanding of the relationship between campus ministries and local churches
• How pastors can encourage the students (and scholars) in their congregations
• Some challenges and opportunities when campus ministries are independent and contextualized
• The close connection between campus ministries and a “missional ecclesiology”
• Thimotee’s three-fold summary of what a campus ministry should encourage students to do: Value, Listen, and Engage

Resources mentioned during our conversation:

• Timothee Joset, The Priesthood of All Students: Historical, Theological, and Missiological Foundations of a University Ministry: The International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES)
• Ralph Winter, “The Two Sructures of God’s Redemptive Mission” in Perspectives in the World Christian Movement
• IFES’s Engage the University project
• Nicholas Wolterstorff, Religion in the University