Actually, we do want Bethany students… but we’ll pass if you fit this description.
And let me preface this by saying this stuff is generally true of Bethany University students, and college students at most Christian schools. If you’re an exception, ignore this. Otherwise, here’s why we don’t want you.
- You’re too flaky. Part of the point behind college is that you’re figuring out what to do with your life. And you should. You should avoid commitments until you’ve had lots of time to figure out if you really want to do this with your life. But you don’t know how to take the necessary time you need to figure stuff out. You just commit. Then you discover it wasn’t the right decision, and bail—often after doing the same dumb thing as before, and committing yourself to something else you hadn’t thought through. You need to slow your decision-making process down; and we need to stop accepting your commitments as if they were rational decisions.
- Your real commitments are elsewhere. But honestly, you aren’t in the Santa Cruz area because you’re looking for a home church. Few people, other than professional clergy, choose to live someplace because of a church. You’re here because of college. College will take priority. You say God is your priority, but really it isn’t. Until you recognize this, you’re an idolater, and the church has enough idolaters.
- You confuse your education with anointing. (I especially recognize this because I’ve been guilty of this.) Just because you’re a college student—and the others aren’t, and they don’t know the newest and latest and greatest things in academia—you cop this attitude of, “I know how things should go, and you don’t” or “I still have my ideals intact, and you sold out years ago” and crap like that. This is particularly found among bible majors (like I was) and typical of people whose ideals take precedence over people, like college students.
- You confuse your adulthood with authority. Now that you’re old enough to vote, you often assume that you’re mature enough to take charge of things. You want to lead the youth ministry, or the food ministry, or an outreach, or a class. And you shouldn’t. The church model of leadership is servanthood. You need to shut up and wait for authority to be given to you instead of seeking it out. But often college students don’t want to wait for that to happen; they have résumés to compile.
- You already have a home church. And it isn’t ours. So, when Easter and Christmas and the other important times come along, you’re never there. When Christmas break and spring break and summer break come along, you’re never there. Once you graduate, you’re gone. We can’t make any significant or long-term plans that include you. God help us if we put you into a position of leadership. It’s great for your résumé, but the ministry often becomes a shipwreck once you leave; instead of seeking a capable successor, you were more interested in going out with a bang.
- You don’t tithe. Your money goes to your home church. Those of you that can tithe don’t understand how tithing works, so you keep your money because you “can’t afford to tithe,” or give a fraction of it. It’s not that we need your money, ’cause it honestly isn’t enough to pay the bills; it’s that your tithe represents your real commitment to the church, and it isn’t there. (Same with the licensed Assemblies ministers who give all their money to the district instead of the church. Where your money goes, so goes your heart. If you cared, you’d go get a waiver from the district so you could contribute to your church, but you don’t; so it’s not really your church, no matter what your résumé says.)
- You don’t give time to the church. College is not a 24-hour vocation, but you treat it like one with the after-classes social events, the afternoon naps taken so that you can stay up until 2 a.m., and all the other artificial functions that mean you “don’t have time” for midweek church functions. You can make time for movie night with your buds, but you always have homework to do during Wednesday night prayer. And when midterms, finals, and major socials roll around, you’re gone.
- You think your spiritual needs are already met with morning and evening chapels, dorm devotionals, the occasional bible class in your general ed package, and your extracurricular ministries. I’ve often heard it said that you don’t need to go to church because the school is the church. That’s bull-flop. The school resembles a church, because it’s full of Christians; but can you go evangelize new converts, take them to the school, and get them baptized and discipled? Not unless you pay tuition. The fellowship in the school is entirely dependent on whether you’ve paid tuition, not whether you have a relationship with Jesus. It’s based on Mammon, not Christ.
- You’re a bunch of gossips. When you meet outside of church, the conversations always turn to, “The pastor should do this,” or “The leadership doesn’t know what it’s doing,” or “The sermon sucked.” The pastor is criticized for being too human and making normal human mistakes; the church is criticized for not having things exactly the way you like them; but you’re too “busy” to step up and fix things. You never say any of this stuff to the face of the person who needs to hear it. Instead of offering help, you spend most of your time bitching. Shut up.
- You’re a bunch of spectators. To this point, I’ve talked a lot about the people who do contribute time to the church; but the bulk of you contribute nothing to the church, because you’re only there Sunday mornings, and that’s all. The rest of the week, we don’t see you, we don’t know you, you speak nothing into our lives, and you’re only there because you like the worship or the preaching. You take and don’t minister. You’re parasites, just like 80 percent of the church as a whole, whose faith has no works and is dead.
- Your presence deceives the leadership of the church into thinking, “Hey, look at all the people we have. We must be doing something right!” And so we don’t do anything. We wind up putting all our time and effort into busywork, ministering to people who won’t change, won’t grow, won’t contribute, won’t learn, and will render us impotent, weak, and distracted. Just like the devil wanted.
So depart from us, you who work iniquity. Come back if you grow up.