I was on a church committee to send devotionals once a week to college students. My day was Sunday. I worked my darnedest to search through Scripture writing something that was elegant, thoughtful, and edgy. For some reason, students kept asking to be taken off the list. Why, I thought, my devotionals aren’t that bad…until I discovered others in the committee were each given a day to send a devotional, so the students received one every single day. If they hadn’t checked their e-mail in two weeks, that could add up to a lot of e-mails.

Once I started reading what some of the other people were sending, I decided that I could get devos to students in a less offensive fashion. The truth is–most of these kids were deleting the e-mails as fast as they came, or letting them go directly into their spam folders. How do I know this? Because after I stopped sending devos, one of the kids started IM’ing me. He said he read one of mine because it was titled, “Stop Being a Jerk” and that was, “A cool title.”

Anyway, while my days of writing devos for college students are over for now, I still seem to be on the e-mail list to get these life-changing statements. Below are some of the inspiration thoughts:

With God, no one is every lost in the crowd.

A problem not worth praying about isn’t worth worrying about.

If at first you don’t succeed, read the instructions (the Bible)! The Bible isn’t antique or modern…it’s ETERNAL!

If life sends you lemons, make some lemonade.

You can’t have a rainbow without the sun and rain.

Umm, yeah. I don’t understand how we’re helping college students get the Bible in their lives without actually providing any Bible verses. It seems a little odd to me.

I don’t think spoon-feeding out-dated Christian cliches to college students is the way to go. They’re smart, and they’ve heard that the Bible means “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth” a million times. Heck, they probably had a week of Bible School with that as the “theme”. From spending time with college students who are Christians, I continually discover their intelligence (we talk down to them), their passion, their amazing ability to reason through very adult problems (managing course schedules, getting papers written, class work), and their hunger and thirst for the Bible.

These young men and women don’t need to be spoon-fed; they need to get power shakes or enriched vitamin bars of biblical insight from home to encourage their walk at college (they probably wouldn’t mind if you mailed them a package of food either). They need a voice on the other end of the line when they’ve done poorly on an exam or been dumped by a lover. They need you to be on AIM when they have a question about God at 1 AM (just when you were about to sign off). They want you to check in with them on Facebook and throw presidential candidates at them. And when you send e-mails, they don’t want them to be weak statements that are meaningless to their lives and situations; they want you to write in your voice and to recapture their imaginations like you did when they were in youth group or young adult group or college group.

If you want to really keep ministering to your graduates, get a RSS Feed and subscribe to their blogs, get AIM, and make a Facebook profile. Oh, and then e-mail them your contact information. That’s an e-mail they probably won’t trash.

For further discussion: 

What are some ways you’ve been able to connect with former students while they’re at college?

How has it been beneficial for students for you to maintain a relationship with them when they leave home? 

Perhaps your job also includes “college ministry”, what do you do to reach out to local colleges?