Clergy: Helping Students Make The Spiritual Passage

In more serene times, the campus chaplain had little more to do than pre pare sermons for compulsory chapel and ladle out doses of manly Christian advice to the spiritually downhearted. Today, he is likely to wear wrinkled chinos instead of a turned-around collar, read Playboy as well as Plato and center his operations in a coffeehouse rather than in a Gothic church. Says Methodist Chaplain Alfred Dale, of San Francisco State College, “I’m generally where the action is.”

The new clerical action seekers have brought a lot of excitement and experiment to a pastoral job that once ranked low among church assignments. Before the war, there were only a hundred full-time Methodist ministers on the nation’s campuses, most of them waiting for a good parish assignment to open up. Now the Methodist Church has more than 400 full-time campus ministers, many of them so caught up by the challenge that they want the job for life.

Jazz Masses & Albee. For these chaplains, formal worship is merely the starting point of their ministry. Church services, says the Rev. Larry Rouillard, Episcopal chaplain at California’s Claremont Colleges, are primarily a means of nurturing those who are already committed, not of reaching out to students. Most ministers agree with Yale’s Protestant chaplain, Presbyterian William Sloane Coffin, that “liturgy doesn’t carry the freight it used to,” and they freely experiment with different worship forms. At M.I.T., chapel services have included everything from jazz Masses to a dance by a Radcliffe girl in leotards. Episcopal Father Malcolm Boyd, a “chaplain-at-large” to U.S. college students, often starts a prayer service with a reading from Edward Albee or from one of his own one-act plays about racial conflict in the U.S.

Princeton’s Episcopal chaplain, the Rev. Rowland Cox, believes that students shy away from the open convert seeker or “the guy who wants to gimmick around with your life.” “Our job is people,” says the Rev. Harold Cooper, one of the Protestant chaplains at the University of Massachusetts, “and the idea is not to bring them into the fold but to help them live better lives as persons.” Most chaplains today shun even such an old-fashioned evangelistic idea as a “Religious Emphasis Week”; they talk about God only when the students want to. Church-sponsored activities, often organized ecumenically by team ministers of different faiths, rarely stress their denominational origin. At Columbia, the Protestant Office sponsors a student hangout called “The Post-crypt,” but Acting University Chaplain John Cannon stoutly contends that it is “not a Christian coffeehouse; it has nothing to do with evangelism at all.”

“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.”