In parallel with the youth peer ministry initiative, the Peer Ministry Institute has designed a new approach for campus peer ministry in collaboration with the office for Young Adult & Higher Education Ministries that increases students’ pastoral capacities in reaching out to their peers on campus. Students on campus have unique access to other students that even campus ministers do not, especially maximizing the reach of campus ministries that are not staffed full-time. This summer over 35 campus ministers participated in an intensive four-day training-of-trainers which covered recruitment, supervision, and the care of student ministers, and thus extending their role far beyond traditional administrative work associated with student ministers. For more information about future training in campus peer ministry, contact the Rev. Douglas Fenton at dfenton@episcopalchurch.org. Read Chaplain Karl Stevens's article about his experience of peer ministry below.
Peer Ministry Engages the Big Questions
By Chaplain Karl Stevens,
For the past four years, Canterbury Kenyon has been blessed by the ministry of two peer ministers, who help with programming, council their peers, and lead the liturgical life of the community. But the definition of that label “peer minister” is about to change. Our original program was based on one developed at the University of Chicago, and it tended to view the peer ministers as Canterbury program officers. In 2004, we were asked to be one of five campuses that piloted a new peer ministry curriculum, and at the core of that curriculum was a very different definition of what peer ministry is.
Peer ministry is the basic Christian vocation given to all of us at baptism. The peer ministry curriculum acknowledges that many of the practical aspects of that vocation don’t automatically manifest themselves in the life of a baptized Christian. Say you’re walking through a park and you come across somebody sitting alone on a bench, weeping. Most Christians would probably feel some compulsion to stop and assist this person, understanding such assistance to be part of their baptismal commitment to witness to Christ’s love in the world. However, most Christians would probably also feel some trepidation about approaching a total stranger, some concern about presuming too much. The purpose of peer ministry training is to remove these barriers to interaction, so that we may “love others in the power of the Spirit.”
It’s an expansive notion, and it requires an expanded community of peer ministers to bring it about. When we piloted the training this past year, we did so with a group of eight. We drew students from a wide variety of traditions, who carried with them diverse theological perspectives. They learned basic listening skills, a certain fearlessness in encountering strangers, and conflict management, among other things.
We found the curriculum effective at teaching practical skills, but there are some larger questions that it didn’t answer. We will try to pay attention to those issues when we begin training a new group of peer ministers in the fall. Probably the most important unaddressed aspect of the Christian life is that of discernment. In my experience, college students are engaged in intense spiritual activity, growing in consciousness in terms of themselves and their place in the world. One goal of peer ministry is to help students create a mentoring community in which they feel the safety and intimacy to consider together God’s will in their lives. In the next year, it is our hope to expand the Peer Ministry program to embrace this basic process of formation.
