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ABILENE CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY
APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY ON THE SOUTHERN HILLS CAMPUS MINISTRY
SUBMITTED TO DR TIM SENSING
IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF BIBM 629 FIELD EDUCATION
BY KIPP SWINNEY
August 8, 2012
Reason for the Appreciative inquiry
I intended this Appreciative Inquiry on the Southern Hills Campus Ministry to illuminate the value and importance of the Campus Ministry to both the congregation and the and the students who are part of it. The Campus Ministry is in a time of transition, and there has been concern about the viability and vitality of the Campus Ministry moving forward into the Fall of 2012. The long time Campus Minister of Southern Hills stepped down unexpectedly at the beginning of the summer, which has thrown the immediate future of the Campus Ministry into question. Not everyone agrees about the prognosis for the Campus Ministry, but several people have vocally expressed concern about the Campus Ministry folding. The hope for this project was to encourage those involved that the Campus Ministry and the church that the Campus Ministry is valuable and worth investing
Important resources
This Appreciative Inquiry was based on Mark L. Branson’s model, which he describes in his book Memories, Hopes, and Conversations: Appreciative Inquire and Congregational Change. The interviews were not as long as Branson described in his book. Many of the interviewees did not develop their answers fully. The focus of an Appreciative Inquiry is not problem solving. Appreciative Inquiry seeks to find the areas where a ministry is doing well. Instead of try to cut the bad areas of a ministry, the goal is to strengthen the good. Appreciative Inquiry’s primary task is to identify what areas of the ministry are most life giving to the participants.
Richard Osmer’s book, Practical Theology, was a very influential book on this project. At the beginning of the summer internship I read Osmer’s Practical Theology. While this book was not primarily about research into churches, it was about the role of the minister. I have had several occasions to be in official ministerial roles, but never for a time longer than eight months. Reading Osmer’s book was very beneficial towards the summer internship and shaping ministerial identity moving forward. Due to the large effect this project had on my work this summer, I felt that Osmer’s book was worth mentioning in conjunction with this project. Osmer spent a section of his book discussing researching churches and highlighted the importance of listening to people. Listening and attending to the situation is very important when conducting an Appreciative Inquiry. Listening is dramatically important to discover the underlying message that people are trying to send you. Whitehead and Whitehead also emphasized the need for attending to a church in their book, Method in Ministry. As a minister, one must be aware of the people in the congregation. This may seem like a huge task, but it is essential to determining the health of a congregation or ministry context.
History of the Ministry Concern
Before the Campus Minister resigned, the Southern Hills Campus Ministry was experiencing a time of transition. The Campus Ministry had been growing smaller over the course of a couple of years, and many of the activities, which it did, accommodated larger groups. Southern Hills had hosted a Wednesday night service for years that was very large and directed at college students. More than five hundred college students used to come to that event, called HIP (High Impact Praise). The number of people who attended that night fell dramatically, and the leadership cancelled that event in favor of a format that was conducive to a smaller group. There used to be multiple options just for college students on Sunday mornings, but with the decreasing size of the group, the leadership decided to consolidate it back down to one.
Many of the traditional events, which the Campus Ministry offered, were smaller or different than they had in the past. Many people on the leadership team had expressed discouragement at the smaller group, but there the team was able to reorganize the Campus Ministry to fit the smaller group. Another level of reorganization came with the birth of the Fusion Ministry. Fusion Ministry is a collaboration between several of the local Churches of Christ. Many of the events, which Southern Hills had done in the past, Fusion merged with the events of other church. Most in the Campus Ministry saw this as a very positive thing. Many people saw the cooperation as a great for all the campus ministries involved. It did not remove all the anxiety, but it did continue the recent trend of the rapidly changing face of the Campus Ministry. Frances had been a key leader in organizing Fusion, so when she resigned, there was fear that Fusion would fall apart. The ministry concern is particularly related to these anxieties that the students are feeling in regard to the Campus Ministry. Some of the older members have express concern that the whole ministry may disappear.
While I feel that the ministry will not disappear, I expect that there will be difficulties in the future semester. Southern Hills is looking for a Campus Minister, but that will take time to find the right person. One of the minister at Southern Hills has assumed the role of overseer of the Campus Ministry, but as his other responsibilities have not reduced, his ability to lead the Campus Ministry is very limited. Students have long been deeply involved in the leadership of the Campus Ministry, but this coming semester the students will have to assume a larger leadership role.
background to the internship
I first came to worship at Southern Hills Church of Christ when I was a freshman. This was an unlikely place for me to start attending church because it was very different from the place I grew up going to church. I went the first Sunday that I was in Abilene because it was where my brother and his fiancé attended church. It was not the church itself that kept me there, but the Campus Ministry. The Campus Ministry was lead by Frances Green, and her husband, Gary Green, had a very large role in the Campus Ministry. The community that was there was rich and inviting. My connection to the church ended up not being at all about going to church with my brother and his fiancé, but it was the Campus Ministry. The next year I became one of the leaders of the Campus Ministry and led one of the Life Groups. At the end of my second year, I applied to be a Campus Ministry intern for the following year. I got the job, which was a learning experience for me. I graduated a year early and immediately started in the Graduate School of Theology. I did not work as an intern during that year because of my commitments at school. I did continue to sever on the leadership team and lead a Life Group. At the end of the year, I talked to Frances about reprising my role as an intern during the summer, and I began the internship that has served as my formal internship for the Contextual Education portion of the Master’s of Divinity degree.
I had a good idea of what to expect from the internship because it was my second time to serve in that role. I felt much better prepared to address the responsibilities of a Campus Ministry intern during this summer. The event that changed the face of the internship was Frances Green’s resignation as the Campus Minister. This did instantly cause much anxiety in me and other members of the Campus Ministry. I was initially pessimistic about the prospects of the church being able to replace Frances in an orderly amount of time, and the church will not be able to replace her prior to the start of the fall semester. I had fears that the next semester might be lost for the Campus Ministry. The decision to do an Appreciative Inquiry grew out of the anxiety I felt and the anxiety that others felt regarding the Campus Ministry.
Frances had planned to be absent for much of the summer, so many things in the internship did not change and she did not officially leave the position until the end of July. However, the main difference was that there was more planning that needed to be done before the arrival of the fall semester. Ministers within the church met with me and the other intern to discuss what was required for the Campus Ministry in Frances’ absences.
presentation of the data
This Appreciative Inquiry was a response to the distress over the departure of Frances Green from the Campus Ministry. Other than her resignation, there was not an event that necessitated this project; however, her resignation did amplify some existing anxiety in the Campus Ministry. The people mainly involved in this Appreciative Inquiry are the students of the Southern Hills Campus Ministry. There are more people affected by the Campus Ministry than just the people who are in it, so there are more people indirectly affected by this study. I would have liked to conduct this study when more of the Campus Ministry students were present in Abilene, but because it is summer time, I was limited in the number of people who could participate. Having done a similar exercise before, I do have a good idea of what many of the students who are not in Abilene now would have said. With that knowledge, I think that the results would have been very similar. Many of the same themes would emerge and conclusions would be the same.
The primary means of gathering data was to interview a variety of people. I told the interviewees to answer the questions as fully as they like and to speak from their own experiences. I was intending for people only to talk about things of which they had firsthand knowledge. I did not record the interviews but took notes. Thus, many of the quotes are not exact, but are reconstructions from the notes I took. I am confident that I have accurately represented each of the students’ thoughts and feelings, which they expressed to me during the interview. Here are the questions, which I asked the interviewees:
1) What are the greatest benefits to you from the Campus Ministry?
2) What are the best influences the Campus Ministry has had on the rest of the Church?
3) If you had one or two wishes for the Campus Ministry, what would they be?
4) Think of a story when the Campus Ministry most adequately reflected the Gospel.
5) How autonomous should the Campus Ministry be from the rest of the Church?
I sought to get a diverse view of the Campus Ministry in this project, so I interviewed a variety of people, and some were not part of the Campus Ministry. I interviewed ten people. Seven were college students and three were regular members of Southern Hills Church of Christ. All of the people had some association with the Campus Ministry. Five of the interviewees were male and five were female. Five of the students I interviewed I considered core members or highly involved in the Campus Ministry. Two of the student interviewees were less involved. I was not able to get a wide demographic of ages of college students. All of the students who remained in Abilene for the summer are older students, entering either their junior or senior year of college. Thus, there is not a very wide age distribution represented in the interviewees. In my initial proposal, I suggested that the Campus Minister of Southern Hills would be highly involved in the process of this project, but she was frequently out of town and was not able to be an integral part of the project.
What are the greatest benefits to you from the Campus Ministry?
The first question is a very basic Appreciative inquiry question. It is a more open-ended question and it set the tone for the rest of the interview. The answers that came from non-college students were not as strong as the answers from the students. This is a reasonable expectation as the Campus Ministry seeks to affect primarily college students. There was a common thread that ran through the answers to the first question from the students. Most of the students’ answers included memories of their freshman years and getting connected at church and at ACU. A male student said, “Through the Campus Ministry, I formed some of my closest relationships when I was a freshman. If that had not happened, I‘m sure I would have found strong relationships other places, but because of the Campus Ministry many of the people I connected to were people who went to church on a regular basis.” Another male student said, “I used to have a job that kept me from going to church on Sundays, and so I did not really have a church home for a couple years, but after I quit that job, it was friends I had in the Campus Ministry that got me in the habit of going to church again.” A female student said, “I never was a leader at church before coming to college. I never thought of myself as a leader because I don’t like to speak in front of crowds, but the Campus Ministry really provided me an opportunity to serve and work in a group of people that I was really close to.”
The best effect that the Campus Ministry had on the students was getting them connected to a community. Many of the answers involved the word community. The three non-students that I interviewed had similar answers, but were understandably from a different perspective. A Southern Hills members in his early thirties answered “The greatest benefit that I received was that the Campus Ministry is one of the first places that I was able to connect to the Church. I have worked with other campus ministries before, so when I came to Abilene, it was natural to find a campus ministry to get involved with. My wife and I got connected to one of the Life groups and it really felt like we were making a difference from early on when we first came to Abilene.” For this person The Campus Ministry helped him be connected to the larger church. Although the college students were not his immediate peers, it gave him a connection to the rest of the church. A woman non-student answered, “The greatest benefit has been for my son. I have been blessed by the way the student have embraced him and allowed him to be part of the group.” This woman’s son is in his late twenties, but has a significant mental and physical disability. An elder who has worked with the Campus Ministry for several years answered this way, “The greatest benefit to me is seeing all the future leaders come through Southern Hills. Most of the students leave Southern Hills when they graduate and become leaders at the congregations in the cities they live in.”