Welcome to College: Caity Interviews Jonathan Morrow

This interview was conducted by one of our interns, Caity Kullen, an English Literature major at Oklahoma State University.  Thanks, Caity!   If you’d like to know more about the author she interviews, Jonathan Morrow, see his website www.thinkchristianly.com or his blog, which has some good resources on worldview challenges your kids will face in college.

College: life’s first great transition, the gateway to the “real world.”  It sounds pretty intimidating, right? It is hard to know what to expect going into it. I know that I was clueless. Coming out if thirteen years of Christian school and into a state school with over 20,000 undergrads i just hoped to stay afloat.  What I did know was that my first priority was to find a community of believers with whom I could struggle, laugh, study, not study, and wrestle with the Gospel. Thankfully, I found just the community I craved in a wonderful campus ministry called Reformed University Fellowship as well as my local church. 

These two communities played a vitally important role in my Freshman year and they continue to support and encourage me regularly. Plugging into my local church allowed me to find surrogate families, mentors, and consistent preaching of the Gospel. Campus ministry connected me with peers who were where I was. Together we learned what it means to engage a secular campus and deal with the struggles that we faced there while engaging God’s Word. The questions posed in this interview stem from my experiences as a college student over the past two years as well as a heart that desires to see incoming students find a place where they are comfortable wrestling through the challenges that they will face. This chapter in life is for growing and figuring out and learning (sometimes the hard way), but a little guidance going into it never hurts!

What do you wish someone had told you going into your Freshman year of college?

That’s a great question and ultimately what led me to write Welcome to College. Everyone has a guidebook to college life. The problem is that for most teenagers many of the pages are blank when they arrive on campus. For example, there is nothing on the ‘how to date wisely’ page, nothing on the ‘how to resolve conflict with a roommate’ page and nothing on the ‘my professor is challenging what I’ve been taught my whole life’ page. Most of my pages were blank when I started college. But thankfully God brought mentors into my life, revealed wisdom to me through the Scriptures, and exposed me to some great books.

Practically speaking I would offer two pieces of advice. First, remember that you are not alone. It’s tempting to think that no one else is experiencing all of the insecurities and emotions you are. But this isn’t true! College is new for everyone and everyone has to navigate all that comes with tons of change in a short amount of time. Take a deep breath and take that next step!

Second, get relationally connected early. The first six weeks are critical. After that people start settling into their groups of friends and form habits. Take advantage of all the free food and visit all of the Christian ministries weekly meetings and have the courage to put yourself out there and meet some new people. Life is a team sport! (2 Timothy 2:22).

Based on your experiences with students going into college today, what would you say is the most confusing aspect of college life for most students?

I think there are two (related) ways to answer this question. First, I see a lot of confusion about what college is actually for. Here’s what I mean—what does it mean to be an educated person and how does one know? One answer reduces education to data acquisition. But my smart phone can access mountains of data. The more important question is what is a human being for? This is where a student’s answer to the most important question in college comes into play—Is Christianity true? Because if it is then I am part of a grand adventure story that God is writing in my life and college is just another opportunity to grow and participate in the mission of God. However, if I am the ultimate goal of existence, then college will look very different. Confusion about the purpose of college (and God’s relationship to it) will bleed over into every other area. So getting this question settled is hugely important. My passion is helping students see that there is good evidence that Christianity is actually true and that because it’s true, it speaks to every area of life.

How would you advise a student to deal with a professor who obviously has an opposing worldview?

Unfortunately this is increasingly common:

1. Take a deep breath and pray.
2. Be respectful and remember that you are an everyday ambassador (1 Pet. 3:15; 2 Cor. 5:20)
3. When your professor makes a claim against what you believe (e.g., the Bible is full of errors), politely ask him what he means by ‘errors’ and then how he arrived at this conclusion (you are looking for specific evidence that supports his claim).
4. Don’t take the bait by making claims about Christianity (he has the microphone and is in the position of authority). Rather ask thoughtful questions that expose the sound bites and slogans so common in today’s classroom.
5. If you don’t know how to respond to his claim, do some homework by exploring the resources I suggest in Welcome to College to go deeper and better understand why you believe what you believe (you can also visit my blog for more resources at www.thinkchristianly.org).

How important is it that college students get connected at a local church?

The local church is God’s home base for reaching the world. It’s also where students can find mentors and a place to serve. Para-church ministries are great (I benefited greatly from my time in CRU), but they aren’t the local church. Be involved in campus ministries, but also get plugged into the local church. A student needs older Christians to cheer them on and provide them a place to grow and use their gifts. It’s also important that student learn to connect to a local church because they will not be in college forever (hopefully!) and will need to plug into a church after they graduate. One of my biggest regrets in college was that I didn’t get plugged in to a local church more.