The most fruitful 10 minutes of my ministry.

This weird thing started to happen.

I work in a downtown church. It’s 150 years old (this year!). The congregation is an interesting mix of solid biblical believers and people who come because it’s the socially acceptable down-town church. (I know I can’t judge the motivations of anyone’s heart. But I think I can call the families who attend church less than once a quarter some of the least committed.)

It makes sense that we’d see the children of the most committed families in youth group, but we almost never saw the children of these least committed.

For my whole career, I’ve worked to try to get kids like these involved. I’ve done personal invitations. I’ve taken them to coffee and lunch. I still pray for them and try to engage them in conversation when they do show up at church but there’s been so little result that I’ve sort of given up on a lot of them. And I’ve seldom seen a teenager who’s not taking their faith seriously in high school, suddenly start taking their faith seriously in college.

Now we’re getting to the weird thing.

After a few years of working at this church, I started seeing the kids from these not very involved families coming back from college as fired-up, serious Christians. What?? And it continued. Again, and again and again.

Here’s what I finally figured out was happening…

Our church has a catered Sunday breakfast for high school graduates every year. It’s a real formal thing. Parents and grandparents come, and everyone is really well-dressed. During the service we recognize the graduates. We pray for them and give them each a celebration package -- a prayer book, a Bible and some book to help them through the transition to college.

As the youth minister, I have about 10 minutes to welcome the families. So, I do a sort of “Oh, the places you’ll go” speech and then talk to them briefly about the transition to college. I say what I’ve told all our youth group kids a million times: “Get involved in a college fellowship group!”

My shtick is that I tell our students to make sure that the first thing they do when they get on campus is find a good Christian campus fellowship group. Then, after they’ve found a fellowship group, they should go and pee. (At this point they’ll need to.) Then they should call me and let me know that they have peed. (And yes, I do regularly get calls in September from students letting me know that they’ve just peed.)

Here’s the crucial part -- I mention college ministries like IV or CRU or CCO, and tell them that if they don’t get involved in the first two weeks of college, their schedules will be so full that they never will, and without a Christian group they’ll lose their faith. We’ve seen it happen time and time again.

Honestly, I was only talking to the youth group graduates, I didn’t think it was really important to the uninvolved kids; they’d never cared before….

Turns out, when the uninvolved kids heard me say that they’d lose their faith at college. THEY THOUGHT I WAS TALKING TO THEM! They thought they had a faith and they didn’t want to lose it, so they took my advice and found a college ministry and met Jesus and came home on fire!

So, that short talk, that 10-minute talk that I’ve given year after year has actually been the most effective evangelism I’ve ever done in my whole ministry. In terms of fruitfulness, it has a higher rate of conversions to Jesus per minute preached than anything else I’ve ever talked about!

There are two big lessons in this story for me. First, participation in a solid Christian campus fellowship group is one of the most important things that we can encourage our youth ministry graduates to do after they leave us. If a student doesn’t get into a fellowship group, and the studies say in their first few weeks, they are highly likely to lose their faith. It doesn’t take much work to safeguard our kids' faith by helping them to plug into a good campus ministry. (We’ve actually assigned “coaches” to each of our graduating kids to have the “pee” talk and follow up on them after they arrive at school.)

Second, there are critical windows of openness to the gospel during the insecurity of life transitions that we can take advantage of as youth leaders and parents to nudge our kids more firmly into the hands of the Lord.

Ours kids going off to college are excited and scared and didn’t have any idea what it’s going to be like. They are open (for once) to clear simple advice, so they took my encouragement to find a fellowship group seriously.

It’s a little humbling that after all the work I’ve put in, all the meetings, all the retreats and all the BRILLIANT talks and all the late night phone calls, the thing that really mattered to these kids was a 10 minute talk out on the church lawn.

(I do want to advertise one of the most useful tools for getting students going off to college in a Christian ministry. Check out campusministrylink.org. They have a list of every Christian ministry at every college campus in the US that you can log on to and search even send a note to the leaders of the on-campus ministries your students are attending.)

Steven Tighe is currently serving as the Canon for Youth Ministry for the Anglican Church in North America, but has been involved with youth ministry since leaving college. Steven currently lives in El Paso, TX, where he attends St. Clement's church, runs several ministry training programs, and teaches undergraduate and seminary youth ministry courses. He enjoys mountain biking in the El Paso hills, he reads a lot, plays computer games, writes songs, is an accomplished sand sculptor and has recently taken up kite surfing.