Should the local church work alongside a college campus outreach or are these two in competition

with one another?

A listener writes in to ask, dear Pastor John, my name is Ryan, a senior at Virginia Tech.

I've been struggling lately with the appropriate role of campus ministry as it relates to

the local church.

What should that relationship look like?

Should campus ministry is focused mostly on evangelism and the church on discipleship?

What roles should each take to best further the gospel?

So Ryan asks, what should that relationship look like, local church and campus ministry?

But then he refines the question, should campus ministry is focused mostly on evangelism

and the church on discipleship?

But with that refinement of the question, he might be assuming something that in the

best case, should not be assumed, shouldn't exist.

So I'm going to go with his first question rather than the refinement and maybe it'll

be plain why, namely, what should that relationship look like?

I'm not on a crusade here against parachurch campus ministries.

I think they have done great good for hundreds of thousands of students and that many churches

have benefited greatly from the ripple effect of those evangelistic and discipling efforts.

Nevertheless, I think that the relationship between the local church and the campus ministries

should be different than it often is.

What I have in mind is what we did at Bethlehem while I was pastor there and it still exists

and I watched it with great joy, namely, we asked a ministry called Campus Outreach to

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