I Am a New College Student. How Do I Balance My Education and My Ministry in the Church?

Christian college students can sometimes find it challenging to balance the responsibilities of academic life and church involvement. Today, Stephen Nichols offers guidance for navigating this unique season of life.

NATHAN W. BINGHAM: Joining me this week for the Ask Ligonier podcast is Dr. Stephen Nichols. He’s a Ligonier Ministries teaching fellow and also the president of Reformation Bible College. Dr. Nichols, we have a question from a new college student, and they are wanting to know how can they balance their workload in school with their desire to serve and minister in their local church?

DR. STEPHEN NICHOLS: Well, first of all, let me say to you, “Congratulations,” on being a college student. I remember talking to Dr. Sproul about just how wonderful it is to teach in colleges. And he said the reason that he loved teaching in college, and actually the reason that he wanted to start a college was—and he was very frank—he said, “I want their minds,” because we learn from sociologists that your sort of mental development and sort of the development of you and your worldview really takes place in two moments in your life: when you’re in that four-to-six, two-to-six for some people, age span, and then college. So, these are very important years in your life. So, let me just encourage you to make the most out of your college experience as you develop your worldview and affirm and go deeper on your convictions and set that trajectory for your life. And you’re asking a very important question: How do you balance your education with ministry in the church?

Well, first, let’s just think a little bit about college. First of all, college is an investment. It’s an investment of your time, of your finances, and maybe if your family’s assisting you, it’s an investment of their finances in you. It’s also an investment, especially if you are at a Christian college, of donors who have enabled that college to be there and enable you to be there to study. And it’s an investment of time of the administration, of the staff, and certainly of the faculty as they are educating you, and again, if it’s a Christian college, also seeking to disciple you. So, college is an investment.

College also is intense. A lot is concentrated into a short amount of time in college. There’s a lot of introductory courses—so, Intro to Philosophy or Intro to Sociology, or Intro to Theology. And so, you have professors who are experts in those fields, and they’ve studied for decades in those fields, and they’ve got to compress all of that field into one semester. And it may feel like you’re sitting in class drinking at a fire hose because you, in fact, are. So, college is just intense. Everything about it is intense.

And also, if you are a college student, here’s one thing we can say for sure: it’s your vocation. It’s your calling. If you’re there, God has put you there. God has called you to that, and it is your post. Calvin loved to talk about vocation, and Calvin would say, “Whether you are a pot washer or you are on sentry duty, this is your calling of God.” And so, college is an investment, it is very intense, and it is your calling. You are to apply yourself to it. So, that’s college. Now, let’s think about what church is.

Church is the God-ordained institution. So, church is God-ordained, and what that means is it is absolutely essential and central to your Christian life. So, now we have two important things that can be very demanding, and now we have to balance them. And here’s where you begin to learn what is very important to learn as you go through college—not just knowledge, but wisdom. And so, how can we wisely balance pursuing our education as a calling and our ministry in the church? Well, let me just say a few things.

First, you need to attend church. You need to attend church joyfully, and you need to attend church attentively. So that means you’re not out all hours of Saturday night and then finding yourself trying to hold your eyelids open during the Sunday morning service. So, attend joyfully and attend attentively to the service.

But as far as service goes, I would say—and this is a principle for whatever stage of life you find yourself in—look for areas of service that are compatible with your training, with your gifting, with your age, and that are compatible with your time and attention to those other callings in your life. So, I’ll give you an example of this.

I have a friend who is a CPA, and he loves to teach Sunday school, but their church is set up with a quarterly Sunday school system, and they have a wide pool, a deep bench of Sunday school teachers. So, he’s never able to teach in quarter one and quarter two because he’s just so busy with his practice that the time he has, he needs to make sure he gives proper attention to his family, and there’s not a whole lot of time left over. But when it gets to quarter three and quarter four, now he’s able to teach Sunday school.

And so, in a sense, you could see your college life like that. It’s a season of life. There’s an intensity there. And you may have desires to do things, but those things you have desires to do may not be compatible with the time and attention that you have. Or take, for instance, a family, and we have a young mom with an infant or husband or father with a young infant. Well, that might be a time where they’re not able to pursue a certain ministry in the church, and later in a season in life, they’d be able to.

So, this is something that’s going to be with you your whole life. And I think you have to be, again, careful to just look for those areas of service beyond attending that are compatible with where you are in life and the time and attention you can give to it. We need to recognize that we are finite creatures, and we all have the same amount of time in a week, and we have to steward that time well, so that the opportunities that God has given and put in front of us, we are optimizing, and we are making the most of.

And I’ll just say one more thing. The service that you might want to be doing in church or can be doing while you’re in college will likely not be the service you’ll do as an older adult in church. And that’s okay because you need to have some more gifting, more developing, and just more life and wisdom and seeing the application of Scriptures in your life for some of those teaching ministries and some of those other ministries that may come to you later in life. But those opportunities to serve are there. And if you can serve where you’re needed most and be faithful in those opportunities to serve, I fully believe that God honors that by bringing opportunities to us later in life as we serve faithfully.

So, God bless in your studies, God bless as you serve the church and as you balance that intensity and that calling of being a student with being a member of your church.