HBCU

Starting a Movement on HBCU Campuses

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 21:09:25 +0000

Starting a Movement on HBCU Campuses

Tamice Spencer was hired to plant an ��ñ�� chapter at Clark Atlanta University, one of the four Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) that make up the Atlanta University Center (AUC) Consortium. New on campus in 2013, she found two students to prayer walk with her to pray for the new ministry.

Almost immediately they met a student from Morehouse College who had been praying that God would send a ministry to students there. The new chapter was soon made up of both Clark and Morehouse students, and later the small chapter at Spelman College joined them. Today, Tamice reports, there are about 50 students in one unified AUC chapter with campus-specific small groups.

But that’s not all. Within the last two years, AUC students have joined Tamice in planting new chapters at Alabama State University and then Savannah State University. “The AUC community has a heart for championing an InterVarsit-chapter-type community at other HBCUs,” Tamice said. “HBCU students are actually planting other HBCUs, which is a great feeling for me as a staff.”

When Tamice first encountered ��ñ�� as a freshman at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), she wasn’t interested in Christianity. She had other interests. But then, after an injury at a nightclub that needed surgery to fix, a near drug overdose, and an HIV scare, she realized her life was headed in the wrong direction.

“I had everything that could possibly go wrong in my life happen during my freshman year in college,” she said. “When I was trying to figure out how to start my life over again, ��ñ�� was the first place I looked.” ��ñ�� students had been praying for her. She put her trust in Jesus, and soon became involved in chapter leadership.

But VCU is not an HBCU. As an ��ñ�� Campus Staff Minister, it took awhile for Tamice to realize that the chapters she’s planting on HBCU campuses can be successful even if they do not have hundreds of participants, as chapters at VCU and some other schools do.

HBCU students are high-identity Black students, and the groups they can be involved in are tailor-made for them. A missional campus ministry like ��ñ�� is different, and its value is not immediately apparent. “I learned to see one student as a win,” Tamice said. “That was revolutionary for my thinking and the way I do ministry. As that started to change, I saw the ministry grow.”

Given that HBCUs present unique challenges for ��ñ��, Tamice is pleasantly surprised at the passion her students have to see ��ñ�� chapters planted on other HBCU campuses. ��ñ�� HBCU students have discovered something that their fellow students don’t realize they are missing.

In Tamice’s experience, HBCU students are frequently either “de-churched” or “dichotomized,” or perhaps both. They went to church growing up at home, or maybe with their grandmother, but they don’t see Christian faith as relevant or credible on campus. Or they see Christian faith as something they still do on Sunday morning but it’s not relevant to their daily lives or their career choices.

“A lot of what we try to do on campus is remove the false dichotomy,” Tamice said. “God can infiltrate everything we do. We can be a Black studies major and love God at the same time and those things are not mutually exclusive. That’s probably the biggest challenge for students—realizing that they can be unapologetically Black and unapologetically Christian at the same time. I don’t think a lot of them realize that they can walk wholly in both of those things. Because they are certainly learning that they can be unapologetically Black at an HBCU. But the Christian part usually falls by the wayside or becomes a sort of secret identity.”

Tamice has seen it take a year for a student to integrate their faith in God into their lives. “Once they get it, it’s contagious,” she said. “They become more excited about faith. I’m also seeing that they become better students and become better stewards of things on campus.”

Several times each semester the ��ñ�� students set up Proxe Stations on campus, artistic displays designed to create spiritual discussions. The most popular Proxe is the one that asks students, “What would you say if you could ask God anything?” What students usually want explained are the tragedies in their lives that seem to negate God’s goodness—questions of theodicy.

“Some barriers are intellectual, but a lot of them are visceral,” Tamice said. That’s a contrast to the perceptions that many people may have of Black Millennials. “[Christians] think about praying for perceived violence in the Black community, not for students who want to know why their father died,” she explained. She’s found that before there can be a conversation with students about conversion, there has to be an honest conversation about pain and suffering.

Tamice is ready to have those conversations. She loves her job and she wants to reach out to more campuses. “There are 21 HBCUs in Georgia and Alabama, and I want all of them,” she said, with a laugh. Starting with her home church, Mt. Lebanon Baptist Church in Chesapeake, Virginia, she has launched a campaign called “Adopt an HBC Near U,” inviting churches to partner with ��ñ�� in campus ministry.

“Students can become strong leaders in these congregations, but local churches need to begin to see how an integrated faith is necessary for students to grow and become mature believers,” she said.

She’s already well on her way to achieving her goal.

“Planting five of the 21 campuses in just three years has been amazing,” she said. “I can see that God is really moving.”

News Keywords

HBCU

Atlanta University Center

Virginia Commonwealth University

Off the Charts and Fitting Right In

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 19:02:03 +0000

News

Gordon Govier

Off the Charts and Fitting Right In

Chelir Grady tells people that she was created to be on staff with ��ñ��. “I love every moment of it,” she said. She loves it so much that she walked away from a lucrative and fulfilling engineering career with a generous employer because, “When I was at work I felt like I was wasting my time.”

Five years ago, Chelir had no clue that ��ñ�� existed. When she attended Texas A&M University her spiritual life centered on her church, where she started a Bible study for fellow students and recruited friends for the church’s Sunday School and choir.

She graduated in 2009 with a mechanical engineering degree and began working with an energy company. Her work took her to Salt Lake City and Atlanta, before moving her back to her hometown of Houston.

Her introduction to ��ñ�� came at Urbana 12, which she attended after starting seminary classes part time and going on a short-term mission trip to Peru. When she learned about the Urbana triennial student missions conference it seemed like a good place to learn more about missions. The third day of the conference she saw an invitation to a meeting to learn how to get more Black students to come to Bible study. Since she was leading a Bible study at her home, she decided to go.

At the meeting, Chelir was the one who ended up talking the most, sharing with the students who were there some of the Bible study tips that she had learned. The ��ñ�� staff in attendance wanted to know who she was and asked if she was on staff with ��ñ��. She said, “What’s ��ñ��?”

After the meeting, Chelir had a long conversation that ended with an invitation to join ��ñ�� staff. She brushed off the invitation, saying she had a job she liked that paid well and wasn’t interested in a job that called her to raise her own financial support.

But her curiosity was piqued. Back in her Urbana 12 hotel room, she researched ��ñ��. Chelir noticed the chapters at many Texas colleges but not at HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). Soon she was telling someone she would like to start an ��ñ�� chapter at Texas Southern University (TSU), an HBCU in Houston.

Chelir struggled with the idea of raising her financial support, until she realized that even a large energy company like her employer couldn’t provide unlimited job security. “If I’m putting my faith in something it should be in God,” she concluded, “because I know he will always provide.” When she got back to Houston, she told her employer she was quitting her job to go into vocational ministry.

The transition to ministry took longer than anticipated. Chelir’s employer offered to reduce her hours, saying they would rather have her part-time than lose her. She continued working at the energy company for two 10-hour days a week, and began ministering on campus for three days a week. On the weekends, she caught up on reading and wrote papers for her seminary classes.

Jason Thomas, ��ñ��’s Executive Vice President for Field Ministry, remembers interviewing Chelir when he was the Red River Regional Director. “Chelir was off the charts on our rating system, and we thought, ‘How is it possible for a non-��ñ�� person to score so high?’”

But with her church heritage (her grandfather and uncle were pastors), her volunteer church leadership roles during and after college, plus the home Bible study she led, campus ministry felt natural. The church she began attending near the TSU campus helped her meet the students and faculty that she needed to become a registered student organization and the TSU chapter was officially launched in the spring of 2014.

With her schedule of off-campus work, on-campus work, and seminary studies, Chelir has had to develop student leaders quickly and the students have responded. Growth has been steady and the chapter is now made up of about 75 core students.

At the end of 2016 she finally said goodbye to the energy company and started working full time on campus. She expanded her focus to another HBCU, helping plant a chapter at Prairie View A&M University northeast of Houston, and also began planting a Black Campus Ministries chapter at Rice University. Chelir discovered she liked planting: “I plan to be planting chapters forever because there’s always another campus you can go to.”

But Chelir’s vision for ministry ranges far beyond campus. Back at Urbana 12, Chelir happened to share a meal with a man who graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary in 1987, the year she was born. As they discussed her ministry plans, he challenged her with this thought: "What if God has invited you to train students who will one day be missionaries all over the world?"

This summer, Chelir is part of ��ñ��’s Global Program in Kenya to see if she can find a way to move forward on that other mission that God put in her heart at Urbana 12, to help Black students become missionaries to African countries. As ��ñ�� continues to pursue its mission of transforming students and faculty, renewing the campus, and developing world changers, Chelir has fit right in.

News Keywords

Texas Southern University