Find Home

SUMMARY

Jeremy Smith, the college minister at Broadway Church of Christ, shared how Atlas Campus Fellowship has been diligently preparing for returning college students with numerous welcome events planned. He presented Atlas's vision to become "the most welcoming college ministry in Lubbock, Texas through radical hospitality," where every student feels "personally invited and genuinely seen." This vision is summarized in their motto: "find home."

Jeremy highlighted the unique challenges college students face: newfound independence, forming identities, competing worldviews, and different pressures depending on their school environment. Using the example of Apollos from Acts 18, he illustrated how the early church didn't treat young believers as "almost Christians" but instead welcomed them, taught them "more adequately," and empowered them for ministry. Jeremy challenged the congregation to overcome the subconscious barrier of seeing college ministry as less valuable because students' time is temporary, reminding them that everyone shares responsibility for creating a welcoming church where people can find home.

TRANSCRIPTION:

I am excited to be with you today. I hope you're excited to be here. I really appreciate everybody coming and joining us. If you're visiting today, we want to say welcome. We are glad that you're here.

If you don't know me, my name is Jeremy Smith and I'm the college minister here. And I've got an opportunity to talk to us today about the fact that college students are coming back next week. And I'm really excited about that. Atlas has been working really, really hard to get ready for college students coming back. If you don't know the college ministry of Broadway Church Christ is called Atlas Campus Fellowship, we have a little building that meets right down the street.

And you may be thinking that during the summer college ministry gets to take this huge break. All of the college students go home. And so you might think that the past two months we have been on vacation and have been sleeping in late and not having to do much and you would be absolutely wrong. We have been working really, really hard to get ready for college students. And in fact, if you had gone into my office over the summer at any point you would have seen my giant dry erase board with over a hundred different tasks that had to get done in order to get ready for college students coming back.

We have been working really hard. We have been praying a lot to get ready for it. And they are coming. Some of them are here today already coming back. But Texas Tex welcome week is going to be happening starting this week and we are going to be doing seven events and seven days to welcome college students back.

So we are about to hit our busiest time on Saturday we have an ice cream social that we're going to be hosting down at Atlas to welcome new college students. Get to meet some of the new freshmen at Texas Tech on Sunday. Next week we will be our first Sunday back and so we will be meeting down the street at Atlas and we're go going to be doing worship down there and we'll also have a, we'll be starting a new series that we're calling Messiah the Prequel in which we're going to be looking at Old Testament prophecies that talk about the coming of Jesus. So that's starting next week and then next week is also College Sunday. And so Broadway is going to be hosting college students.

We're going to be doing College Sunday. Carl's going to be preaching. Gary is going to be leading worship. It's going to be an awesome opportunity to kind of for us to celebrate the college students being Back. And in fact, on that Sunday, we are asking you as a church if you have a Texas Tech shirt or an LCU shirt or an Atlas shirt and if you’re comfortable, if you would wear that on that Sunday, we'd love to see our auditorium be filled with red, blue and green shirts to kind of support the college students coming back.

We're going to be doing that on Monday night. We're going toa be doing a game night that we're going to be hosting another way to meet new students in town. On Tuesday night, we're going to be at LCU doing the Get Busy Bash and getting to meet all the LCU students. On Wednesday morning, we're gonna do brunch on Broadway in which we're gonna be hosting lunch and breakfast foods down at Atlas. You saw the announcement for that.

If Shelly hasn't already sought you out to get donations, she's here today and she’s searching for you. So be sure to talk to her. And then Wednesday night we're gonna be starting back not this Wednesday, but that Wednesday we'll have our first Wednesday down at Atlas in which we’ll host - we’ll have a free meal for college students and we'll have worship. And we'll start a series on Wednesday night called Blessed Be, in which we are looking at the Beatitudes and centering on that throughout our Wednesday nights throughout the semester. So we are gonna get really, really busy really, really quick.

We have done all of this planning. We've already planned all the way throughout our semester with all the different events and things that Wen to do to make sure that college students in Lubbock, Texas, find a place to connect. And there is one thing left to do, and that is to talk to you as a church. Because our goal at Atlas is to help students find home. And we don't mean find home at Atlas.

We may find home in the church. And you are the church. One of the things that we are very intentional about talking with college students is that Atlas Campus Fellowship is not the church. We are a college ministry. If you ever come down on Sunday morning, we will not do communion down at Atlas because we want to communicate to students that the church is intergenerational.

And so we may have worship down there, we may have class down there, donuts and coffees. But we encourage our students to find and connect to a church. But that means that we have to have a church who wants to connect to them. And so what I want to do today is help us create a vision of College ministry to help us kind of think deeply as a church about what is college ministry and what is our role as individual members and contributing to having a college ministry. Over the summer, our leadership team and our staff met together to talk about what is our vision for atlas.

What if we, if ATLAS could become anything, what would it be? And we spent a long time in dialogue over the vision of atlas, our dream for atlas. And I wanna share a little bit of that with you today and talk about how you can help us achieve that goal. Atlas focuses on 18 to 23 year olds. Most of our students come from Texas Tech or LCU, although we do have some students who come from South Plains College.

We have some students who are not in school. They're taking a gap year, trying to figure out what they wanna do. We have some students who went to trade school and now are working full time. They come from a wide range of backgrounds. Some of our students are married, some of them are single, Some of them are going to be single for a while.

No, just kidding. In fact, some of them are engaged. In fact, actually, two of our students just got engaged this last week. Charlie and Jenna. If you know them, you can reach out to them.

They just got engaged. And so we have this wide range of backgrounds that our students are from. Some of them have grown up in the church their entire life. They've been participating in Bible studies, they went to LTC events, they did all of the things that you do in youth group, VBS, all these things that you do in children's ministry groups. A lot of our students have no church background at all.

They didn't grow up in the church. They were brought to ATLAS by a friend. They were converted at Atlas. And plugging in. Some of our students have really, really good church experiences.

And some of our students have very bad church experiences. They grew up in churches that were damaging and harmful to them and they thought they would never come back to faith. And then they decided that maybe they would give it a try again. And so they're learning to kind of cope and overcome those challenges that they had growing up. And not only is that diverse background happening at atlas, you can imagine what a Sunday morning or a Wednesday night class would be like.

Whenever you're talking to that diverse of a group. We spend a lot of time intentionally thinking about how we can actually communicate well to this group, but what it creates is this beautiful atmosphere of dialogue that happens where you have new people and older people asking questions, different life stages coming together to talk about what does it mean to be a Christian here today. And not only do you have all of that going on, but ades late adolescence, young adulthood in and of itself has a very unique aspect to it. This idea of becoming a young adult, moving out of your parents you house and into your own house and trying to become an adult for the first time has a lot of unique aspects to it that are challenges for college students. A lot of them are having independence for the first time.

They're moving out of their house, Some of them are moving 500 miles away. They're leaving their network, the families, the churches, the mentors, the friends that they had growing up, that they've known their entire lives. They're coming to a brand new place where they don't have any of that for the first time. They're forming new identities, they're meeting new friends, they're trying to figure out who they want to be, what they want to do with the rest of the life, who they're gonna marry, they're handling responsibilities, some of them for the first time. A lot of our college students work full time jobs and go to school full time, you can imagine.

And they have very active like social lives. So you can imagine that none of them are sleeping well. So if a college student doesn't show up on Sunday morning, that's why we can give them a little bit of grace for that. A lot of them are facing competing worldviews and how does the church respond in this? There is a tendency among college students for there to be a hesitation with churches.

College students can be very disillusioned with churches that seem too political, rigid or prescriptive because what they really long for, what they really want. You can imagine coming out of this background where everything in your life is changing and up in the air, what they're looking for is communities of kindness and understanding, communities of faith that can offer them something good, that can offer them some sort of connection beyond what they had. And a lot of our college students, depending on which school they come from, have very diverse challenges that are facing them. Texas Tech students have pressure from secularism and cultural pluralism. Secularism is this idea that God and faith are in general irrelevant to your daily life.

That you, if you want to go to church and you want to have a faith, okay, you can kind of compartmentalize that over here. But in the day to day life, God doesn't show up in your classes, he doesn't show up in your jobs, he doesn't really show up in your friend groups. You can do that kind of thing over there. But really the pressure is that God's kind of irrelevant today. It's kind of an old idea that older people have, but it's not really something that you really need in your life.

Cultural pluralism is this idea that there are lots of different ways to live, There are lots of different ways to be in the world, and every single thing is okay. There's nothing wrong. You just get to decide what you want to be, who you want to be, and that's okay. You get to be in charge. And this even shows up in the churches that they experience on Texas Tech campus.

I would encourage you, if you're ever up here during the week one day, to pick up some lunch and go sit outside the sub in what's called the free speech area and see the different types of Christians that show up out there. Because on one hand, you'll have a person standing literally on a soapbox shouting about how all of Texas tech students are going to hell because Texas tech is Sodom and Gomorrah. And across from them, you'll have this little table that has these little old Catholic nuns sitting at it with a little sign that says, ask a Catholic a question. They're like the sweetest people you'll ever meet, and they're sitting there ready to talk to you. The mormons will drive up on their bikes, they'll jump off, they'll ask you if you want to have a Bible study.

My wife was walking not too long ago through the mall area, and this group stopped him and said, hey, would you like to have a Bible study with us? And she goes, oh, actually, my husband is a minister, and so we already go to a church. And they snapped back at her and said, well, does he work on Sundays? Because if so, he's breaking the sabbath. And she was like, whoa, I didn't know where that came from.

And then they proceeded to tell her how the last four presidents have endorsed their church. And I don't really know who they're trying to recruit with that. There's a wide range there of the last four presidents, but that's the kind of cultural pluralism, Christian cultural pluralism that's happening on Texas tech campus every day. And it goes beyond just Christianity. LCU students, on the other hand, are swimming in a Christian environment.

They can struggle with having a nominal faith or spiritual apathy. Everything is Christian at LCU. You have chapels. You have required Bible classes to go to. You have club devos.

Everything that you do is Christian. You are surrounded by it. So if everything is sacred, then nothing becomes sacred. And they can struggle if they're not careful with misunderstanding what Christianity and what church is. One of the things that college ministers in town have been talking with LCU about is how do we help our college students understand that chapel is not church.

That there is a difference between doing Christian things and being a Christian. That just because you are surrounded by people who lead prayers and lead devos every day doesn't necessarily mean that that has become internalized in you. That they can borrow Christianity from the people sitting around them, borrow faith from the people sitting around them instead of developing faith themselves. Now, if you are looking at this list, you may notice that South Plains College is not on it. And that's what South Plains College struggles with.

Nobody knows about them. All the college students at South Plains College are like, do we even exist? Does anybody even care? We are in the shadow of all these other college ministries around town and they are looking for places that actually care about across the board. Students desire authentic faith.

This is what we see in our students. They genuinely want to grow. They are excited about gathering together and learning. They are serious. A lot times they're more serious than we are as full grown adults, as one of our students likes to call us.

They want genuine belonging. These are the things that they are searching for. And so how do we as a church help students find this in the midst of all of this background that's happening, in the midst of being pulled in different directions, or the pressure to compartmentalize your faith and not talk about it, or just everything's Christian. So I don't really need the church. What do we do as a church?

An ATLAS spent a lot of time thinking about this and we came up with a vision statement, our ideal future. If we could create any kind of culture, any kind of environment at atlas, what would it be? And this is what we came up with. The vision of ATLAS is to become the most welcoming college ministry in Lubbock, Texas through radical hospitality. We think that because of the blessings of having our building where it's at, right next to Texas Tex campus, the fact that you have donated to refurbish it and make it look beautiful, that we can become one of the most hospitable college ministries in Lubbock, Texas.

This is our goal. And here's how we want to do it. We want to do it by cultivating and experience where every student feels personally invited and genuinely seen. Where spaces are thoughtfully designed, barriers to participation are removed, shared ownership is encouraged, and every detail reflects A commitment to intentional care. This is our goal at Atlas.

This is what we've committed to doing. We summarize this with our moto find home. We want college students in Lubbock, Texas, to find home. And we, as a staff and as a leadership team, have committed to doing everything in our ability to do that. But the truth is, is that we cannot do this without your help, because the college ministry, off by itself, doing its own thing, is nothing unless it's connected to a church, to a group of people that also buy into this mentality.

We cannot make sure that every college student is genuinely seen, is invited to everything unless you are helping us see college students. We cannot help remove barriers to participation unless you help us invite college students to be a part of Broadway. And I'm not talking about a part, as in just sitting in the back and kind of being quiet and showing up, but I mean active participation. One of the things I'm excited for next week on College Sunday is that our college students are going to be helping with worship. You're going to see them up here participating in worship.

That we have a church that allows that. How do we, as a church, beyond just a college ministry, help people find home, Help college students in Lubbock find home. And I think in order to do this, we have to start breaking down some of the subconscious barriers that we have against college students. One of the things that you see over and over again that can become the biggest barrier to college ministries, college students really becoming ingrained in students, is the very fact that we know that their time here is transitory, it is temporal, that it's going to end soon. We see this every day at Atlas.

Every week, we have college students. We are expecting around 120 college students to come through our doors. And this semester, last semester at this time or last semester or, sorry, last fall semester, we took 96 students out to coffee. A lot of them, some of them returning, a lot of them knew where we sat down and got coffee with them. We are expecting to see 120 of those come through our doors.

Most of them will be in the next month and a half.

And we know that some of them, a lot of them will not find home at Atlas. Some of them will come for a semester and then they'll leave. Some of them will come for a day or two. They'll come and visit us one Sunday, maybe come back on a Wednesday, and then they won't come back again, and we won't see them again. Some of them, at best, they'll Be with us for four years before they move off and go somewhere else.

And it's really easy as a church, whenever you see this, this in and out revolving door of college ministry, to get discouraged or to think about it as like a lesser type of ministry because they're not placing membership here necessarily because they're not going toa be here long term. And that can be really damaging. You see, at Atlas, we have decided, we have believed that the Holy Spirit works and our college students, and that there will be times when the Holy Spirit will send people to us. And there will also be times when the Holy Spirit sends people away from us. And it doesn't matter whether or not somebody is coming for a day or coming for a week or a semester or four years.

Our vision doesn't change. Our goal is for them to find home. We will care for the college students that come through our doors. As long as they're coming through our doors, we will continue to care for them as best as we can. We often get coffee with college students who don't even go to church with us.

They'll go somewhere else, but they still want to get coffee with us. There are students who don't even live in this town anymore. They came for a year and then they dropped out of school. And they still call us and contact us. And we believe that is what it means to be radically hospitable, that their attendance doesn't determine how well that we help them find home.

And I love this picture and acts that Lauren read for us, this picture of Apollos coming and meeting with Priscilla and Aquila. Because one of the things that you see is that they don't see Apollos as this, like, almost type of Christian type of person. Like, oh, you're still young, you still need to learn. You know, why don't you sit on the bench for a while and kind of, you know, wait till you get a little bit older and then you can kind of participate. Apollos shows up and he is already preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.

He doesn't know everything, but he is already doing it. And I'm telling you, today our college students are preaching the gospel with their lives, with their words. It is not uncommon for our college students to go out and do Bible studies with people. They are passionate about it. Now imagine if Priscilla and Aquila had been like, oh, you know what?

Hey, let me kind of teach you. So you want, you come on in and you sit there and like, I'm just gonna teach you. And you just kind of be quiet and listen. And then whenever you're older, then you can participate. That's not what happens here.

They realize that Apollos doesn't know everything. They invite him into their home, and they begin to explain. Explain the gospel, not brand new, but more adequately. They are empowering them to do ministry. They are empowering Apollos to go out and do ministry.

They are encouraging him, not just saying sit and wait. And then the most amazing thing about this, when Apollos wants to go, when he's ready to leave, they don't say, you're not ready for that. You know, you need to still kind of get some more learning and stuff. They send him out with gladness. Now, I don't know how long Apollo stayed there, but what you see from this church, the early church, is that when somebody is ready to go, when the Holy Spirit, when God sends them somewhere else, while there is a bit of sadness there, a bit of mourning that maybe comes with that, they are excited for what's going to happen.

And it doesn't matter how long Apollos was gonna stay in their home. Their job was simple, to be hospitable, to open up their home, as long as God allowed them to open up their home. And I think that this is something we have learned at Atlas as a staff, that it doesn't matter how many people come through our doors, it doesn't matter how long that they are there. Our job is the same that while you're here, if you've made the decision to come and join us, we will do everything in our power to encourage you, to empower you, and we will celebrate the day. Whenever you get sent out to go and do whatever God has planned for you, we will celebrate that.

And I think that's something we can learn as a church.

You see, we have a thing called Friends Day coming up. And Friends Day is not about. For me, Friends Day is not about evangelism. It's not about filling our seats. It's definitely not about increasing the giving.

That's not what Friends Day is. For me, Friends Day is an intentional moment for us as a church to think about the people in our lives that do not have a home. Because what happens is that when you walk into this room on Sunday mornings, I do the same thing. The very first thing I do is I look for the people I know. I scan the room.

I look for where my wife's sitting so I can go and meet her. I look for my friends, and I shake their hands. I give people hugs. I ask Them crazy questions like, you know, how are your kids doing? How is your colonoscopy last week?

We ask them all these type of things to get to know them, see how they're doing. And then when it's over, we say goodbye to em. We say good luck on your colonoscopy coming up. And we go on, you know, and we go on our lives. Some of us, though, we come into this room and we see empty chairs and we think about the ghosts of the people who used to fill those chairs.

And we're haunted by the fact that they have left and they're no longer there. And those mindsets, while they're not necessarily bad, while we can still mourn for those things, those mindsets keep us from dreaming and imagining. When you walk into this room, just like when we walk into Atlas, I don't want you to just look for the people that you, your friends and your family that you see every day. I don't want you to look for the ghosts of the people that used to be here. I want you to see chairs, and I want you to imagine the type of people that would be here had they been invited.

I want you to think about the people in your life that don't get what you get every day, every week. I want you to think about the people who don't have somebody coming up and hugging on them and shaking their hands, asking how their kids are doing. Those are the people I want you to imagine. Because if it was me, I would want you to be imagining me. And I want your heart to break for them.

I want it to yearn from them. I want you to develop compassion for the people who don't know Jesus, who don't have the same hope that you and I have, that don't have the same family that you and I have. And I want your heart to break for him. Because if I didn't have a church home and I didn't have a risen Christ to look for, and I didn't have people praying over me, my heart would be breaking. And I can only imagine what it's like to go through this life lonely, not knowing where you belong, not having hope.

And there are people in our lives who don't have that. Friends Day is about that. It's about reminding us as a church that there are people that we walk by every day who need a church family, and all they need maybe, is an invitation. At Atlas, we deal with this every day because college students come and go, and I don't care if somebody shows up here. On Friends Day and then never comes back again.

Because it's not about that. I trust in the work of the Holy Spirit, that the work of the Holy Spirit is going to be working on that person, even if they're not going to church here. What I believe in is that it is up to us. It is our responsibility. If you have placed membership here, if you have said, this is my church, it is our responsibility to notice the people that walk into our church.

Because hospitality, you're either helping it or you're hindering it. There is no in between. Either you are noticing the visitors and reaching out and saying hi to them, or you're ignoring them. There is no in between. We are all responsible for making sure that the church is welcoming and encouraging.

We are all responsible. My focus is college students, but that doesn't matter. If a young family wants in, I don't get you to go. I'm the college minister. So whoever else, Caroline, Brian, you guys are over there.

I don't get to do that, right? I'd be fired if I did that right. You don't get to do that either. We are all in this together. We are all responsible for helping people find home at Atlas and at Broadway Church.

Christ, let's pray. God, we love you. And we thank you, God, that we have a church to call home. We thank you for the people who came before us, who created this place.

God, we remember those who came and we mourn for those who leave. God. But we ask, God, that you bring onto our hearts and our minds those who could be here if only we had invited on. God, as the college students come back this next week, Lord, as we get ready to celebrate them on next Sunday, God, we ask that you bless their lives. God, we pray, God, that you send them to us.

If there is anybody that we can serve, God, we ask that you send them to us. God, we are your vessel here on this earth. We are the bridgehead for your kingdom breaking in, God. And we pray and we ask Holy Spirit, that you guide us and help us to. To do that to the best of our ability.

It's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.