Tag: graduation

Giving Your Graduates a Book is Lame.

4.1.1Look, I’m sorry for offending you.  I know that gifting your graduates with a book is tradition.  At the risk of further infuriating you, I’m just going to come out and say it:   Your students don’t want a book.  They most likely won’t read it and even if they do they probably won’t remember what the book was about when they are struggling through the treacherous first two weeks of college.

For the first 6 years of my student ministry career my well orbed transition strategy included a nice Christian book about graduating, shaking the student’s hand during our church’s graduation ceremony, and an appropriate side hug.

Here’s the thing, our graduates don’t want or need a book.  However, they are desperate for REAL help in transitioning.  Consider replacing or adding to the book with these three crucial transition pieces.

A Hand-Off

We need to stop simply hoping that our graduates connect with a church or ministry and start actually connecting them.  Here’s what I do:

  • Make a list of all your graduates and what they are doing next year.
  • Learn where each school, military training facility, etc. is located geographically.
  • Research churches in the area.  Pick one similar to your church—or the church you wish your church was (ouch!)
  • Discover what campus ministries are active in the area.
  • Contact reps from churches and campus ministries and request that they contact your student in August, before they arrive on campus.
  • Do not give up until you find a good church or ministry who actually contacts your students
  • Follow up with your student to see how it went.
  • Add good ministry/church connections to your database for next year

A Mentor

The first semester of college is about as disorienting as it gets.  Students need a mentor to keep them grounded.  In our high school ministry, small group leaders transform into transition mentors during a student’s freshman year of college.  In order to achieve this we only hire volunteers who are committed to serving as a small group leader for 4 years and then we constantly vision them with Sticky Faith’s 4+1 concept.  Most leaders attach so strongly to their students after two years that they naturally commit to something much deeper and longer. 4+Life

A Care Package

Do you remember how awesome it was to get a care package from your mom when you were in college?  So good!  A few years ago we stumbled upon this idea and we’ve been doing it ever since.  The feedback we get from our graduates is incredible.  The key is to make sure the package lands within the critical first two weeks of college.  The goals are to remind them that we haven’t forgotten them, still love them and to encourage them to engage Jesus and plug into a church or ministry.  Here’s what we put in our care package:

  • A crap-ton of candy and snacks
  • A LifeLine thumb drive and lanyard.  On the thumb drive are digital devotionals.
  • A Starbucks Card (go to Starbucks…do devotional)
  • Letters from LifeLine staff and small group leaders (we still love you…GO TO CHURCH!)

So ditch the book and adopt these practices.  We must do more to help our students transition.  If you have other ideas that have worked well in your ministry I would love to hear them.

Ultimatum

A few years ago my boss read a couple books and became paranoid—this sort of thing is pretty common around my church.  He pulled me into his office and asked me a series of hard questions.

“How many of our graduates are plugged into a good church?”

“Uh, I’m not sure.”

“Where are our graduates going to college?”

“Umm…I know a few are going to [insert college] .”

“How many of our graduates have walked away from faith?”

“Uh…hopefully none?”

“What are you doing to ensure that our graduates will pursue faith beyond LifeLine (our student ministry)?

“Uh…I gave them a book and an appropriate side-hug?”

Needless to say, he wasn’t amused.  Then he gave me an ultimatum, “This time next year, I need to know the answers to each of these questions.” That’s how my boss works. He’s a genius thinker but he’s really annoying because he actually makes you do stuff.

Since I need a paycheck, I spent the next year researching, experimenting and finally implementing. Along the way I discovered a passion that keeps me up at night and gets me out of bed in the morning.  The question that haunts me is this, “Will my students pursue Jesus after high school?”  That was about 3 years ago.  Since then we’ve made significant changes to our ministry philosophy and structure.  We decided that we were unwilling to continue doing what wasn’t working.

Here my challenge:  do you know what happens to your students after graduation?  I mean, do you really know where each of them is going to college, what ministry they will connect with?  Will you or someone else walk with them through the transition?  How do you plan to encourage them throughout their transition?  If you don’t know the answers to these questions, (let’s be honest, most of us don’t) then we have some work to do.

The journey starts with an accurate assessment.  Ask yourself, what really happens to my students after graduation?  Where do they go?  What does their faith look like?  Take some time to learn the truth and then develop a strategy to respond to what you learn.  The good news is that you probably don’t need to reinvent the wheel because there is a ton of great research out there on the issue of transition and faith fade.   Keep reading this blog and I’ll share some of what we have learned.