Mentoring an Embodied Faith

Bill Van Groningen, the chaplain and dean of spiritual formation at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Ill., is a man with lots of energy and ideas and for his work he recently received the Dana Walling Award from the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU).

The award honors college chaplains who find creative and compelling ways to integrate the Word of God into the lives of students, regardless of their religion or lack of it.

Named after a leader who devoted much of his career to caring for others, especially in hospice, the Dana Walling Award fits Van Groningen for his extended service as a chaplain and as a leader and visionary mentor for students.

In some ways, this bushy-bearded Christian Reformed chaplain is a seer. He helps students see beyond the normal; he is someone always showing his students that God is at work on the edges; God is not only in the church; God is alive and well in the relationships you have and in the dreams you are dreaming. God is not limited to where you think God is.

 “I heard God calling my name when I learned of this position,” said Van Groningen. “Becoming the chaplain, I envisioned the campus community in terms of the way of Jesus and how we can be guided with grace and truth in connecting with one another and our neighborhoods.”

Campus ministry is not a traditional youth ministry or even crisis pastoral care. Rather, added Van Groningen, “I’m trying to nurture a culture in which the whole community is a diverse mix of students, staff, and faculty turned toward mission.”

In a letter acknowledging the award, Trinity President Kurt Dykstra helped to put this chaplain’s role into context: “I am confident Bill will receive [the award] with great gratitude, genuine surprise, and a generous humility,” said Dykstra. “Those are the attributes that we see, every day, in Bill. Those attributes, not surprisingly, are also evident in the ways in which Bill has molded and shaped Trinity’s campus ministries program and its culture.”

Trinity Christian College is a member of the CCCU, a higher-education association of more than 180 Christian institutions around the world. With campuses across the globe, including more than 150 in the U.S. and Canada and more than 30 from an additional 18 countries, CCCU institutions are accredited, comprehensive colleges and universities.

“I have seen a sea change in the church in our changing world,” said Van Groningen.

Though he worked for the Christian Reformed Church as the Home Missions director of ministry development for a time, he was eager to take the job at Trinity because of the challenge of working with young people., those on the edge of the sea change.

He has learned that college students, in large part because of today’s endless array of possibilities for spiritual inquiry, are willing to explore what has been stable and enduring across the ages. Contrary to what some people might think, they are open to being formed by “old spiritual practices” and contemporary mentors.

Van Groningen also saw that he could serve to guide students deeper in Scripture and into the Reformed faith and help them see how those things can deeply form a person’s personal faith, as well as how that faith can be lived out on campus and in the world beyond. Faith, he firmly believes, can be rich and in some ways mysterious — and yet also provide the ground on which we stand.

“Campus ministry requires a person to faithfully persevere in planting seeds and then, over time, to behold and encourage and see the new fruit that appears,” said Van Groningen.

Along with his student ministry leaders, Van Groningen pays close attention to students with emerging gifts for spiritual leadership. Then together they look at further developing students’ spiritual formation. “I pay careful attention to a person’s character and the quality and presence of faith that are evident there,” he said.

The goal is to create an embodied culture in which members of the community grow deep in faith and then out of that faith live in the world in the ways of Jesus.

In an article that appeared in the Apr. 26, 2013, issue of Comment magazine, Van Groningen asked about the “thread” that holds things together. Quoting author Joan Didion, he said, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

But he laments that young people in the emerging generation frequently lack cohesive stories. They “live in a world without such threads, such metaphors,” that can help to form overarching stories. Instead, they are plagued with endless and mostly fleeting possibilities, he said.

In his work Van Groningen seeks to offer opportunities for students to discover those stories — because all us have stories — and to share those stories and ideally be shaped by them.

In a world gone chaotic, we all tend to get caught up in the moment. Not surprisingly, therefore, the social, religious, economic, and political location of children and grandchildren is both hard to find and even more difficult to define, said Van Groningen.

 “There is no leading image, no guiding metaphor for our times.” Van Groningen wrote. “In such circumstances, we inevitably turn our attention to managing the obstacles and opportunities that arise as best we can.

“But in a world gone busy with the never-ending need to manage these ever-changing circumstances, perhaps we would do well to pause, gain the conversational wisdom of individual and institutional mentors, and in this way modestly, yet significantly, also redeem and renew the social architecture of our generational and institutional location.”

“The mantra of the moment,” said Van Groningen, “is not simply that everything is changing, and that the rate of change is more rapid than ever before, but that everything is uncertain.”

“The political world has polarized into platitudes that fail to placate or please anyone,” he added. “Churches are mired in scandal, denominations suffer steady decline, the faithful are no longer as faithful to theological traditions as they are to music and movements that help them feel good in the moment.

“How in the world does one offer leadership in the midst of such unrelenting transiency, possibility, decline, and drama? How could we even know what counts as fruitful or faithful leadership in times of such flux?”

Van Groningen spent his early years in Australia, his higher educational years in middle America, and his formative vocational years in Canada. He served as a campus minister at Queen's University, Kingston, Ont., for 17 years, and then spent eight years in leadership service with CRC Home Missions before coming to Trinity.

He said that a key approach he takes on campus to help students see a deeper, coherent story is to look at the Reformed faith, of which he wrote once in the Reformed Journal. He lets his students know:

“To be Reformed is to be caught up in this grand narrative. It is to live and move and breathe inside the world of this story. To be in this world is to be religious. It is to live attuned to the story or to wrestle in rebellion against it. There is no other alternative. To live and move and breathe is to bear witness, no matter what we are doing, where we are living, or how shallow our breathing. To be Reformed is to acknowledge that we live in totality (every part and the whole of us) before the sovereign Author of the story. We were made for such living; it is our mission. Each and every quirky one of us, every interest and skill, all our work and play is inevitably caught up in the story.”

“The students hear and learn about these deeply held values,” said Van Groningen. “The goal, even in this time of COVID-19, is for us to develop a community of learners committed to living out these embodied, spiritual values.”