I Am a New College Student. How Do I Balance My Education and My Ministry in the Church?
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How can college students balance their education with their service and ministry in the church? 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're wanting to know how can they balance their workload in school with their desire to serve and minister in their local church? 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're 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 investment. 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, 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 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's a CPA, and he loves to teach Sunday school.
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