Podcast Episode: Reflecting on Four Decades of Campus Ministry
For forty-four years, Steve Hinkle has presented the Christian gospel at Duke and other campuses as a leader in the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship campus ministry. Along the way, he has served as a staff member for the Christian Medical and Dental Association and as interim Religious Life director for Duke Chapel—and also gave up driving his car for a year. This summer, he will retire with decades of wisdom and a network of hundreds of former students he has pastored and encouraged. In this episode of our Sounds of Faith podcast, we sit down with Steve to learn lessons from his ministry and find out what he hopes to pass on.
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Learn more
- Watch Steve Hinkle's Ash Wednesday sermon in Duke Chapel
- Visit the Duke Graduate Christian Fellowship website
Transcript
James: Welcome to Sounds of Faith, a podcast exploring traditions of faith, sacred music, and spoken word here at Duke University Chapel. After more than 4 decades of campus ministry, Steve Hinkle is retiring this summer. An area director for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Steve supervises and supports fellow campus ministers in serving graduate students and faculty here at Duke as well as 7 other universities in the region. In addition to his work with InterVarsity, he has served as a staff member for the Christian Medical and Dental Association, and as interim religious life director here at Duke Chapel.
At this year's Ash Wednesday service, Hinkle closed his sermon with this message.
Steve: The God who is unseen, he sees you. He knows you. He pursues you. He forgives you, and he loves you. Come as you are. Come with all you are. Come with all you have. Nothing hidden, nothing unsaid. Come to God's throne and know that it is a throne where you are welcome, where you are forgiven, where you are his now and for eternity. Thanks be to God.
James: I'm James Todd, director of communications here at Duke Chapel, and I am here with Steve Hinkle to learn from his 44 years of campus ministry. Steve, welcome to sounds of Faith.
Steve: It's good to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
James: We just heard you proclaiming the gospel in your sermon at Ash Wednesday service here at Duke Chapel this year, and I have a feeling over 4 decades of campus ministry you have proclaimed the gospel in many ways to many people in many situations, but I'm wondering is there a kind of core message that you have when you have the chance to present the gospel? How do you articulate it?
Steve: Well, the end of that sermon is one of the ways I really try to articulate it, because that verse or set of verses in Hebrews 4 has been an important kind of marker for me. Just reminding people especially students who are in the midst of strife and self-examination and fear and shame and joy and elation, that they're seen and known and that there's an invitation waiting for them.
James: Has that evolved over your decades in campus ministry? You sort of started with 1 emphasis of the gospel and you're ending with another?
Steve: I would say, yeah. When I first came to the university as a student in '77 at NC State University, I was a brand new Christian, I was excited, I got the gospel from verses in Romans, and just kind of wanted to throw a bunch of scripture at people and hope some of it stuck. In the early days I would say, this was at the kind of tail end of the Jesus movement, people started with their questions. Is this true, is it real, did Jesus really rise from the dead, did he really ascend, is there any evidence for the resurrection. Those things, much more a heady approach.
I would say now people start with their fear and angst rather than their questions. Is this a place I can belong, is there anything good for me here? so it's much more personal and not necessarily intuitive, but relational and emotional as a starting point, and most of the apologetics I see out in the university world now are mostly for the Christian students who faced questions and wonder, is there a good answer for these? So for them, the question is, will my faith stand up under scrutiny? And I think those kind of apologetics help them answer that question, yes.
James: That actually anticipates 2 of the questions I was going to have, so 1 was, have you noticed trends in students over time, and so you're talking about this shift from the more intellectual seeking to a more kind of relational belonging. Are there other trends that you've seen, or how have you noticed that trend?
Steve: Yeah, I would say 1 trend is that the church is on different trends. There's a part of the church that's made that move toward understanding how the culture has shifted, and I think there's other parts of the church that are like, this is how we learned to do it and so we will continue to do it the way we've learned it, and there are people who come to faith in a variety of ways, and people from outside American culture as well. I once had a Chinese student tell me, "I want to become a Christian, but I have these 5 questions." And so for him it was very much an academic and an emotional journey. He knew what he wanted, but there were hurdles in the way.
The task of evangelism or witnessing then was to help him over those hurdles.
James: You talked about the intellectual piece. You're working at university campuses. I have to think that that's a constant in some way of young people having questions that they're wrestling with, so what are some of those questions and where do you point people to?
Steve: Right. Some of those questions, I think, are lifelong journey questions. Is Jesus the only way is one of the things, and that becomes a real barrier for this generation, especially the current generation.
James: Why is that?
Steve: Anything that's going to leave anybody out, or claims to some exclusive understanding of reality of the future is seen as kind of arrogant or narrow, and so that then Christianity for them if that's where you spend all your time would be dead in the water.
James: What's your response then to that?
Steve: Well, for you, the question of what about all the others matters less, because here you and I are, so this is your chance to explore what Jesus said, what he did, how the people around him reacted, how he treated others, and how he called us to treat one another, the creation and the world, and how to respond to him, so trying to draw it back from those giant questions that you may spend the rest of your life, even as a Christian, trying to sort out, and so you don't have to sort all that out now, but what you want to sort out is your own sense of truth and calling of encounter with God, not in isolation from others.
That's what cults do. Don't pay attention to your parents or wherever you grew up, just listen to me, but with a genuine examination and an offer to God to say, show me yourself, because I want to know you, and so that's how it has shifted for me.
James: You work with graduate students, so I'm guessing that they have specialization in a field, and may have some real particular intellectual questions about the church in the 16th century, or what about molecular building blocks of creation? How do you explore the faith with graduate students?
Steve: That's a really good question and with faculty too, so we have a whole side of things that interact with faculty. One is you have to be humble and not pretend like you understand everything about their world. This is a good fit for someone like myself. I'm a generalist but I also like to figure out how things fit together, and so that's helpful as you're talking with people who are economists and radiologists and molecular biologists and particle physicists, and an occasional philosopher. Although I would say the humanities there are fewer Christians who end up in those places. I think intellectually it's a little bit less hospitable than it is for the scientists.
James: Interesting, so there's this kind of faith and science tension, but you're saying your observation is that you find more Christians in the sciences on campus than in humanities. Right. Why do you think that is?
Steve: Because I think once you get through that, once you decide about the kind of creation evolution, that's a lot of where the science stuff debate happens, and a way of reading, for some a way of reading scripture, that God is the initiator of all that is in the imagination, the creator but the early sections of Genesis really weren't trying to be a scientific explanation. If you end up in that field, then you move on to do the science because once you're through that initial kind of barrier, then nobody cares what you think about those things. You could be a young earth creationist, but if you understand the thermodynamics of this protein folding, then you can help us solve the science.
Once you're into science, those kind of meta-narrative questions kind of fade to the background.
James: How is that different for humanities?
Steve: Because I think those questions are at the center of the humanities. How do you make meaning in life? What is true? How do we relate to each other? How do you understand knowledge? How do you understand the difference between knowledge and hope? Because those are uncertainty and confidence. Humanities parses the words very carefully, and so in that domain you have to be more careful in what you say, and then in the religious domain you have to be more careful.
I always jokingly say, if I have a Baptist friend who asks me if I know I'm going to heaven, I'll say yes. If I have a non-believing friend who asks me if I know I'm going to heaven, I'll say I hope so. It's a hope that has been at the center of my life. I organize much of my life about all that I hope for in Christ, in full expectation that what I hope for now I will 1 day know with certainty, but now it is a hope, because who hopes for what he already has, which is another scripture text.
James: Yes. Looking through the glass darkly[?].
Steve: Yeah, so there's that sense of understanding the way the culture parses words and being careful, and giving room for people to be on a journey toward confident hope.
James: Yeah, and you talked about ministering both to graduate students and faculty. That's your purview now.
How did you come to that part of the university population? So much campus ministries with undergrad students, but how did you come to I guess we'll say, specialize in graduate students and faculty?
Steve: That's a good question, so I worked for 5 years at UNC Wilmington just with undergraduate students. That was the beginning of my intervarsity career from '82 to '87, and then I went to seminary. I went to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, did an MDiv because that would open the most doors for my future, but I had an agreement with intervarsity that I could come back, and the intent was that I would become an area director and start ministry in South Carolina. The state was fairly undeveloped. Well, my boss felt like there wasn't funding for that, so I was thrown back into the wind and there were 2 options in front of me.
One was area director in Florida for the north half of Florida, and the other was the undergrad position at Duke, so it was apples and oranges. I'd always loved Duke University. When I was a student at NC State I actually used to come to intervarsity meetings here at Duke. One of my friends was sweet on a young woman here and wanted company, so I went with him and loved it and I'd always enjoyed Duke students at some of our camps and conferences, so about 3 days before I had to announce my decision, a letter came from the president of intervarsity, and it was just saying here's what's going on in the movement, and just as 1 paragraph about the fact that on a few campuses, they were beginning work with graduate students as an intent to kind of pay attention, not just to the fish in the pond but to the pond itself.
The graduate students who become faculty then are permanent part of the university, and if we can begin early on to shape their imagination for how to do that in a way that's faithful to Christ, then you'll have done a lot long-term within the university world, and I thought, I need to do that and if I go to Duke I probably can, so I came to Duke as the undergrad staff, but with the intent of starting graduate work here at Duke, and so we had a Bible study off to the side. There was an amazing group of people. One of them's a national apologist. Brian Miller, who was just here at Duke doing evangelistic outreach. Craig Keener, who teaches at Asbury Seminary now, and has written tons of great scholarship on New Testament work.
He was a part of that small group when he was a PhD student, and one is a missionary who had served in Eastern Europe for years and years, and he was in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, has just returned and is now on the staff of ISI, International Students Incorporated here at Duke. Was one of those students in that little Bible study.
James: I imagine you have an alumni network that goes far and wide for 44 years of campus ministry.
Steve: Yes. I would say that's true, and it's a delight. I'm proud of who they are. I'm pleased to have walked with them along the way, although most of who they are is shaped by the Lord and their community and their own seeking after Christ in the company of others.
James: Yeah, we were talking about your early days of campus ministry, so can you talk about your calling, and as part of that, explain a little bit about InterVarsity. How did you end up with InterVarsity? What is their approach to campus ministry?
Steve: That's a good question, too. You're good at that.
James: Well, that's what we're here for.
Steve: Yeah, I was brought to Christ in a United Methodist Church in Brevard, North Carolina, where I grew up. I grew up in a family that was nominally Christian, and we went to church some when I was younger, and once in a while Christmas and Easter, Christians and if you asked my parents about what they believed, they would say, yeah, I agree with that. I've got no problem with that, but it wasn't shaping who they were. and so I hadn't been to church in years, started going to this Methodist Church and the counsel and encouragement of a friend who wasn't a Christian, but they've been helpful to him.
Was introduced to Christ, went on a silent retreat up to D.C at Dayspring, this Church of the Savior retreat center up there, and sometime during that time I said yes to Jesus.
James: Yes. This is high school.
Steve: High school. This is high school, senior year of high school, 1970, December of '76, so it wasn't like a moment thing. It was just like, I know. I went in having understood the gospel, wrestled with it, but there at least I got to see a community that felt like we're embodying what I would hope to see if this was true. It was a great encouragement to me, because there was a sense of if this is true, then the church ought to look like this, and the church I was in as much as I loved it didn't look a lot like that, and I'm like, oh, this is what faithfulness to Christ can look like, and so the pastor that was running that youth ministry encouraged me, he said, "When you get to state, look up InterVarsity."
It was basically that 1 bit of advice and I said, okay,
so I saw a flyer about an ice cream social. I went to that. The next night 2 guys knocked on my door and invited me to a Bible study. I'm in church with one of those 2 guys now, and he lives in my neighborhood, and that was the entry point. Just got involved, started learning, growing. I was a chemical engineering and pulp and paper science double major.
James: At NC State.
Steve: Lots of time. At NC State, heavy class loads, lots of science, math, but my advocation kind of grew more and more on the ministry side. After my first year, I actually wanted to quit and go to Bible college.
James: What would your parents say to that?
Steve: They said, huh? Are you sure? They said, we know a lot of people thought they were going to be ministers and now doing fairly low level jobs at DuPont. We would hope for something better for you, and he said, so if you finish your degree and decide to do something different, we'll support you in that, and so I always say I searched the scriptures, I found a lot about how God gives you wisdom and good guidance through your parents. Not much about going to Bible college, so I took their advice and that was great advice because I learned how to be a Christian in a non-Christian context, where Bible college would have been following Christ with everybody agreeing with me, so that was helpful.
James: What about how would you describe InterVarsity's approach to campus ministry? Obviously you've got the early nod to it and stuck with it, so why did you stay with it for all this time?
Steve: Good question too. Well, so when I graduated from my engineering degree, I'd pretty much decided I wanted to go into ministry. I'd worked at DuPont during my summers. I worked for a chemical company right after I graduated in Raleigh, but I'd applied to InterVarsity staff and it had accepted. It was a tough one because I really value life in the kind of non-ministerial vocations. If I didn't I wouldn't be working with grad students. We don't recruit them to come on staff or to go be ministers. We call them to go be faithful to Christ as an engineer, as a physician, as a lawyer, as a business person, as a researcher, as whatever it is that they're studying, and so I loved it.
I loved the university world. I was convinced that ministry in that place, just the faithful presence of Christians could at least help people imagine what it would look like to follow Christ as an intellectual. That it was possible to have a robust faith in Christ and a deep curiosity and learning and research about the world, and all that inhabit it and hold those 2 things, not in opposition, but actually in a way that it's resonance and reinforcement.
James: I want to take a little turn here, which is in 2009, you got a call from the then Dean Sam Wells of Duke Chapel, said, "We need to talk." And he asked you to serve as director of religious life in a part-time capacity, which is convening and guiding all twenty four of the religious life groups here on campus, which is a huge range of faith, and so I'm wondering about what that experience was like for you being the interim religious life director.
Steve: It was a challenge to say yes to that.
James: Why?
Steve: Well, I'm a Christian exclusivist. I'm like, I believe that hope is found in and through Christ and that he is our only hope, and so how do you step into a job that not only encourages the groups that would say that with me, but those who have radically different views and messages? On the plus side I had actually walked alongside 2 or 3 prior directors of religious life, and process that with them, and so I'd been working on kind of like how does a faithful Christian take a role of fostering, or at least extending welcome to people of contradictory faiths? Because one of the things I've loved about Duke is that there's a real clarity that we believe really different things.
You can't make an amalgam of them and have it make any sense. If you do that you've created just a new faith that says all the other faiths are wrong and we're right, so how do you do that? And hospitality was the place for me. I knew the staff, I knew I was a good choice because I had been around religious life for a number of years at that point. This was 2009, and I came in 1990, so I'd been around 19 years so I knew the staff well. I'd gotten to know Sam. I thought I could understand why he asked, so the place for me was the idea of hospitality. How do you welcome those with whom you may have significant disagreement, but you would fight for the right to be there?
I think every religious group that doesn't do harm to students, and you can talk about how wrong religion might do harm to somebody, but wrong religion isn't even the way I would choose to put it, but I would fight tooth and nail to make sure that they weren't excluded from campus and had a place on campus.
James: What did that look like? Was it how you ran meetings or were there kind of policy together?
Steve: InterVarsity is decidedly Christian. You asked me earlier about InterVarsity. One of the things I loved about it early on was there was a real clear core message and mission, but a lot of freedom and flexibility on each individual campus because it's rather indigenous. The staff role is to help raise up and prepare and guide student leaders, so the staff aren't in charge, the students are. Even if they're an InterVarsity chapter. The only power we really have is you have the right to use the name and you get a staff person, but otherwise it's your group, and so that's kind of a fun piece of it.
In one sense, there was something similar in the Director of Religious Life group. I wasn't in charge of their ministries, I was trying to extend hospitality and space for them to resource each other, to understand the context of our work so back then we had every other week Religious Life meetings, so we had people from the university come and speak from admissions to counseling and psychological services to the Women's Center, just trying to help 2 things. One is to help the Religious Life staff understand our context, who is it God's called us to minister to, but also so that those university leaders see the Religious Life staff and know that we're there, and that some of the things they work on and desire to see dealt with in student life.
Belonging, comfort, companionship, a place to process life, that was going on in all the Religious Life groups. and so we had resources to offer them, and so that was another important part so help us to care well for each other, and kind of be a professional society together and then build those connections with the rest of the university, and make sure everybody had their paperwork done and got their stipends.
James: Yes, that's right, administration.
Steve: You got space. Space is a thing that Religious Life staff have been striving after for a long time.
James: Yes. In serving that year as Interim Director of Religious Life, when you came back to focusing just on campus ministry for InterVarsity, is there anything that you changed or kind of was informed by being Religious Life Director?
Steve: It gave me a different kind of experience at the university. When I was religious life director is when the Haiti earthquake hit and Duke mobilized resources to try to help, and I was the chapel's representative, that added some work to my job. The chapel's representative to that kind of body, and so that gave me kind of see the way the university thought. It was really interesting as after a month or so they were like, "We're not really a rescue agency. We're an education institution. How do we educate our students to be able to respond to these kinds of needs in the world?" I loved seeing that, so I got to see some of the heart of the university.
It's hard to get them to articulate what exactly they're trying to make happen in the lives of students. There's a lot of programs that clearly have some purpose, but if you try to articulate the purpose nobody wants to claim it. I think in some ways you're held accountable to whatever end you name, but if you never name it you could have some freedom to kind of aim at a lot of things, but that sense that we want to be able to prepare students to offer assistance and help in moments like this. How do we do that? I thought that was brilliant.
They named a few places in the university where university employees were helping, and it struck me, I just happened to know the 2 main employees they named, and they were both believers who had a long-term. One had a long-term relationship in Haiti. The other was an engineer who had had the practice of taking students into places that needed help, and using their engineering skills to solve a problem there, so it was interesting to me to find Christians in those places of need and help.
James: At the university, yeah. Another interesting twist in your time at Duke, so 2011 you entered a contest to win a free bike in exchange for giving up your car and not driving for a year. I don't know if this was a faith-related endeavor but it stands out, it's something notable, and I'm wondering what was it like to not drive for a year?
Steve: I'd say doing that only made sense in a Christian vision of kind of the foolishness and folly of men. No, I had been a runner, run some marathons in my 40s, then 3 knee surgeries, and long story short, I started riding, and I once in a while would commute to Duke and I loved it. I lived maybe 4 miles away on Coal Mill Road and it was a good way to get around. It was actually faster to get to my office on a bike than in a car and park and walk, and so I tried it but I kept failing. I would do it 3 times and then 3 months later, I would do it a couple more, and so I heard about this Tour de Fat. It's a new Belgian brewing company event they used to do.
They would send a group of their employees and they would put up this wonderful kind of almost vaudevillian show. There was a couple of sponsored bike rides, there was some giveaways, but the pinnacle was this car for bike trader, and you had to submit a video of why they should pick you, and the trade-off was that you'd donate your car and they'd sell it and give it to local bike charities, and they would give you a nice commuter bike, handmade black sheep bike and you were to use that bike, and drive for personal transportation, and you got to blog and get involved in some local bike charity.
James: Did you do it? Yeah.
Steve: I submitted the video and lo and behold they picked me, and I think I'm still maybe one of the only people that was in their 40s and right at the end of their 40s and no piercings, no tattoos.
James: Okay. It was a different culture.
Steve: Everybody who succeeded me in that, so they did it like 4 years in a row in Durham and everybody was 20s, some graduate students, but I did and they picked me, so yeah the car I had, to be honest, was an old Toyota Corolla. It was probably worth less than the bike that I got. but I donated and it was, and I did some local bike advocacy work. It was actually I was interviewed on a TV show in Raleigh, so I had to get there, put my bike on the bus and take the bus and bike to the shop early enough to not be sweaty, and I had to figure out how to do life and ministry that way.
We would hold dinner for thirty graduate students on campus every Friday night, and I would do all the grocery shopping for those dinners. I would get the non-perishables in on Mondays and swing by the Harris Teeter on the way to campus and I bought a printer one time at Costco and bungeed it to the back of my bike. I'm an engineer still at heart, so I like to figure out how to do stuff that might be a challenge. It was fun but also when I had an opportunity to speak, the Christian connection was really about creation care, and I thought that was a unique voice in some parts of Christianity at least, that isn't necessarily let's save the planet.
Not fear of the loss of humanity or what it was really a sense of, we are stewards of what's been entrusted to us, and we have a whole planet that is in one sense part of the domain in which we must nurture, and help it bring fruition and flourishing to all that live here, human and non-human alike, so I had some chances to talk publicly around the Christian call to care for creation and to steward it well. It's in the counter narrative for the dominion idea that we rule over it and can use it as we want.
James: Receive and cultivate a gift given. Now you are coming up on retirement this summer, and so it would have been 44 years, so you may still be in the thick of campus ministry, but I'm wondering if you're starting to reflect on the journey and milestones or key moments, like are there sort of insights bubbling up as you approach retirement?
Steve: Yeah. One is just gratefulness, so we already have somebody taking my place now as the area director for the Virginia and North Carolina graduate and faculty ministry staff. It'd been one of my supervisees at Old Dominion University. He's from Cameroon as an American citizen now. Just delightful leader and gifted and visionary and I'm thrilled, and then locally the staff was covering some of the graduate work here, left to take a science job. She did her PhD here in cell biology. One of the few who went from science to campus ministry, but there's already somebody lined up to take my place here at Duke. She's quite gifted, has a PhD in Semitic languages from Harvard and MDiv from Gordon Commonwealth and great ministry skills.
She can nerd out and she can pastor and lead so I'm thrilled to have both of those important roles for me they've both gotten upgrades in my sense, so I'm grateful for that. I'm actually writing up a lot of things for InterVarsity around the work of being an area director, some of the ideas around building communities on campus, because that's really the goal and probably the central witness idea behind InterVarsity is to create not just events, but to create a community of people who follow Christ together and invite others to join them, and it's as straightforward and simple as that, so how do you build those communities? How do you give agency to students?
I'm working right now on the area direct some resources for the area director position on how do you care for staff? Could you get a good staff you want them to stay if the Lord wants them to stay. If he doesn't want them to stay, you want them anyway, so how do you help make their life one of a flourishing, meaning agency care company along the journey so that, so that they are both equipped and freed up to do their work, so I'm doing some writing around that and then around membership. Duke does the same thing. They're all the focuses on developing leaders. Not everyone, this is a little known secret. Not everyone can be a leader.
Not everyone's a leader everywhere they go. You might be a leader somewhere, but you're a follower somewhere else, a member so what does robust membership look like? How do you call people to it? So when someone says in the Graduate Christian Fellowship, why doesn't GCF do X? And I'm like, I'm like, who's GCF? There's no GCF out there that does stuff for you. It's you, and so that kind of entrepreneurial possibility, if you really want to see that happen, I'll help you find some others who would like to see it happen too, and we'll find resources and go for it, so part of my task this last year is trying to get some resources to paper, and then you kind of cast them into the ether, because you never know whether they'll actually ever be used or not.
James: The next question is, what would you pass on to someone early in a campus ministry career? And you're starting in on that, but are there kind of bullet points in your head that you're thinking of that you want to get out there?
Steve: Gosh, there's a lot.
James: Top 3.
Steve: Yeah. I think managing up is one of the skills for staff, especially for staff and also even for students. I had a student one time come into me and say, "Sometimes I come in with some things I like to talk about and we're through our time and I haven't gotten to talk about them." He said, "It would be helpful to me if you would ask me at the very beginning, are there things on your agenda?" And so it changed my practice and I'm like, that was a real gift that it's hard to do that when you're a student, to kind of say, you're not doing things the way I prefer, and then as a staff to be, to listen to that too, so be able to receive feedback well, but also learn what kind of a manager, I don't like that term at all.
A staff leader, do I have, how do I receive the best that they have to offer? And how do I find what they don't offer in other places? That for staff can become really important. How do I find my people on campus? When I was first year InterVarsity staff at UNC Wilmington, 2 Christian faculty members took me under the wing and met weekly with me and prayed for me, and these were a couple of men who they were both men and I was like 24, 23 and I'm like, what a gift to find those people who will come alongside you and help you understand the context where you're working and understand the rest of your life, so that's 1 but equip students, free them up to do their work. Faculty are a different bear. Their life is really, really full.
How do you then understand the context of your campus? So if you want to work with faculty, you don't invite them in general to a weekly prayer meeting. You might get a few who want to do that who are all prayer warriors, but most things for faculty we're going to do a book study for 4 weeks on this book, and then it's going to be over. Short-term commitments that I can say yes to if you ask me for anything long-term, I can say no, and then the other thing I think for graduate students is you need a core, but you want a really large fringe. It's fine if people just show up for the talk that's interesting to them, so giving that kind of freedom because a lot of grad students are married, they got kids, maybe they're holding down a part-time job.
Maybe not, but their work is. For PhD students, it is a full-time job. so giving them freedom when this is what they need to come to what's helpful without shame and without the sense of not really, you shouldn't be here because I'm not a part of this thing. You are a part and so have that fringe, invite people into the core but not with a sense of obligation and shame, so that's been good. I think it's helped the group be a place of freedom instead of pressure, so building those kind of communities I think is important.
James: A final question as you're approaching retirement, is there a scripture verse that you've been turning to, mulling over, that kind of summarizes where you're at, where you're going, where you've been?
Steve: Gosh, that's hard. I always go back to Hebrews 4, that was the text at the end of my Ash Wednesday service. For me personally, that's been a really important one. I've memorized it years ago and recite it to myself when I need to hear it.
James: Will you recite it now?
Steve: Yeah, first is the scary part. There's nothing in all creation hidden from God's sight. Everything is naked and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom he must give account.
James: Yes, God sees all.
Steve: God sees it all. That's a scary thought and I realize in me, sometimes I act as if I can kind of get off stage or behind the curtain and I can act there and then I'll come back on stage and be a pious Christian person. There's no behind the curtain, there's no off stage so that's helpful for me in terms of living a more genuine and true life before the Lord, but then we don't have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tested in every way just as we have been, yet was without sin, and then there's a therefore, let us draw near to the throne of grace that we might receive grace and find mercy in our time of need, so the connecting of those 3 things, of being seen.
Of drawing near and finding grace, has been probably what I want the people around me to experience, and that's what kind of motivates me in a lot of ways. That's the individual thing. On the grander side, InterVarsity GFM kind of lives out of Jeremiah 29. The Jews are in exile in Babylon. Not that the campus is exile but it's not a Christian place. It's a place where Christians are. Many are but it's not organized around Christianity, and so we are aliens and strangers in the world, but the command to those people, rather than kind of twiddle your thumbs or grumble, it was seek the welfare of the city. Marry, have kids, build businesses.
In the city's flourishing, you too will flourish and so that's part of our posture on the university campus. Not culture warriors, but people who seek the welfare of the campus and who have a vision for what that might look like, but don't have power. We're not in charge. We are just part of the population trying to create a space of grace and mercy, of kindness, and of the pursuit of truth.
James: Wonderful. Well, Steve Hinkle, thank you for sharing your insights of 4 decades of campus ministry and best wishes and every blessing in your next season of life.
Steve: Thank you, James. Appreciate it.
James: Steve Hinkle is an Area Director for InterVarsity Christian Fellowships, Blue Ridge Graduate and Faculty Ministries. This has been Sounds of Faith from Duke University Chapel. Learn more about the chapel's mission, ministry, events, and programs at chapel.duke.edu.
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