1987 The establishment of office of Spiritual Development ushers in new era of ministry and outreach.

The students were spiritually hungry for more than just chapel, however. They were a participant generation, unwilling to simply sit back and be preached-to. They came from churches with youth ministers, with summer teen programs, and had an appetite for involvement. President Bond invited Norm Shoemaker to come to campus to upgrade and expand the student ministries program. When Shoemaker first arrived he took part in LEAD Week, a pre-school week of prayer and bonding and preparation for the new school year by all student body officers and residence assistants. That first week was a "true work of God." There was an energy that created an upswing on the campus. Shoemaker felt that those who had been involved in campus ministries before were marginal, and not a strong influence on campus. Now the campus just seemed ready and these groups and their norms of Christian seriousness and service could become the main current on campus.

Shoemaker and his ministries groups were to become new norm-entrepreneurs (a term for those seeking to establish new norms for a group) for the campus. They had to build and raise the visibility of the new norms, then expand the groups widely enough that the norms would cascade across the campus, growing in size until they became institutionalized as the norms of the campus culture.

To his small office Shoemaker brought a career of dealing with young people, and soon expanded student ministries. Project YES brought high school students together with college students for a spring break ministries program on the Navajo Indian reservation. The Wednesday night Bread Board had ceased to operate, so Shoemaker created a new Wednesday evening service he called TimeOut. It was a time of singing and testimonies for 200 to 400 students. It was followed each week by a time of discussion and teaching. The central importance of TimeOut was reflected in Shoemaker referring to it as the "central heating unit" of the campus.

Bond began to see a new possibility for a Nazarene campus, and created the office of Director of Spiritual Development for Shoemaker. That office would oversee and coordinate the chapel, campus ministries, and summer ministries into a high-powered force on campus.

What was happening? This generation of college leaders who had come of age in the 1950s while reacting against the church culture of the 1940s understood that deep and broad spiritual growth does not come from outside the students, from efforts to generate fear and guilt. It comes from an infrastructure of means of grace that invites students to open up to God's Spirit and purposes. The tension for campus spiritual leaders is between recognizing where students are and the challenge of where they are to grow. "We have them for four years," Shoemaker said, and we have to ask, "what we should do and have them work toward during those years." For him, those goals were best expressed in upward, inward, and outward spiritual growth.

From Promise and Destiny: Grace in the History of Point Loma Nazarene University, by Ron Kirkemo 2001


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