In 2001, Tim and Melissa Kern traveled to Helena from Dillon Montana with Curtis Cole, campus minister at University of Montana–Western (UMW) to check out Carroll College. Curtis and Delyn Freeman Cole were their XA pastors and mentors who invested years in them as students at UM-W. Tim and Melissa were 26 years old and were toting around their daughter Hannah Kern who was 1 month old. That day, God birthed in them a calling to pioneer Chi Alpha at Carroll College, a private Catholic campus. Pastors Ken Ross, Norm Christofferson and Paul Feuerstein were incredible mentors and supportive of XA along with so many other pastors in Helena and Montana that helped them start XA. Levi Mielke was their first student who transferred to Carroll to help the Kerns pioneer the ministry. Emily Roehm was their first full time associate staff and Haylee Petrusha and Haley Feuerstein were their first students to “give a year” back to XA at Carroll. Keith Elder, district youth director for Montana, challenged and appointed the Kerns to establish XA at Carroll College.
Nick & Haylee Petrusha and their team took over the ministry at Carroll College. Tim and Melissa received national missionary appointment in 2013, to relocate to South Bend, Indiana to pioneer another private Catholic University, University of Notre Dame and they have! They also began ministry at the Indiana University at South Bend and St. Mary’s College.
John Konkel is a Chi Alpha campus pastor at the University of Minnesota. When he started in 2005, he walked by frat row and God placed a burden on his heart. Was anyone reaching out to these guys?
He asked, “How does a campus minister (chaplain) get invited into frat houses, which have a stereotypical reputation for not being havens of morality?” John felt God impressed him to grab a toilet bowl brush, some cleaning supplies, and start making phone calls and knocking on frat house doors.
“I started by just cleaning toilets,” John says. “Then I grabbed a Chi Alpha student, and we spent the summer cleaning frat houses free; we’d vacuum, wash dishes, clean toilets, and while we were at it, we’d build relationships with those guys.”
“I wanted to pitch the idea of having a chaplain to a lot of the fraternities on our campus, but I needed an invitation to attend the yearly frat council meeting,” John said. He started by calling frat presidents, and one of them responded. The frat president wasn’t walking with the Lord, but something had been stirring in his heart to read the Bible. He thought having a chaplain for his frat would be a good idea. He took the idea to his chapter, and they voted on it. They agreed it was a great idea! That was 2007.
“For the next 15 years, every year, I’m permitted to attend the frat council meeting and pitch to all the frats the idea of having a chaplain,” John says. “What I’ve found is that after I make that pitch, especially the last three years, students have contacted me as they’re dealing with things like anxiety, depression, addictions, suicidal thoughts, alcohol — underneath it all is a hunger for Jesus!”
John shares that two years ago, he led 16 frat members to the Lord. Last year, in a unique COVID year, he led 20 to the Lord. This year, he’s already seen 38 frat guys make commitments to the Lord as their Savior in just the first semester!
“I could speak at a chapter last week, my last chapter for the semester,” John says. “This frat has a yearly initiation process and now that includes a spiritual direction night that I’ve been able to lead in the last two years!”
“There are few subcultures on the college campus larger or more impactful than fraternities and athletes,” John says. “On the weekends, a huge chunk of what student life looks like is tied up in sporting events or Greek parties. What if God comes and breathes life into these subcultures? That can transform a university!”
Since reaching out to fraternities by cleaning toilets, John says he has now become the chaplain for many of the fraternities on campus. He can freely walk into a meeting where he is known and recognized. And as a fraternity chaplain, they permitted him to engage other fraternities that don’t have a chaplain.
“What’s really great is that recently I had a frat president contact me after a meeting,” John says. “He wanted to start a Bible study, just him and me. After a while, I encouraged him to invite other frat brothers, and now we have eight guys coming. And when that president transitioned out of leadership, the new president joined our group.”
“Imagine,” John muses, “frats taking leadership in leading campuses to Christ — it’s almost like planting an indigenous church.”
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Ryan Foster, is the primary Chi Alpha campus minister at the University of Minnesota, leading the typical Chi Alpha model with undergraduates and small groups, while John Konkel (in the article above) works in partnership with Chi Alpha and focuses on Greek life and athletes.
This is a condensed version of a full article that appeared in the AG News, January 3, 2022, “Chi Alpha Chaplain Leads Dozens of Frat Members to Christ,” by Dan Van Veen.
I never thought I would pioneer a ministry. This was affirmed to me in multiple ways. Indirectly, I remember listening to someone I highly respect publicly teach that pioneering ministry requires an outgoing, “type A” personality. I am an introvert who needed to overcome his shy tendencies and risk-averse nature. Besides this public pronouncement of what it takes to pioneer campus ministry, I recall another veteran campus pastor say that the best way to determine if someone is a leader is to “place them on a campus and see if anyone will follow.” If I could not escape my introspective and introverted personality, surely my fear of the unknown within a crowded campus would trip me up. But I felt like Jesus was leading me into campus ministry in places where it had not been established. Thus, I headed out to the Northeast with my wife as interns at Georgetown University. It was a challenging, yet highly influential year. I faced all my fears in one year. I had to engage with students I did not know or share much in common every Wednesday afternoon in the center of campus called “red square.” The ministry would not succeed or fail due to my efforts so part of my experience was getting outside of my comfort zone (personal), while the other was learning to creatively consider why anyone would listen and take seriously the Gospel (theological).
After a year of ups and downs, the day of our final internship evaluation was upon us. My wife and I sat before our internship directors and listened to their feedback. Their final analysis: “Matt, you could take over a campus ministry as a director, but we don’t think you can pioneer one at this time.” They weren’t wrong. However, it was an uplifting moment for it showed me I was headed in the right direction.
After Georgetown I went to Cornell University where the group was being rebuilt after years of officially being chartered through a local church. My wife and I took over and through the 7 years we spent in upstate New York, we learned and worked through what it takes to cast vision, preach the Gospel, and equip students to follow our example. When we moved to St Louis (for reasons beyond this short story), we entered a city where almost every campus is private, and no one had much success establishing campus ministries.
As a 32-year-old with two kids and another coming shortly after arriving in St Louis, I walked onto campus, as a reflective, confident introvert, determined to show that with God’s leading, others would follow. In Genesis the patriarch Jacob left his mother and father in order to find a wife among some distant relatives. Over those years, his personality changed, and his experiences produced a tremendous household of people, livestock, and wealth. But it was his confrontation with his past, with his brother Esau, that caused his fears to rise again. And it was in the middle of the night, as he wrestled with God, that his fears were relieved and he moved forward. The story of his son Joseph would be similar. A foreign country became the proving grounds for his faith as well.
If I could impart one simple lesson in all of this it is this: making disciples for Jesus is not a matter of who you think you are or who others think you are, but using what spiritual gifts God has given to you in whatever calling His is leading you into. Not all will have the spiritual gift of leadership or administration, etc. The point is to find out what your gifts are, and use them to make disciples. Pioneering cannot be done by anyone, but far more are capable of its calling than we make it out to be. That was the case for me.
Matt Herman, is the author of Pioneering Campus Ministry, What You Should Know Before Stepping Out Into the Unknown (2021). See a complete Book Review in the Resource section of the web.
“This may be the first book written in such a way that brings you on campus in the first few years of forming a campus group from scratch. You get inside Matt’s head as he encounters students for the first time to build relationships when he is unknown and few cares about what he doing. It is a masterful book, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is pioneering a new ministry, particularly on campus, and to those learning how to exhibit humility as a leader.” Dennis Gaylor, former national director, Chi Alpha Campus Ministries, USA
