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In the eighth episode of the fourth season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Nathan Hart, the Hinga-Boersma Dean of the Chapel at Hope College. Hart opens by discussing the challenges campus ministry officials encounter while striving to serve a variety of internal and external constituents. Hart views the primary audience he strives to serve as students. However, he is also asked with some frequency to interact with prospective students, parents of prospective students, alumni, and donors. While striving to communicate with each distinct audience, Hart contends he lives by the principal of seeking to be the same person in all situations. Hart then recalls his own calling to the ministry, one he remembers dates as far back as elementary school. That calling led him to study at Hope, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, to serve in a variety of ministerial contexts in the Tri-State area, and back to Hope. After detailing the discernment process that led Hart to return to Hope, Hart explores the ways he and his colleagues in campus ministry seek to provide opportunities for spiritual formation for the Hope community including opportunities for faculty and staff members. Hart then concludes by detailing how Hope students and graduates go on to serve the Church as well as the ways the Church provides support for the Hope community.
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Nathan Hart, the Hinga-Boersma Dean of the Chapel at Hope College. Thank you for joining us.
Nathan Hart: Thank you. Happy to be here.
Todd Ream: In your role as dean of the chapel at Hope College, in what ways are students the focus of your ministry? And in what ways then are faculty and staff also the focus of your ministry?
Nathan Hart: Yeah. My role is interesting because when I was taking the role a couple years ago, somebody said that Hope College really wanted to have it all ways with my role. Meaning, so it’s an administration-focused role and a student-facing role, and everything in between. So I serve on the president’s, we call it the Hope Leadership Team.
So he’s got a group of vice presidents, and I sit on that team with him setting mission, vision, and strategy for the school. There’s a lot of alumni and donor and trustee interfacing with that role. But I’m also available to all, all the students, 3,400 students, most of whom pack out our chapel voluntarily.
So anytime I stand up to give a chapel talk, any, any number of them are sitting there thinking, “I want to follow up with this guy and have a conversation.” So I have lots and lots and lots of student meetings, which I love. So it’s a lot of, you know, like I said, administration level, but also student-facing and everything in between.
I also sit on the school’s student formation council with the dean of the students, and we really believe that student formation includes transformation, the transformation of the Holy Spirit. So my position sits on that, on that team as well. And yeah, so on that team, I kind of get into the sort of the bureaucratic inner workings of the school, everything from res life to Greek life.
We have fraternities and sororities here. Obviously campus ministries. We have a large team. We have seven full-time chaplains plus support staff just in campus min.
And one of my chaplains, her name is Jennifer Ryden, she’s a big fan of your work. She’s we call her the chaplain of word and sacrament, and she’s, she really focuses on the faculty. So there’s a faculty worship service. She’s sort of the minister to the faculty which she does very beautifully. So yeah, I think I’ve answered your question there about, you know, the student-facing, the faculty-facing.
Todd Ream: Yeah.
Nathan Hart: And then, I actually served on the board of trustees for seven years before taking this role, so that relationship with the board is something that comes natural because of that history, but it’s also an important part of this role, the way we’ve defined it here at Hope.
Todd Ream: So you got a couple of different constituencies then which you and your colleagues serve. How do you navigate, interpret, and make sense out of the expectations that they have about your role, whether they are part of your position description or they’re ones that get sort of culturally formed and shaped through the narrative that defines the Hope College experience?
Nathan Hart: Yeah, good question. What is this position description of which you speak?
Todd Ream: Right. Well, there’s 3,400 students. That’s plenty of opinions right there. Not to mention, then comes the faculty, so.
Nathan Hart: Yeah, totally. But your question about, you know, my role, just who I am to all those different constituents, my immediate thought is I go back to something my dad taught me when I was young, and it was about integrity. And I, I remember it on this question because he said integrity means being the same man in every room that you’re in. And I knew exactly what he meant when he said that, you know?
And I’m answering your question with that answer because whether I’m with some faculty, whether I’m with some high school juniors who are checking out Hope College on a visit day, whether I’m with a, you know, a billionaire donor alumni if I’m the same person in all those rooms, that actually kind of frees me up. It’s less exhausting trying to be, you know, kind of a different persona to all those different people.
In other words, I don’t try to, I don’t know, I don’t try to use Gen Z slang with the, with the teenagers, every time I’ve tried that, they just laugh at me. Uh, and I, and I also don’t try to, you know, sort of, I guess, kiss up to the big donors.
I just try to have integrity. I try to be faithful. I try to be authentic and, you know, let the Holy Spirit operate through me. If anybody experiences my ministry, and if it’s meaningful to them, then I can give credit to God, right? Because He’s just bearing fruit through me. He obviously uses me as a vessel.
But, yeah, that’s kind of a simple answer to your question. Obviously, there’s conversations I’m going to have with the donor or the trustee or the community member that I might not have with the freshman or sophomore college student. But I do try to draw from that same well, be the same identity, be the same man in every room that I’m in.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Perhaps the only details that exceed the expectations communities have for campus ministers come in terms of the needs that communities have for campus ministers.
When you’re thinking about the community as a whole, in what ways do you and your colleagues seek to assess those needs and then strive to meet them?
Nathan Hart: Yeah. So, you know, I, I was a senior pastor for a number of years in my career, and I developed a little bit of an allergy to that word needs and how I can meet the needs. Because I don’t believe that the local church is a, a, is a consumer transaction or consumer relationship, you know, with customers, so to speak.
I think that can kind of be the kiss of death to the community. You know, “Hey, hey, Pastor, I’m a paying customer. You didn’t give me the product I want, so I’m going to take my business elsewhere down the street.” And, and I had to kind of learn that the hard way, saying, you know, because a lot of ministers have people pleasers in them, so you want to give people what they’re asking for.
But after some years of that, I thought, “You know what, we’re not a, we’re not a shop. We’re not a consumer arrangement here. We’re a church, which means we’re on a mission to serve the needs of the world, and let’s roll up our sleeves to do that.” So I kind of shifted my MO with that. I’m much more comfortable talking with my constituents about our role in the world rather than meeting their needs.
Now, having said that, I’m not super strident in that. I’m just saying that as a sort of a motivating principle. But I think a lot about the spiritual needs of the flock, right. What, what does every human heart need? That needs connection with God and connection with people. needs a role in the kingdom. So on those needs, I’m trying to meet those needs.
It’s funny you said a minute ago 3,400 students, they all have an opinion. True, there’s opinions among the students, there’s opinions among the thousand people on the payroll here at Hope College. There’s 34,000 alumni out there. Everybody’s got opinions.
And I would say something that I’ve been kind of surprised by in my now decades-long ministry of speaking and preaching and ministering is, my surprise is, usually, when I’m in trouble, so to speak, when someone’s giving me an opinion of something they’re not happy about, nine times out of 10 they’re upset about something they’re not hearing me say. And I’ll explain what I mean by that.
You know, when I was a local pastor, you’d have people in the congregation, you know, watching their cable news channel of choice, whichever one, and it’s got their hair on fire. They’re so mad about those people out there ruining our country. And then they come, you know, they’re so mad. “Ah, we got to, we got to call these people out. We got to speak truth to these,” whatever. Fill in the blank of what your political enemy is.
And then they come sit in the pews of the Church, and they don’t hear the pastor, you know, calling out the enemy, so to speak. And so you get these emails, you know, “Your silence is deafening. I can’t believe you’re, you’re not speaking out against so-and-so.”
And it’s like, you know, I preached for 25 minutes. I wasn’t silent. I just spoke the Bible. I didn’t sort of scratch your itching ears. And I think to my surprise, now that I primarily serve college students, same thing is true, right? You have 19, 20, 21-year-olds and you know, sometimes they want to meet with me and, and say things like, “You know, when I go to chapel, I don’t hear you telling my fellow students to stop partying on the weekends. I can’t believe you’re silent about them, you know, sinning.”
No matter where I’m serving, no matter what demographic or constituency, people want to hear things. Usually they want to hear the sins of others being called out. Very rarely have I heard someone say, “I can’t believe you’re silent about my type of sin.” So I don’t know if I’m getting at what you’re getting at there, but that, that all came to mind with that question.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. They’re not sitting there thinking, “I wish I felt more convicted as a result.”
Nathan Hart: Yeah.
Todd Ream: “And the sermon left me feeling better about myself maybe.”
Nathan Hart: Right.
Todd Ream: Thank you. For individuals then discerning whether they may be called to serve in campus ministry, what advice would you offer them? What discernment practices might you encourage them to invest?
Nathan Hart: I have this conversation quite a bit, Todd. A lot of students, you know, they’re a biology major, engineering major, business major, whatever, and then they start really hearing from the Lord about really entering into vocational ministry. So they book an appointment with me, and often the question from them is, you know, “What can you teach me about leadership in the Church or leadership in Christian ministry?”
And what I often say to that is, “Christian leadership begins with followership, not with leadership.” And, you know, I joke sometimes with students saying, “If you go to Amazon and type leadership books into the search, you’re going to get thousands of titles. If you type in the word followership, you don’t get much.” And that’s a problem, right?
You’ve got a lot of people wanting to be leaders, yet the math doesn’t math, as they say in Gen Z. The math ain’t mathing. So what do I mean by followership? You know, Paul’s wonderful word in the New Testament, “Follow me as I follow Christ.” So this is really what I instruct young people is that, you know, you’re going to get a lot of real-world leadership training, whether it’s through books or resources or just the world.
So you’re going to, you’re going to learn how to lead, and, and I’ve got resources you, you can read for that. But primarily what I want you to do is follow. Follow Jesus, follow His ways receive His love, receive His wisdom, receive His Holy Spirit. The more you follow, like a disciple following a rabbi, so to speak, the better your leadership will inherently become.
Because I believe that Jesus is the best leader in the world. He’s a servant leader. And the more we have of Him indwelling us, and the more fruit He’s bearing on the branches of our lives, so to speak. But on the discernment question, you know, I think some students, they, I try to explore with them, is this really coming from the one who calls? Or is it coming from a lack of other options for you?
Sometimes I help students discern that they’re more interested in, you know, the spotlight or the, they might be a little bit ego-driven. I can be a little bit famous if I’m standing on the stage or from behind a pulpit. So I try to eliminate any kind of motive that might not be an actual call.
And sometimes I say to people discerning a call what was said to me long ago, which was, “Can you think of anything else that you might want to do?” Because ministry is not easy, and you’re not going to get rich, and it’s going to challenge you in ways you can’t imagine. And so I, you know I try to, I don’t just give, give the students a quick pat on the shoulder and say, “Get on out there and you’re a leader now.” I try to really do some of the deep inner work with them.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. I want to transition now to asking you about your own call to ministry and how it eventually developed in terms of your appointment there at Hope College. You earned undergraduate degrees in religion and communication from Hope, an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary, and a DMin from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.
At what point in time did you discern that you were being called to the ministry?
Nathan Hart: Well, I was eight years old actually. I was in the second grade. I remember the day really well. The teacher, Mrs. Lucas, had asked us to go up and down the rows of the desks saying what we want to be when we grow up. So you were hearing, you know, firemen and policemen and teachers and that sort of thing.
And I told Mrs. Lucas, I said, “I want to be a pastor.” And I remember it very well, not so much from me saying it, but from her response. She really affirmed it. She said, and I quote, “Nathan, I’m tickled pink.” That’s exactly what she said. And you know, in hindsight, the memory of that is like a tractor beam of heaven just hit me right when she affirmed what I had said. And I looked back on that, you know, years later, and I realized, I think that was my moment of calling.
And now, my father worked in the Church. He was the director of discipleship at our church. His dad, my grandfather, was a Baptist minister, and his dad was a Baptist minister, so I’m fourth generation. So you can kind of psychoanalyze it that way.
You know, when I looked up into the night sky, the constellations that I saw and the men I admired were pastors. So that, that may be why I said it, but then it was, the Holy Spirit used her affirmation of me saying it to, to really call me. And if you met me when I was 12, I probably wouldn’t have told you I’m going to be a pastor someday. It was definitely in the back of my mind.
Todd Ream: Yeah.
Nathan Hart: And then when I was a student at Hope College, I was getting really involved in the theater department as well as my religion and communications classes. And I was really having fun in theater, and I had some professors encouraging me to think about that as a career, which is kind of funny to say now. I mean, they were helping me look at internships in New York and stuff like that.
But I had a great professor here, a religion professor here back then, who’s still here. And he had a great, some great conversations with me where he helped me kind of figure out, you know, what I wanted to do when college was done. Do I want to go be a waiter in Manhattan and audition for acting roles, or do I want to go on to seminary and continue my track towards what the Lord had spoken to me in the second grade? And it became very clear when I started thinking about it that way, and I went off to Princeton Seminary after Hope. So the rest is history, as they say.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. You began your ministerial career, I’m going to ask you about one of those pictures over your left shoulder here and what, what it may trigger in terms of thoughts in your mind. You began your ministerial career serving as the New York City director for the Fellowship of Christians in Universities and Schools, or often known as FOCUS.
For audience members unfamiliar with FOCUS, would you offer a few details concerning the commitments and practices that define its mission?
Nathan Hart: A lot of your audience is probably familiar with Young Life. That’s my guess. A lot of your people would know what Young Life is. FOCUS, if you can think of, of Young Life, but only targeting the very, very, very elite, very expensive East Coast private schools, independent schools. So the ones you see in the movies, Dalton and, you know, these sorts of places, boarding schools and, and day schools. Focus is a ministry that really serves those kids and their families.
So that was, you know, when I was at Princeton, I made an immediate connection with a guy who was at the time the New York Yankees chaplain, and he had a whole other arm of his ministry for Wall Street men and their families. And the next 20 years of my career, up until just two years ago coming to Hope that was the demographic that I served.
You know, you’ve heard a lot of people do ministry to the down and outs. I did ministry to the up and outs. Another phrase is you know, missionary to an unreached people group. That’s part of what motivates FOCUS is you consider the, the East Coast private school kid with all the money in the world, and but the same spiritual poverty that any human being has. And not many missionaries think to go to the up and outs.
Not many missionaries think to go to demographics where, where people have country clubs and multiple homes and yachts and all that sort of thing. Yet that, that’s what FOCUS does, and does it very, very well, and it knows how to reach that type of kid, that type of family with the Gospel. So that was a thrill for me. I really loved that. And like I said, for 20 years of my ministry, that was the demographic that I served. And but start, really started with the Yankees chaplain and with, with FOCUS.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. I want to shift now to asking you then, so you talked about the picture there of the Brooklyn Bridge. Now we’re going to shift to the Connecticut license plate that you’ve got there because you moved to Fairfield County, Connecticut. You accepted an appointment as an associate pastor at Stanwich Congregational Church.
Would you describe the discernment process that led, similar demographic, but a shift in terms of how you were to express your call to ministry and the institutional base for that?
Nathan Hart: Yeah. It really is same demographic. I mean, you know, if you work on Wall Street, make a couple million a year or more, you eventually if you want to kind of class it up or kind of go up a class, you go to the upper east side. And then if you really want to show society how you’re moving up in class, you go even further up, same direction, up upper east side, all the way to the, those couple of those first train stops off Grand Central.
And one of those first train stops is Greenwich, Connecticut. So really just absurd levels of wealth. And this church, so the, my, my, this calling discernment was just relationships that I had already had developed in the ministry I was just talking about, FOCUS and the Yankees chaplain and so forth, Wall Street men’s Bible studies, boardroom Bible studies.
Through those relationships, when this position came open in Greenwich at Stanwich, some people already kind of knew about me and said, “I think this guy might be good for the role.” You know, when I first heard the title of the church, I was like, “Nah, I can’t work there, it’s Congregationalist. I don’t even know, I’m ordained in the Reformed Church in America.” Well, I learned that the church is actually non-denominational.
The church was founded in 1731, which is one year before George Washington was born. So for about 90 years of its history, it belonged to the UCC, but it left that in like 30 years ago when the UCC was getting a little bit politically intertwined. So it’s non-denominational.
Nowadays, you hear non-denom and you think of like a brand-new megachurch, big black box kind of church. This is a white steeple New England non-denominational church that received my pastorate, even though I’m in the RCA. But yeah, that was kind of the, it was very much a Holy Spirit connection and nudge through the relationships that I had just mentioned.
Todd Ream: Yeah. In 2024 then, you accepted an appointment as the dean of the chapel, as we stated at the outset of our conversation, at Hope College. Can you describe the discernment process that then brought you from Connecticut back to Holland, Michigan?
Nathan Hart: Yeah, I mentioned a minute ago the Holy Spirit. This move here was completely a move of the Holy Spirit. I was serving as senior pastor of that church and have two teenagers, and was in the middle of leading the congregation in a $21 million capital campaign and construction project. We had purchased an old department store in Stamford, Connecticut, which is the next town over.
And you know, leading a project like that and leading a congregation and having teenagers, those are all indicators that this is not the right time to make a change. And the Holy Spirit started sending, I don’t know how this is going to sound to the Christian Scholar’s Review audience, but the Holy Spirit started sending dreams and visions into my own household, into my congregation and into people close with me. Things that can’t be explained other than there being an active Holy Spirit.
And so I, like a good and faithful and submissive and dutiful servant of Christ, I said “No.” I argued quite earnestly with our Lord you know, and said, “Uh, Lord, I’m sure you can see that I can’t leave right now. I’m asking people for all this money. You know, I’m sitting in people’s living rooms asking them for contributions towards this $21 million capital campaign.”
Meanwhile, I’m having conversations with a search team at Hope College and sitting in people’s living rooms, and they’re, they’re giving money. We raised the full amount. It was great. But they were giving money and saying things like, “Nathan, we believe in your leadership on this.”
And in the back of my mind, I was thinking, “Okay, I’m going to accept this money for the kingdom, and then in a couple weeks I’m going to tell them that I’m, that I’m bouncing.” So to be honest with you, Todd, I still don’t know, maybe when I get to glory, the Lord will reveal His perfect timing and His perfect plan. But there’s still a little part of me that’s not quite resolved about the timing.
Todd Ream: Yeah.
Nathan Hart: He was very clear, like I said, dreams and visions. I could tell a much longer version of that story. It’s quite a dramatic event. So we did is we, we finished the campaign announced, “Hey, you know, pledge Sunday,” or whatever, fulfillment Sunday, raised the money. Isn’t that wonderful? We waited, the next Sunday was a normal Sunday just to put a buffer in there. The Sunday after that, I announced my departure.
And the only thing I could do with the congregation was just tell them the story, tell them I wasn’t out looking. The Holy Spirit led this. I argued with Him for some time until He finally convinced me through these dreams and visions. And I hope, dear congregation, that this builds your faith because it built mine.
And I don’t even know. I feel like that, you know, when Jesus was talking to Nicodemus and he said, “The wind blows where it wishes,” so it is with those born of the Spirit. I feel like I’m a, like a leaf on the branch that’s just been detached by the wind, and the wind is taking me where he wants me to go right now. And, you know, it actually did build faith in the congregation. They handled it extremely well.
The Church is still thriving, probably even more without me. So the Lord knew what he was doing, but that was a dramatic moment in my life, being called to this position.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. As we talked about also at the beginning of our conversation, you graduated from Hope College and benefited from the services provided by one of your predecessors. In what ways did being a Hope College graduate make it easier to transition in, and perhaps in what ways, if any, did it make it more difficult to transition in?
Nathan Hart: Yeah, I mentioned a minute ago I was on the board of trustees for seven years. I had to resign that position to take this one. And that was a huge help because, not only as a graduate, but also as someone who was pretty involved as a trustee.
I was very familiar with the dynamics and the culture of the school. That was a big leg up, as they say. And there’s another picture over my shoulder. It’s a painting from the late ’90s. There was a revival that broke out in our campus ministries with a guy named Ben Patterson. He was in my position at the time. You’ve probably heard that story. It’s well told. And I was a recipient of what the Holy Spirit did during the ’90s.
And there’s a whole generation of us alumni who were really filled by the Holy Spirit during those years. I like to say filled because I was here for four years, and it’s as if I was a bucket and got filled with the Holy Spirit during those four years, so far, now 25 years after I graduated from here, I’m still drawing from that same bucket. And so far, it has proven to be inexhaustible.
Todd Ream: Yeah.
Nathan Hart: And when I share that analogy with other alumni, they do what you’re doing right now. They say, “Yeah, same. That’s my experience.” And by God’s grace, you know, we talk about the revival in the ’90s, this full chapel that you see in that picture. By God’s grace, that chapel is still that full with students. It’s standing room only Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday night. Students just pack it out. It’s a sustained revival, you know? It doesn’t make the headlines like the Asbury outpouring a couple years ago, but it ought to because it’s just an incredible continuation of God’s work that He really began in the ’90s.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you.
Nathan Hart: But I didn’t answer the other part of your question. What’s made it harder?
Todd Ream: Yeah.
Nathan Hart: You know, every place has its quirks, and Hope College has its quirks. There’s, having lived in the New York City area for 23 years and learned to be direct with communication style I, I married a woman from there. She grew up at West Point, the Military Academy. Her father coached Army football, so she lived her whole life at West Point in, in and around New York.
The last thing she is, is what they call passive aggressive. She’s aggressive, aggressive. She’s a New Yorker. And so I moved her here two years ago, and I moved back here, and there’s all this niceness, right? Michigan niceness. And so that’s, that’s been, you know, interesting, because I’m just way more direct than the culture here and, you know, I try to do it with kindness and with love, but it’s a surprise to people.
And I, I’ve had to, I’ve had to teach my wife how to translate West Michigan nice. Like, for example, if you’re at like a pizza dinner hanging out with people and somebody comes in with the remaining pizza and they say, “Does anybody want these last two slices?” What they mean is, “I want these last two slices.”
And so I tell that story because there was a moment when that happened and my wife goes, “Sure.” And she took them and everyone got real quiet. And so I had to help her like, “Okay, what they,” and she’s like, “Well, why don’t they just say what they mean?” So anyway, we’ve had to learn that. That’s the only difficult thing is the West Michigan niceness, learning how to navigate that again.
Todd Ream: I grew up in Los Angeles and got enrolled in a seminar on Midwest Nice, actually as part of our human resources efforts. So maybe we can put it online and we can ask your wife if she’d like to take it or something.
Nathan Hart: She would probably throw it out the window.
Todd Ream: I want to ask you a little bit more now about the sort of the details. We talked about sort of the big picture of campus ministry at Hope and those dimensions. But can you talk a little bit more about the services and programs that are led and offered through that area? Obviously chapel services three days a week during the work week, but then also Sunday evenings are part of it. What else?
Nathan Hart: Yeah, those are really the tent poles. You know, those are the big programs that we do. Thousands of kids are involved in that. But we also have weekly Bible studies. Those are student-led. We have over 500 students enrolled in those. Our student leaders, we train them on Sunday afternoons with a couple of hours of training, and then we send them out throughout the week and they lead those Bible studies. Those are great. People love those.
We have spring break immersion trips where we send 13 groups all across the country and world, places like, a refugee center outside of Atlanta to a university setting in Croatia to Appalachia to the Caribbean. There’s a deaf, deaf center in the Caribbean that we go to. So those are, those are transformational. When I was a student here all those years ago, I did one of those trips all four, all four spring breaks. Those really transform kids’ lives.
Then we have prayer teams. We have about 180 students on any given semester who are in campus ministries student leadership positions. Almost all of those are volunteer. And those include, we have worship teams, so three worship teams. One of the reasons the chapel services are so popular is the music is led by student musicians. So some of them are also music majors. They’re excellent musicians, but they lead, you know, passionate praise music.
So like I said, about 180 student leaders that we train and equip. And our mission statement at campus ministries, the first sentence of it is that we exist to train, to prepare students for the Church as grateful lifelong followers of Jesus Christ. And we really believe in that.
You know, the academy is obviously training and preparing students for the marketplace and for all kinds of things in the world, and campus min, we view ourselves as preparing students for the Church. So those student leadership positions, we really believe in those, and we think that the kingdom, the local church is really blessed by this sort of fanning out of Hope College graduates. As they land in various communities, they’re well-prepared for church leadership.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. We talked earlier about ministry and expectations from different quadrants of the campus. In what ways do you and your colleagues then also partner with some of your colleagues, say, in student development, co-curricular educators, but also faculty curricular educators on the Hope College campus?
Nathan Hart: Yeah, as I shared at the top I serve on the Student Formation Council, and my whole team occasionally joins up with that whole team. And you know, sometimes that causes some friction just because there’s some people working in student development who aren’t really thinking about faith, even at a Christian college, right?
And so, sometimes you’ll see a dorm activity that they plan, and we’re like, “That is not forming Christian character.” And that’s rare. It’s really rare. They really do a fantastic job. For the most part, our student formation group does an amazing job from our perspective. And I don’t even like to say our perspective, their perspective, because it kind of creates this false silo.
Our dean of students is doing a really wonderful job integrating faith formation into student formation. What was the other part of your question? Oh, we also, with faculty, like in the Ben Patterson years, this picture over my shoulder, he wrote a book after that whole experience.
And in that book, you learn there was quite a bit of daylight between faculty and campus ministries. There was a lot of friction. There was a lot of tension. There was a lot of even public battles. That is pretty much not really a factor anymore at all like it used to be. I mean, there’s still some little pockets of that, but it’s really not, not like that.
And the woman I mentioned earlier, Jennifer Ryden, she organizes faculty worship services, which is really beautiful. A lot of faculty come to those, and they have their own space to worship. On any given Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Sunday in our chapel services, though, for students, you’ll see a sprinkling of faculty that are there. So that’s beautiful to see.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Before we close our conversation then, I want to turn back to then thinking theologically about the role of the campus minister. What practices, if any, have you found that prove to be essential to nurture that calling and to help one to embrace the opportunities that come when serving in such a role?
Nathan Hart: Well, I, I would say I try to live the same advice that I give students, what I talked about earlier, that leadership begins with followership. You know, my calendar has so many demands on it. Somebody asked me just the other day, “How you doing?” And I said, “I feel like I’m riding a bull.” And I’m talking about my Google calendar. You just run from one thing to another.
It’s kind of insane the amount of, the amount of obligations and responsibilities and events that I have. And so with a busy schedule like that, it can feel a little bit frantic, to be honest. Just, it’s just a lot. And so I try really hard. Every once in a while I drift from it, and I can feel it when I do. But I try to have some kind of devotions every morning.
There’s a great app for the iPhone, it’s called Lectio 365, and it’s like a daily lectionary reading and pause and meditation, and it really forces me to take a deep breath. I also, on good weather days, I like to ride my bike to work. I live three miles away. That tends to really help with this riding the bull thing, just gets me some fresh air.
And then, you know, I’m sure you know this too, but hardly a week goes by that somebody doesn’t hand me a book that I have to read. They’re like, “Nathan, you gotta, you gotta read this.” And so I have these stacks of books, very few of which I get to because of the demands of my schedule. But when I actually do sit, sit and read materials, I find that very helpful as well. It just kind of gets me outside of my own mind for a little bit and considering some other things.
I also listen to podcasts as much as I can. I mean, not as much. I actually like it. So when I’m mowing the lawn or doing yard work or something, I’ll often have a podcast going, and those tend to feed me as well. Some of them are, there’s one that I listen to that’s just dumb and trivial and entertaining, and that, that one, in a weird way, that one ministers to me too, because it’s just like me to lighten up a little bit, you know? It’s a pretty serious role that I have.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Sometimes we need those diversions in our lives too. Yeah. You mentioned the frantic pace and the seriousness of it. Are there any other forces that then, you know, perhaps threaten one’s calling or one’s ability to express that calling that need to be guarded against?
Nathan Hart: You know, we’re obviously in a divided time and somebody said recently, “Your politics in this country used to run downstream from your religion, but now your religion runs downstream from your politics.” And that, that’s hard.
You know, I interface with a ton of families who are looking where to send their kid to college or have their kid already here, and some of these families have really bought into one or the other political worldview. And their kid hears something from a professor or from somebody that doesn’t fit that, and they’re super upset. And so I end up talking with a lot of those families and just trying to listen to them and hear them and gently grab the steering wheel and turn them back towards a higher calling.
Todd Ream: Thank you.
Nathan Hart: Yeah.
Todd Ream: In terms of maintaining that focus on one’s calling, what intellectual and/or moral virtues would you think prove important for campus ministers to cultivate? But then also for what theological virtues do you believe they need to pray to receive in order to flourish in their vocations?
Nathan Hart: Generosity, curiosity, community. We here at Hope College, we have, we’re post-denominational. We’re no longer governed by the Reformed Church in America. We’re truly an ecumenical community.
And we have one religious identity statement or document, and it’s called the Hope College Christian Aspirations. And it says, “Hope College aspires to be,” and it’s, there’s three headings: faithful, welcoming, and transformational. And I won’t give you the whole or full version of each one, but the faithful part, you know, okay, what do you mean by faithful if you’re no longer denominational?
Well, we mention the ancient creeds in that first paragraph, the Nicene and the Apostles. We’re trying to be faithful to that. But what that allows for, is for Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox, the Trinitarian branches of the faith that subscribe to those creeds, they’re all welcome here. So we have about 18% of our student body’s Catholic. We have a full-time priest.
The head of our religion department is Catholic, which is a bit of a surprise when you think about an old Dutch Reformed school. And it can create some, it can be kind of messy, but it’s good. But so faithful to the, sort of, the historic Christian faith. That welcoming piece, there’s beautiful language in there about how, you know, we don’t have our students sign, saying that they’re, that they’re a Christian when they come. So you can, you can be totally a non-Christian student when you come here.
Our hope, though, is that by the end of your time, you will have been introduced to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and you’ll have a living faith and relationship with Him, and that’s in that paragraph too. But that’s kind of a more kingdom way of thinking about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Like, we’re including anybody who wants to come here. You’re included not just for the sake of inclusion. You’re included into something, included into, into Christ.
And then that transformational paragraph at the end we believe in obviously there’s student formation, but there’s this thing called transformation that can really only happen as the result of, of One person, and that’s the Holy Spirit. And so we really, you’re asking me personally, and I’m citing these institutional values and aspirations, but I, I really subscribe to those. I really do, I am happy about our Christian aspiration statement because those are worthy aspirations.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. Against what vices then do you believe campus ministers need to be vigilant and prepared to confront as they pursue the service and the calling, you know, that they’ve received?
Nathan Hart: I would say self-righteousness. I mean, that’s sort of the general vice of all sin is the way I see it, or self-absorption maybe, which sometimes looks like self-righteousness. You know, in an ecumenical community like I’m describing, it’s tempting sometimes to get rather strident and become a culture warrior.
I have very strong Reformed Protestant theological convictions, but I’m also the dean of chapel for all the students here. And so a potential, I’m just talking personally now. I, I could, I could become self-righteous and strident and arrogant if I wasn’t careful. And I also am able then to see that in some others.
And, you know, especially students, when you’re 19 or 20 years old and you just learn some really good theological doctrine or practice, you think the whole world needs to get on board with you. And so I try to notice that and help gently steer students into a more gentle, humble, curious approach.
Todd Ream: Thank you. For our last question then today, I want to ask you, in what ways do you believe that campus ministers, through the service that they offer, can be of greater service to the Church? And in what ways can the Church then also be of greater service to their brethren in the clergy who are serving on campuses?
Nathan Hart: Yeah, I think the campus ministry service to the Church is profound, actually. I often say, so when people come to one of our chapel services, it’s really kind of mind-blowing. A lot of times people cry. I mean, the sound of 1,200, 1,300 students singing, it’s very moving. And so I mention that because sometimes I say what happens in the room in chapel is amazing.
What’s even more amazing is what happens in the world as a result of what happens in that room. What I mean by that is to illustrate that, I’ll tell you, last January, I took my family to five different churches just for the fun of it, local area churches, because five Sundays in January, we went to five different churches. All five of those churches had recent Hope alumni or current Hope students leading worship or leading children’s ministry. Think about that for a second.
You know, like, we’re training and equipping and empowering a whole generation of young people in how to, how to lead in Church. So when they graduate out of here, they’re, they’re like salt and seasoning on these local churches. And sometimes when I, I can even imagine if, if Hope College was removed, if we, if we’d had one of these financial deaths that some of these other schools are having, if Hope College was gone overnight, the kingdom of God would, would be a lot less blessed place because of this sending that we’re constantly doing.
And your second part of your question, how can the Church assist or bless us? When I hear the word the Church, I think of the body of Christ, and the first way I would answer that is to pray, to pray for these kids. They’ve grown up in a pretty chaotic world. You know, these last 20 years of American history have been really hard. And they’re searching. This generation is hungry. They’re hungry for truth. They’re hungry for God. They’re hungry for connection.
And some of them are finding voices that are the gospel, and they’re grabbing onto those. Many are, though. You’ve probably seen the trends. You’ve seen the statistics. I can tell you anecdotally here at Hope, the headlines you’re seeing about Gen Z revival, they’re not just headlines. It is real. Man, the revival in Gen Z is real. And so keep praying into that.
And obviously keep opening your doors when you have internships, when you have roles for young people. Sign us up. You know, these students are willing to get involved. But the first thing is prayer. Keep praying in. Keep praying in for more of these students to turn their lives over to Christ.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much.
Nathan Hart: Thank you.
Todd Ream: Our guest has been Nathan Hart, the Hinga-Boersma Dean of the Chapel at Hope College. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Nathan Hart: You got it. Thank you.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
