Adaptation

In just over two weeks, my life will change significantly. After 38 years of ministry to college students, I am moving out of the role of Director. For that entire time, I have been the leader of two ministries. Although I was supposed to start out as Associate Campus Pastor after graduating from seminary, I was told before I went for an onsite interview that I actually would be interviewing for the senior position, as the board of directors wasn’t willing to go along with the plan the then-Director had explained to me. I had to adapt because the Lord had something else in mind for me.

When I arrived at Appalachian State University 17 years ago, I came to a very different campus amidst a different culture from the one I experienced in Kansas. I had to adapt because the Lord had called me to the town of Boone, NC. 

Neither of these adaptations were easy; more accurately, they were overwhelming. I remember after about six months in Kansas, I was looking for an exit. No doors opened and I decided I needed to submit to the Lord’s will. So, I settled in and learned over the next 21 years a lot about adaptation. College students change over time; thus, campus ministry must change with them. Not the basic Christian message, of course, but some things just run their course and become ineffective. One of the only things I truly remember from my seminary thesis is a quote by a campus minister: “If you marry your ministry to one generation, you will be a widower in the next.” Adaptation was the key.

I remember one student leader from that time coming to my office and bluntly asking me to redo our small groups. He and other students had grown weary of how we were doing them. So, we adapted them to make them more relevant to the students. Over my tenure, I have changed the way our ministry did things countless times. In order to thrive, you have to adapt.

For 17 years, I did the same at App State. Change in college ministry, in particular, is always the name of the game. So, I have become pretty good at adapting over the course of my adult life, although, as my wife would tell you, I do like routine. I sometimes don’t change easily, but neither do I dig in and refuse to budge.

Over the past several years, I have been preparing myself to make one of the biggest adaptations of my adult life—stepping out of ministry to college students. Come August 1st, that will essentially happen, although I will remain affiliated with CCF for another year to focus on support-raising for the ministry. I just won’t be on campus very much. It will be vastly different, but I am embracing it because, like the other two times of major change, I know it is the Lord’s will. And he always knows best.

Going to Kansas and then coming to North Carolina were the best things to happen to me. God has used both to shape me more closely into the man that he created me to be. I am confident in the next season he will do more of the same. 

Adaptation is always easier when we keep in mind that often he requires it in order for us to grow deeper in our relationship with him—more intimate and dependent. Refusal to adapt is to cling to the past whereas the Lord is always focused on the future and what he wants to do next in our lives.

These words of Isaiah have become very meaningful to me over the years. I will close with them: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” (Isaiah 43:18-20)

Jim Musser © 2021 All Scripture references are from the New International Version, 2011