One topic in student ministry worth thinking about more is food – the great mark of hospitality. What better way is there to demonstrate love in a tangible way to our guests? A proper hot meal is characteristic of all the best events I have been involved in recently. Take the Aberystwyth CU special Globe Café, for example. Aber CU has a thriving Globe Café on Thursday evenings throughout the year, run by the students. This has become so fruitful that the CU has given over one of their regular CU meetings on Monday nights to a special Globe Café (without cancelling the Thursday event). I visited them for their Chinese New Year celebration. A big help for them is a post-doc Chinese student who is a great cook. Food was hot, tasty, and plentiful. The room was packed with Globe Café regulars and other CU members as well as some who had never been before.
In Dundee, the students put on an International Meal at 6 o’clock each evening in the marquee. As at Aber, hot food was served and much appreciated. This was cooked by local church members and brought over just in time for the meal. Sometimes the quantity was insufficient because more students turned up than expected. But it was good food. The talks given by me were short. My intention was to make international guests feel welcome and to pique interest in the main event to follow, rather than make it self-contained. I think this worked well. We also had an interview on two evenings, though I thought they were a mixed bag.
In Newcastle, the CU set their sights higher still, with the plan to feed everyone at the main evening event – a tall order when up to 100 were jammed into the marquee. They faced a big obstacle as well: having a marquee provided by the Students Union, they were obliged to follow their dictates, which were only to use the SU’s regular caterers. The upshot of this was cold food served in boxes. The students worked very hard to make a go of this and the food was certainly acceptable, but it lacked the welcoming warmth and smell of a hot meal.
The Newcastle CU pushed the boat out further by adding an ‘International Track’. It is great to give international students an invitation to events specially for them – part of what it means for the church in the UK to welcome the stranger in our midst (Lev 19:34). The arrangements for the main event, however, meant that canapés and squash from 5pm in a different building off-campus was not much of a draw. One who did come, though, – and from a different religious tradition – went on to attend other events and signed up for the follow-up course, so there was fruit even from this.
On the first evening, some of us skipped the main event in the marquee and popped over to a local church, where their weekly Globe Café was going on, with maybe 150 present – a mix of international students and church folk. This is a thriving regular work that feeds into a number of other activities during the week, including English classes and discovery Bible studies. It seems to me that some joined up thinking needs to go on here: would it not be better if the events week started on the Tuesday, with a big encouragement given at the Monday Globe Café, for international students to join in? As it was, the events week was scheduled to finish on Thursday because of other arrangements for the weekend. Clearly, cutting off the first evening event would have severely limited the effectiveness of the week. In hindsight, however, expecting international students to give up four hours of their evening was probably unrealistic. The Dundee model could be a great one for CUs to emulate.
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