During the mid-semester break, twenty-two arts students gathered in a church hall to mingle, play games, share stories, read the Bible, pray, and eat together. It was an initiative of the Pure Arts faculty in the EU, and everyone who came made new friends and came away encouraged as brothers and sisters in Christ.

This event was one part of an overall strategy that the Pure Arts faculty has developed for the year – a strategy formed several weeks before the semester started as the seven members of the faculty committee scribbled on butchers’ paper, pondering how they might best encourage their faculty.

In that meeting, the committee members saw that Arts students always had trouble making friends at university – not what you might have expected, but the natural result of the fact that flexibility in choosing subjects means that you rarely see the same classmates from semester to semester. This, and other observations, led them to three “thematic goals” for the year, summarised enigmatically as “make friends, be friends, and make more friends”.

Thematic goals express a short-term seasonal objective – an expression of what to concentrate on in the next year. This year’s goals expressed a desire to help students make meaningful connections in a context where making friends was hard, to encourage and equip students to pastorally care for one another in Christ, and to connect with the culture around them in order to bring the gospel to bear on it.

The Pure Arts Faculty Day during the mid-semester break made great gains in the first two goals as students developed friendships and provoked one another to love and good deeds. Pray for the students as they continue to think of innovative ways to achieve these goals as expressions of loving God and loving their neighbours!