The church fails students when it comes to service work

If you grew up in any faith-based organization, you were likely taught from a young age the importance of mission work.

By the time you were in middle school, you were probably visiting food shelves, building houses in low-income communities or teaching Sunday school to children at a random church in a different part of town. It was likely that the sought-after high school experience was a mission trip to a country in Africa or South America where you would get to spread the love of Jesus to those less fortunate than you.

You have now arrived at CSB+SJU where the expectations are the same. To be a good Christan and to live out God’s love you must go and serve. Every weekend and school break, there are countless opportunities to go and serve others in need. From volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club in St. Cloud to traveling across the globe to serve on a medical trip, the opportunities are endless. Many students even need to fulfill service hours to graduate.

Where is the problem with this? How can serving those in need be a bad thing? The problem lies not in the service itself, but in the lack of education and training we give students to engage in service work ethically and consciously. We do not train students on how to research organizations to make sure the work they are doing is ethical. We do not educate the students on how to have conversations about power imbalances that can arise in service work. We do not have conversations on how to interact with vulnerable communities. We do not help students consider the sustainability and long-term impacts of the work they are doing. We do not work to dismantle the savior complex that can arise when we engage in service work. We do not have students be introspective about their true motivations behind why they want to engage in service work.

What does this leave us with? This leaves us with a large student body engaging communities across the globe with little tools and education to serve in an ethical way. If our campus is committed to the Benedictine values and wants to promote service work to its students, this is education that needs to be taught. Ethical service work should be taught in the first-year curriculum, or at least before students engage in their first service project.

Otherwise, we are doing a disservice to both our student body and the communities we are attempting to serve. There is nothing biblical about leaving a vulnerable community disempowered or stuck in an unbalanced power dynamic with a service organization. Our students also deserve better.

Many students most likely have never encountered the idea of ethical service work until college. I did not until last year. Our students deserve to be educated on these topics and be aware of how their actions can impact communities. Service work at its heart is a good and virtuous thing. We should all be trying to make the world a better place for everyone. The problem lies when we are not educating those who are engaging in service work on how to do so responsibly and ethically.