{"id":250,"date":"2015-06-20T11:38:13","date_gmt":"2015-06-20T16:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/workcited\/?p=250"},"modified":"2015-06-10T12:58:40","modified_gmt":"2015-06-10T17:58:40","slug":"a-faithful-guide-to-life-and-learning-make-college-count-by-derek-melleby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/workcited\/2015\/06\/a-faithful-guide-to-life-and-learning-make-college-count-by-derek-melleby\/","title":{"rendered":"A Faithful Guide to Life and Learning: Make College Count by Derek Melleby"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I know you know what re-runs are.\u00a0\u00a0<\/i><\/span>
\n<\/i><\/span>Or \u201cencore performances\u201d as they are sometimes called.\u00a0\u00a0Sometimes, we are really glad to see one \u2014 the first showing was so good that you want to see it again; \u00a0or, maybe, the \u201cencore\u201d allows folks to see something they missed previously.<\/i><\/span>
\n<\/i>With my celebration of my new book <\/a>designed for those young adults who are transitioning out of college or trade school, or finishing up graduate work, and taking up vocations in the work world (Serious Dreams: Bold Ideas for the Rest of Your Life<\/b> published by Square Halo Books) we have not forgotten that many readers give books to their high school graduates this season, too. \u00a0<\/i><\/span>
\n<\/i>Churches, youth ministries, private schools, moms and dads, godparents, confirmation sponsors, uncles and aunts, older sibs, even \u2014 who doesn\u2019t want to honor the twelfth graders who survived senioritis and made it to graduation day?<\/i><\/span>
\n<\/i>My favorite book to give to high school grads who are going off to college is the fine book by Derek Melleby, Make College Count: A Faithful Guide to Life + Learning <\/b>(Baker; $12.99.)\u00a0 I\u2019ve mentioned it a bunch of times over the last few years, but I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve actually done a re-run.
\n<\/i><\/span>
\n<\/i><\/span>For a list of suggestions for those high school grads who are not going off to college, see here.<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/b>
\n<\/i><\/span>So, without further ado, with only minor editing, here is the \u201cencore performance\u201d of a review I wrote when this book released. Since I wrote this review a few years ago, I\u2019ve only deepened my appreciate for Derek as a young leader, for the usefulness of his book, and for the impact it has made. The publisher has been happy to keep it in print, and it has developed a fantastic reputation. So it deserves this re-run of a review.\u00a0\u00a0Enjoy.<\/i><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"teens.jpg\"CHURCH KIDS GROWING UP
\nIt is always a joy to be standing around the church hallway and see some teens sauntering up the stairs to their Sunday school class.\u00a0 Many medium-sized mainline churches don\u2019t have many youth, and it is a blessing that we have a good handful.\u00a0 It was a joy this morning as I was sitting in the back of the sanctuary, noticing a few seniors, students that I have nearly watched grow up.\u00a0 A few I played with in the nursery 15 years ago; my own youngest daughter\u2019s cohort will soon be graduating from high school.<\/p>\n

Last year this time \u2014 well, most every spring for the last dozen years or so, since my oldest was first active in youth group and I knew many of those kids with senioritis\u2014I was in a serious funk about what might become of these older teens.\u00a0These were kids I knew and cared about, mostly all heading off to some kind of higher education.\u00a0 Would they get involved in some campus fellowship group when they went off to college?\u00a0 Would they find themselves being followers of Christ in their new homes?\u00a0 Would a local church reach out to them?\u00a0 Would they develop good new friends that would wisely assist them in discerning the big questions about their future, their major, their callings and careers?\u00a0 Would they, like most young adults in what developmentalists now call the critical years, take up the materialistic and secular values of the American way of life or would they choose God\u2019s Kingdom\u2019s ways \u2014 upside down values of service and justice and a deeper purpose better than upward mobility?\u00a0 Would they find a spouse that suits them well?\u00a0 Oh, how we fret about these very young adults.<\/p>\n

WHAT MESSAGE DO WE SEND?<\/p>\n

Of course, the fretting comes to a head for me when we pray over them (if we do at all) or recognize them in some churchly ceremony.\u00a0 Does your church do something for students graduating from high school?\u00a0 And does it sound something like God\u2019s radical call to them and a profound blessing upon them, or just a religious veneer over the same kind of stuff they hear at their mawkish high school commencements?\u00a0 Do we commission them to a new phase of Kingdom living, with fear and trembling, or do we just sprinkle a little civil religion over the hope they\u2019ll be happy and successful?\u00a0 I hope it is the former.<\/p>\n

That is, I hope our churches really inspire our young adults to take their faith seriously, and to move into the next stage of their lives with gusto, intentional discipleship, and a desire to have their lives count, really count.<\/p>\n

This concern of what message we send to our graduates really<\/i> comes to a head for me when we give them some sort of graduation gift.\u00a0 We are asked this in the store each year, too \u2014 what do we recommend?\u00a0 In our experience some well-intended folks get students a plaque or pen or gifty type knick-knack. (A tie tac, you ask?\u00a0 How do you ask a customer if they are out of their cottonpickin\u2019 minds?)\u00a0 Most students find these remembrances pretty boring, I\u2019ve heard, reinforcing their hunch that church is about as relevant to their lives as, well, their great grandma\u2019s gifts of a monogrammed hanky.<\/p>\n

Often, though, we try a offer something a bit better, so we give them a book, like a faux leather compilation of Bible promises, as if some 18 year old is just dying to do a concordance type study of every listing of every Bible verse around a certain theme.\u00a0 Anxious about leaving home?\u00a0 Wondering what major might make sense or what classes to choose?\u00a0 Sad about leaving your bff from kindergarden?\u00a0 I am not so sure they will turn to that handsome little pocket guide, even if they do deep down want to know what God might say to them.\u00a0 I recall one kid trying to sell such a book back to us; you had to admire not only his ingenuity but his honesty.\u00a0 \u201cI just wouldn\u2019t use a book like that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

THE BEST BOOK TO GIVE
\nAnd so, I am here to announce, as urgently and as plainly as I can, that\u00a0we have found the best book to give to college-bound high-school seniors and graduates.\u00a0<\/b>
\n\"MakeThose in the throes of that\u00a0<\/b> \u201ccollege transition\u201d will enjoy this book which is substantive, interesting, important, and \u2014 and this is important, too \u2014 cool looking and fun.\u00a0It is called Make College Count: A Faithful Guide to Life + Learning <\/i><\/b>by Derek Melleby (Baker; $12.99 )\u00a0 As Steve Garber (one who has studied, and studied with, college students as intentionally as anyone I know, most college professors included) writes of it,\u00a0 \u201cMake College Count<\/i> is just right!\u00a0 What Derek Melleby has done is find a way to come alongside someone on the way to college and offer guidance about things that matter most.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

THINGS THAT MATTER MOST\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There are several very nice books for college-bound students and they have useful stuff about getting along with room-mates, doing laundry, avoiding the college party scene. \u00a0 A couple warn about the atheism of their secular professors.\u00a0 They almost all admonish youngsters to not have sex, to stay in touch with mom, to study hard.\u00a0 They are fine.\u00a0 And they are almost all cleverly written and still mostly inane.\u00a0 This 17 or 18 year old has just completed the first major phase of his or her educational life;\u00a0 it feels (at that age, at that transition point) like one of the most important moments in their whole life, and they are off to one of the most challenging (and expensive) and life-changing, formative episodes of the rest of their life, and we give them a whimsical guide to doing laundry, and one last warning not to have sex?\u00a0 This is the best God\u2019s people can do??\u00a0 This is all we have to say?<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\"Make-College-Count-Hardcover-218x300.jpg\"Mr. Melleby, in Make College Count<\/i><\/b>, thinks more foundationally; without seeming at all high-minded or overly serious, he winsomely invites students to think about, as Garber says, the things that matter most of all,<\/i> and without sounding preachy.\u00a0<\/i> There are seven questions that Melleby has discovered to be important for students to ask themselves, most usefully, before they get to State U, or at least early on in their college experience.<\/p>\n

Derek is increasingly known as a national leader on the psychology and spirituality of the college transition (he now directs an innovative Christian gap year program called OneLife<\/a><\/b>) and he affirms the research that has shown that college is a time where emerging adults will become the person they most likely will be for the rest of their life.\u00a0 How can they make the most of that time?\u00a0 What might we ask them to consider, to set them in the right direction?\u00a0 What are the things they should wrestle with a bit before they jump into the pace of the collegiate experience this fall?<\/p>\n

Melleby is a fine and at times funny writer, and after each chapter, where he takes up one of the primal questions, he does an illuminating interview with a young woman or man who has recently been out of college.\u00a0 He invites them to look back over their shoulder and tell their story, how their identity and sense of calling was shaped by their university years.\u00a0 These are not composites \u2014 they are real interviews. I actually know almost all of these students. Derek (I\u2019m happy to disclose) is a very good friend and his campus ministry work where he met these students occurred at a campus near here.\u00a0 I can say that nearly all of these students who are now young alums, have bought books from us, have shared some of their stories with Beth and me, and we can vouch for their thoughtfulness and integrity.\u00a0 The interviews in Make College Count<\/i><\/b> are like little sidebars, and they are upbeat and very interesting.\u00a0 And really helpful.<\/p>\n

We are confident that this little book \u2014 offering a way to discover a path to true success at college and beyond (as it says on the back cover) \u2014 is the best thing we\u2019ve seen like this in over 30 years of book selling.\u00a0 There is simply no other book that asks these very basic sorts of fascinating questions and offers such solid counsel about such good stuff in such a brief, colorful, (and likely to be read) format.<\/p>\n

Here is a part of the table of contents:<\/p>\n