Thinking allowed: thoughtful faith and generous love in university chaplaincy

HOW CAN university chaplaincy be a setting where – as the promotional material for today’s Colloquium puts it – believers can open their arms to enquirers and spiritual explorers, making all comers feel truly welcome without subjecting them to any pressure? In short how might university chaplaincy best off er compelling “invitations to Christian commitment”?

In exploring this I will focus on my seven years as Dean of Residence and Church of Ireland chaplain in Trinity College Dublin. But before I do that, I’d like to say something about my time as a university student, because long before I ever off ered any one at university any “invitation to Christian commitment” I had myself received such an invitation. That experience greatly influenced how I related to students when later I was on the other side of the altar, so to speak.

I did my first undergraduate degree at UCG, now the University of Galway, back in the early 1990s. And, in a not untypical way – certainly in the West of Ireland back then – while I had been brought up in a Christian tradition as Roman Catholic, I had drifted away from it somewhat in my teenage years and by the time I went to university, I was pretty agnostic about God and church and the life of faith.

* Full article available in printed copies.

Darren McCallig

is Rector of Esher, Diocese of Guildford, and was Dean of Residence and Chaplain in Trinity College Dublin from 2007 to 2015.