Friendship, Clubs, and Intellectual Ferment: Creating a Hub for Campus Ministry
One characteristic that sets Cambridge House apart from many of the other campus ministries at William & Mary is that it has a physical location. Although campus ministries can reserve rooms on campus for events, such rooms can often can feel somewhat sterile and institutional.
In contrast, at Cambridge House we strive to create a warm, hospitable environment that makes people feel at home—it doesn’t hurt that the study center is located in an actual house (or that it provides free coffee, tea, and food!).
What this means then, is that one of the easiest ways the center can help support and further the work of the Christian community at William & Mary, is by simply making its space available for use by other campus ministries. Currently Cru, InterVarsity, and the Christian Legal Society use the house on a regular basis for small groups, Bible studies, and dinners. In the future, we hope to see other campus ministries, and possibly even churches, use the house more.
In addition to helping campus ministries by providing space for their programming, there’s another potential benefit that can come from the house being used: namely, the possible collaboration and intellectual ferment that can result from having different Christian leaders rubbing shoulders with one another at the house on a regular basis. Despite the myth of the lone genius producing a flood of intellectual output, the evidence often points to something else: small groups of leaders developing friendships over shared conversation and often meals, leading to an intellectual ferment resulting in tremendous artistic and intellectual output. As Jacques Barzun points out, the sine qua non for cultural flourishing is not, “prosperity, or wise government support, or a spell of peace and quiet… The first requisite is surely the clustering of eager minds in one place.”[1]
History is replete with such groups and the intellectual ferment they produced was truly remarkable. As Philip and Carol Zaleski point out, such groups include:
The 17th century Friday Street Club at the Mermaid Tavern in Cheapside, with its boisterous Elizabethan roster of Ben Johnson, John Donne, and Francis Beaumont; the early 18th century Scriblerus Club, a Tory group led by Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Arbuthnot…; and, later in the 18th century, Samuel Johnson’s dinner-and-discussion circle, generically entitled “The Club,” with Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, (and) Edmund Burke, (Adam Smith. and Edward Gibbon)”[2]
The supreme example for Christians of such a group is the Inklings: the group of friends that included J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield.[3] According to Philip and Carol Zaleski:
The [Inklings]… altered in large or small measure, the course of imaginative literature, Christian theology and philosophy, comparative mythology, and the scholarly study of the Beowulf author, of Dante, Spenser, Milton, courtly love, fairy tale and epic.[4]
By providing a space that encourages campus pastors and Christian leaders in the area to work in close proximity with one another, Cambridge House is hopefully increasing the likelihood that they’ll form relationships; relationships that could have a catalytic effect, resulting in increased intellectual output, richer spiritual fruit, and greater collaboration in the Body of Christ. What this means is that when you give to support the ministry of Cambridge House, you’re not just giving to support the ministry of the study center, you may also be indirectly supporting the work of other campus ministries, as well…
[1] Barzun, Jacques. From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001, 67.
[2] Zaleski, Philip and Carol. The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, 27.
[3] Pavlac Glyer, Diana. The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. Kent State University Press, 2007, Pp. xvi-xvii.
[4] Zaleski and Zaleski, Fellowship, 4.