Trauma-Informed Campus Ministry

THE SOURCE

At 19 years old, I went on a retreat through my university’s campus ministry office. At that point, I hadn’t acknowledged that I had been sexually abused as a kid, let alone told anybody else or sought healing… so when the retreat leaders approached me with a blindfold as part of a trust walk activity, I couldn’t have explained why my heart started racing or why I felt so trapped.

Years into working on healing, I could tell you that this was likely a trauma response. I could also tell you that I was very likely not the only person on that retreat who had trauma in their background or struggled with the prospect of being blindfolded. Research tells us that trauma is unfortunately common: almost two-thirds of United States adults have experienced at least one potentially traumatic event. ¹  The effects of trauma are pervasive and far-reaching – in addition to psychological effects, trauma can also cause social and physiological effects. It can lead to educational difficulties and long-term health consequences, to name a few. It also disproportionately impacts marginalized communities in the United States. ² 

THE RELEVANCE

Research surrounding trauma and trauma-informed care has rapidly expanded in recent years. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has been a leading authority regarding principles and practices trauma-informed care. ³ A number of professions including K-12 educators, social workers, librarians, and primary care providers have drawn on the work of SAMHSA to develop practices for trauma-informed care specific to their fields. ⁴

The foundational beliefs of the Christian faith involve the deeply traumatic experience of Jesus’s crucifixion and even his resurrection with wounds from the crucifixion still present on his body. While an expanding field of theology ⁵ demonstrates the imperative of grappling with trauma in the Christian tradition along with the insights about our faith that can be gleaned from this narrative, trauma-informed care is still a lesser-explored area in the work of ministry.

There is some emerging research surrounding trauma-informed care in church ministry and in other forms of pastoral ministry, but campus ministry and college campus ministry more specifically still constitute a gaping hole in the research.

As a college campus minister who has spent years in the field, I decided to use the existing research and my own experience to develop an articulation of what trauma-informed campus ministry might look like and how campus ministers might be trained to implement the approach.

THE CONTEXT

Put bluntly, campus ministry is a weird job. My running list of “unexpected things I do as a campus minister” includes sitting in a dunk tank, mass-producing meatballs, and attempting to capture a bat that managed to get inside our university’s retreat house. It is a struggle to describe the varied and complex work of college campus ministry with 18–22-year-old “traditional” undergraduate college students. Broadly, this work includes formal programming like retreats and worship and informal programming like spontaneous discussions or office hangouts, along with relational ministry, pastoral care, and crisis response.

The work of campus ministry is filled with joy and sorrow, questions of meaning and vocation, wrestling with faith and challenges, as well as moments of delight and silliness. We get to see students begin to grow into themselves and deepen their understanding of what they believe and who they want to be in the world. Then, inevitably, we send them on their way and welcome new students in their wake. ⁶

To add a layer of complexity, professional campus ministers operate with a wide variety of educational backgrounds and training. Campus ministers sometimes enter this field straight out of college, others have formal training and education like Master of Divinity programs, and still others enter the work of campus ministry from entirely different professional fields. Theology and Divinity schools are expanding their trauma curricula, but it is not yet standard or required. Even if it were, we cannot assume that all or even most campus ministers would have this training before entering the field. As a result, any approach to trauma-informed care in campus ministry must account for the varied backgrounds of campus ministers.

THE APPROACH

I began by imagining how I might train my own team of campus ministers in trauma-informed care. My plan was to facilitate a day-long workshop that taught content but also sought to create interactive ways of learning so that campus ministers would leave not only with a better understanding of trauma and general principles of trauma-informed care, but also engage with practical ways they might implement the principles into their work. I desired to offer practical, tangible content while also maintaining a commitment to the idea that trauma-informed care is not a checklist to complete but an approach to be infused and integrated. However, to facilitate a workshop, I first needed to use my research on trauma-informed care to develop an approach to trauma-informed campus ministry. ⁷

I settled on three main domains of campus ministry: physical spaces, programming, and individual pastoral ministry. In the infographic below, I offer considerations and possibilities for implementation in each domain. During our workshop, I offered a crash-course on trauma, its prevalence, and its impacts. Then, I led my team through activities to explore the three domains of implementation and develop concrete and practical ways they could implement a trauma-informed approach in their ministry.

 

THE FUTURE

A day-long workshop was a reasonable start to this work, but it was just a start. In the semester-end assessment I had my team complete, they noted that they were able to implement the workshop content into their work but they also desired ongoing conversation and education.

In the future, I’d like to bring this content to other campus ministry offices to increase capacity in the field overall. I’d also consider performing audits of campus ministry programs to adapt them to be more trauma-informed, along with consultation and continuing education.

Ultimately, this is just a first step. I hope it serves as a starting point for a much larger conversation to develop a thorough approach to trauma-informed care in the context of college campus ministry that encourages spaces of safety as well as healing, meaning-making, and flourishing. ⁸

 

If you’d like to work together, or you’d be interested in having me facilitate a trauma-informed care workshop for your team, please reach out: meredith [dot] mckay13 [at] gmail [dot] com

 

 

Footnotes

1. Elizabeth A. Swedo, “Prevalence of Adverse Childhood Experiences Among U.S. Adults — Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2011–2020,” MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 72 (2023), https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7226a2.
2. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, “SAMHSA’s Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach,” in HHS Publication No. (SMA), vol. 14–4884 (Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2014).
3. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, “Practical Guide for Implementing a Trauma-Informed Approach,” in SAMHSA Publication No. PEP23-06-05-005 (Rockville, MD: National Mental Health and Substance Use Policy Laboratory: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2023).
4. Daryl Mahon, “An Umbrella Review of Systematic Reviews on Trauma Informed Approaches,” Community Mental Health Journal, July 24, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-024-01317-z.
5. My theological sources for this project included Shelly Rambo, Jennifer Beste, Julia Feder, Erin Kidd, Danielle Tumminio Hansen, and Megan K. McCabe. Each of these authors has made significant contributions to trauma theology and their work is worth exploring.
6. Mary Catherine Young, “Welcome, Engage, Connect, Send: The Revolving Door of Campus Ministry,” Anglican Theological Review 99, no. 1 (2017): 71–79.
7. Major sources for this work included Trauma-Informed Spiritual Care: Interventions for Safety, Meaning, Reconnection, and Justice by Danielle Tumminio Hansen, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem, and Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining by Shelly Rambo.
8. This work would not have been possible without the courageous work of writers like Chanel Miller (Know My Name: A Memoir) and Stefanie Foo (What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma), nor would it have been possible without my network of supportive friends and my first editor, Olga Segura, who encouraged me to use my voice.