NC Family Staff | October 26, 2024 | SHARE: 
College is a transformative time for many people as they explore who they are and what they believe. While many walk away from their faith during this time, many grow in their walk with Christ. There are countless campus ministries designed to help students become closer to Christ in North Carolina, including ministries known as Study Centers.
This week on Family Policy Matters, host Traci DeVette Griggs welcomes Madison Perry, Founder and Executive Director of The North Carolina Study Center, to discuss his motivation for starting this ministry and how it has impacted the community at UNC-Chapel Hill.
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TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Thanks for joining us this week for family policy matters by the time young people, even from Christian homes, set foot on a college campus, many are already questioning or even rejecting their Christian heritage. Well, today’s guest is part of a unique way to meet these young scholars on their own turf at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It’s called the North Carolina Study Center, and its efforts have been so successful, the center is now expanding to additional campuses. Madison Perry, founder and executive director of the North Carolina Study Center, welcome to Family Policy Matters.
MADISON PERRY: Thank you so much for having me.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: All right, so first of all, talk about what is the North Carolina Study Center, and why did you find that it was needed so much that you started it yourself?
MADISON PERRY: Thank you. That’s a good question. So, I came to Carolina in undergrad. Actually, I’m from Kinston, North Carolina originally, from a Christian home, and I’ve always really been excited to learn and excited to go deeper in my faith, especially intellectually. And when I came to UNC, I was actually really engaged with kind of literary theory and philosophy, and I was sort of wanting to understand exactly what the philosophies were that I was kind of intersecting with in the academy, and also how I could think as a Christian in those environments. And I just didn’t have many resources close to hand. At the same time, I went and visited a friend at UVA who was also studying literature, and they had a Christian Study Center at UVA. And I was immediately struck by like, how lucky he was to go to a school that had one of these study centers. So that was, kind of takes me back when I first noticed study centers.
And what a Christian Study Center is, it’s roughly analogous, actually, to the Jewish Hillel house movement. So Jewish Hillel houses were started in the 40s, and now there are, you know, hundreds and hundreds worldwide, but basically with the thought of saying, we want to give students a place to study and celebrate what it means to be Jewish. Similarly, Christians really, actually, since the 70s, have been starting these Christian study centers at universities across the country, saying, like, let’s have a place where students can grow in their appreciation and knowledge of the Christian life and of Christian thinking. So, the kind of trick to this is that study centers, you know, we call ourselves a Study Center. We’re a hospitality location. We’re kind of like a hub that a number of different evangelical ministries and student groups and various school groups will also use. And we kind of are this, like, center of social gravity, and then from this place, we can give students and faculty great resources that would help them grow in the faith. And so that’s the rough premise, is we sort of combine a hospitality presence with opportunities for growth.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right, how exciting. So, talk about the kind of responses. I know you guys have been around for a while. So, what kind of responses have you gotten from former students, from people on campus, administrators and your teachers there?
MADISON PERRY: That’s really been a very fun run. I started full time fall of 14, and we opened fall of 15. Thanks to a really kind group of people at the State Baptist Convention in North Carolina, we were able to get this really remarkable property on the corner of campus, and it’s a very desirable place to be. And so, our response from students and campus ministry friends and churches has been, was like, immediately, really, really strong. People just wanted to be here, and we’ve been able to be thoughtful about offering really good resources to those who come. So over time, obviously, it’s kind of grown in terms of just overall student traffic and attendance. We also do have faculty who we’ll invite to come speak. We’ve, from the very beginning, said that we’re seeking the truth, and we think that Christianity is a friend of the truth, and so we’re okay with questions. And so sometimes we’ll have speakers who are not Christian as well as Christian, but it’s been a really good environment to allow people to ask questions, to think, to see the depths of the Christian faith they haven’t explored yet. And the question did also involve our relationship with UNC. So, we’re an independent nonprofit. We own our own land, but we also have a student organization. We are active on campus in that we will use campus facilities for lectures. We also have just lots and lots of informal relationships within the school. I mean, there are a number of Christians who are active as faculty, administrators, staff, and one of our, kind of, main points has been that we think UNC is a great school. It’s a public university. It should allow for a diversity of viewpoints, and we are specifically tasked with kind of consolidating and encouraging people who want to explore Christianity to explore it intellectually and to also kind of taste what it is like to be a Christian. So, we’re glad that UNC is there. We understand that the school is not a Christian school. It’s not framed as a Christian school, as a public university. So, we’ve, from the very beginning, have said we want to make UNC a desirable school to go to, especially for Christians who would want to take advantage of all that UNC has to offer to contribute to campus and also to grow in their faith.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Yeah, talk a little bit more about that. So for Christian students and their parents, who are going, oh gosh, I just don’t want my kid to go, you know, get chewed up and spit out, kind of by our culture, which, you know, we hear a lot of scary things that might be happening on campuses, how is that a great laboratory for these students to come especially if they’re involved in these kinds of studies that you’ve mentioned.
MADISON PERRY: I think laboratory is a really good word because it involves, I think learning how to live as a Christian as an adult, you have to choose it. And so when you do leave home at some point, if you’ve been raised in the faith, you obviously have the option to leave. And so, to give students like a middle ground space where they can be surrounded by people who care about them and who do want to encourage them in the faith, but the students also have the freedom and the opportunity to see what else is out there, and also to learn how to live as Christians in a contested space. It’s a really great experience, I think, to have early on if you have the right resources at hand. So, I think about my own children. I have six children, four of whom are homeschooled at the moment, and we’re trying to pour into them. We’re trying to build them up, but knowing that eventually they’re going to have to learn how to live as themselves in environments that are not going to be built to encourage their faith. And I would rather they have that experience before the age of 23, of having to learn how to navigate, you know, the public world that we’re all in, and so, so that’s roughly kind of the thought is like, what if we could give Christian students at UNC really, really great resources, and at the same time they’re going to have to learn how to navigate public spaces in which they’re going to have to do eventually. And so, we can, we can actually help them as they’re learning how to do that, which we wouldn’t be able to do if they weren’t in secular contexts.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Give us some examples, if you would like, what’s an example of a student that really found your program to be helpful, or a professor or just frame that for us a little bit more specifically.
MADISON PERRY: Definitely, we really kind of try to offer resources for different kinds of students. And so, I could tell you hundreds of stories of lonely students who come to a big school like Carolina, and they don’t have a quick and easy way to meet other friends who they share a faith identity with, and they can find those people here. We actually run an orientation camp at the start of school. This year, we had over 220 incoming students do this camp. It’s a three day, in-town time, and we had students meeting each other, learning about all the different great ministries that are out there, getting connected with churches, actually meeting Christian faculty and within that, you know, at the very start of school, so many students are just crazy burdened by, like, social anxiety and the need to make a big school small. And so, we can, as Christians, give them ways to do that and also encourage them to live into the identity that they’ve chosen. So that’s a super fun thing to do. And I can just tell you about student after student who I think, from very early on, if they can get connected, it solves a lot of problems really quickly. And I can tell you other stories about students who get kind of, like, burnt out or like, become really isolated, and they need to have somebody reach out to go and just see how they’re doing and kind of get them moving again in a productive direction. So, a lot of students who have struggled with some kind of like low grade anxiety or depression, who we can kind of go the extra mile with them and get them moving, get them connected, help them discover good resources to kind of re engage. But I think my very favorite stories, though, are of leadership level students. They already know roughly who they want to be, but they don’t know how to get to where they want to go. And so, we can give them great books. We can help them with their questions. We can connect them with great faculty, with great professional opportunities, and by the time they graduate from Carolina, they have led as Christians in a public school. Some of them have, like, run for campus office, or they have ended up with prestigious, post graduate scholarships to go abroad. So, we’ve seen students who really lead well on campus, and they grow in their faith. And yeah, I’m just so proud of the people they become. So, I think about multiples of stories now called good running for almost 10 years. Yeah.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Yeah. Well, thank you for that. I am also a Carolina graduate. I did my undergrad there many years ago. It was much different back then, but I would have loved to have some kinds of resources like this in a center like this. So, and because it’s so valuable, you’re talking about expanding, right? And so, tell us about that, because I think some parents might be excited to hear that maybe their child would have the opportunity to attend something like this.
MADISON PERRY: I’m really excited about this. I kind of have, like, a tendency towards enjoying, like a startup phase. You know, we’re an independent nonprofit. We serve UNC Chapel Hill, but we’ve learned a lot, really quickly that we think would be useful for others who would want to have these started at their own schools. And so, we’ve been in the planting process at NC State, which has been really fun, because people who are familiar with our work and also love NC State have said, why can’t we have that at NC State? And I think with some level of organization and kind of like a plan for moving forward, they really will have that. And in fact, they’ve launched one which will be open to the public, you know, probably in nine months. But it’s already working. So, anybody who’s listening North Carolina State Study Center, search for it. You’ll see it. But the thought experiment is like, how can the church take care of its college students? And you know, for a long time, what the church has prioritized, from where I’m sitting, has been to offer really great fellowship groups for students who are in secular universities. And those fellowship groups do evangelism, they do discipleship, and then alternatively, for students who are going to go to a Christian college or university, they have that whole kind of university that should be forming them as Christians, but as Christian colleges and universities are kind of on the decline. Just enrollment. It is hard to run your own college. I think the thought is, instead of saying, like, how can we start more Christian colleges and universities, why don’t we say, like, what are the resources that our students who are embedded in secular contexts need? Like, let’s make these schools great schools to go to, where you can grow in Christ. And so, we love to see strong ministries at UNC. We try to strengthen them. And then also, we’re looking at the UNC educational experience, and we’re saying, like, where is it weak, or how could be supplemented? And we’re finding lots of opportunities to do it. So, I would just say, you know, if you’re interested in seeing this happen at another school, we’re kind of developing like a blueprint for doing it. And, yeah, I’m really excited about it.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: All right. So, is this the way, then that you think churches could get involved is helping to start one at a local college, or are there other easier first steps that churches could take to be involved?
MADISON PERRY: Well, what we really love is just when churches let their students know about our orientation program. We rely on word of mouth for it, but we’re a really easy on-ramp into the Christian community at UNC, and so just supporting us by being ambassadors of saying like, Hey, you’re going to go to UNC, and we know exactly how you need to get going. That actually is really helpful for, I think for students, it can really make a huge difference for them. So, I would just say, for their own good, please do that. We do have churches who lend us financial support. I think if churches are interested, they’re saying, hey, like our university town could use something like this, I’m totally willing to talk. We also are part of a group called the Consortium of Christian Study Centers, and it’s like a roughly, like a trade organization that strengthen the study centers is looking to grow the movement, and they would also be a good group to reach out to, because they’re also involved in planting, and they have lots of resources and connections. I would say lastly, that one of the tricks to doing it right as a study center is not be a membership organization. So, students don’t come to UNC and join the study center, instead they utilize us as a resource center. And so usually, how it’s worked best to start a study center would be to say, like, Let’s gather as many people who love this university, as who are Christian as possible, and then found something that would be not under the umbrella of a single membership organization, because unfortunately, that can kind of undercut the movement within that university, you want to draw everybody together who could be appropriate.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right, so what about owning your land too? Because it seems like that, at times, could be pretty important if you have some opposition from the university, or somebody who’s trying to drum up support to drive you off campus. Is that a pretty important component?
MADISON PERRY: I mean, campus access is always going to be kind of contestable, because we want to be independent. We think it’s better for us to be independent from UNC. UNC, again, is a public university. And so, I think it’s important that we be able to determine what we think students and faculty need. So yeah, that measure of independence is important.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, well, we’re just about out of time, before we go, Madison Perry, where can our listeners go to learn more about the North Carolina Study Center, the NC State Study Center that’s getting started, and other ways that they might get involved?
MADISON PERRY: You can see us on Instagram or our website is NCStudyCenter.org and you’ll see pictures from lectures. You’ll see students out. It’s a really fun time of year for us. You can also come visit if you want to see us in person. And then NCStateStudyCenter.org, will be the State Study Center. And yeah, please keep us in your prayers. Please be praying that the Lord will grow up great students and faculty in Chapel Hill. And yeah, I’m so excited about the road ahead, and very much appreciate that you all took the time to hear from me.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your good work. That’s encouraging to me, and I’m sure to our listeners as well. Madison Perry, founder and executive director of the North Carolina Study Center. Thank you so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.
MADISON PERRY: Thank you so much. Have a good one.
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