How InterVarsity Supports Faculty in Integrating Faith and Work

Updated

InterVarsity's Faculty Ministry equips Christian professors to integrate faith and scholarship, with the stated goal of lasting campus and world impact. If you are a faculty member, the practical path is to join or lead a Christian faculty community on your campus, and to use InterVarsity's resources and support for faculty flourishing. The site frames this around three actions: learn about Faculty Ministry, join or lead a community, and equip your ministry.

What Faculty Ministry is for

According to InterVarsity's own description, Faculty Ministry exists to "equip Christian professors to integrate faith and scholarship for lasting campus and world impact." That single sentence carries the whole purpose:

  • Who it serves: Christian faculty, not students. InterVarsity's broader campus work serves students and faculty, but Faculty Ministry is the faculty-facing track.
  • What it does: equips professors to hold their faith and their academic work together rather than treating them as separate spheres.
  • What it aims at: impact that outlasts a semester — on the campus and beyond it.

This matters if you have ever felt that your discipline and your faith run on parallel tracks. The ministry's premise is that they can be integrated, and that other faculty are working on the same problem.

Ways to get involved

The site lists three concrete entry points for faculty. Each answers a different question.

If your situation is… The site's suggested step What it involves
You want to understand the vision first Learn about Faculty ministry See how Faculty Ministry equips Christian professors to integrate faith and scholarship
You want people, not just ideas Join or lead a community Connect, lead, or launch a Christian faculty community on your campus
You already have a group and want to strengthen it Equip your ministry Resources and support for faculty flourishing together on campus

The middle option is the most open-ended: "join or lead" covers both someone arriving at an existing group and someone starting from nothing. If no community exists on your campus, the site's language explicitly includes launching one.

What "integrating faith and work" looks like in practice

The phrase can stay abstract, so it helps to name what it actually asks of a professor. Integration typically shows up in at least three places:

  1. In your teaching — how you frame your field, what questions you treat as worth asking, how you treat students.
  2. In your scholarship — the topics you choose, the assumptions you examine, the way you handle evidence and disagreement.
  3. In your department and campus life — how you relate to colleagues, mentor junior faculty, and handle institutional pressures.

A faculty community is the setting where those questions get worked out with peers who share the commitment but not necessarily your discipline. That cross-discipline mix is part of the value: an economist and a biologist asking the same question about vocation tend to surface assumptions neither would notice alone.

How this connects to the rest of InterVarsity

Faculty Ministry is not a standalone program. InterVarsity describes itself as a campus community helping students and faculty follow Jesus with their whole lives, for the rest of their lives. The faculty track sits alongside student communities, campus stories, and events such as Urbana (the site promotes Urbana 25, Dec. 28–31, with registration open).

For faculty specifically, the site also points to giving — supporting the mission of reaching every student on every campus — and to an annual report showing impact. Those are optional next steps, not requirements for involvement.

Practical next steps

If you want to move from reading to acting:

  1. Decide which question you are answering. Understanding the vision, finding people, or strengthening an existing group. The three site options map onto those.
  2. Start with the community option if you want peers. "Join or lead a community" is the page's own framing for getting involved, and it covers launching a group where none exists.
  3. Use the equipping resources once you have a group. They are described as tools for growing together, which implies an existing community rather than a solo reader.
  4. Check what is local. The site describes national-level ministry and resources; the actual meeting times, format, and campus presence depend on your institution, so confirm details with the local InterVarsity contact rather than assuming a chapter exists.

One caveat worth stating plainly: the site describes the mission and the available paths, but it does not publish a directory of every campus faculty group, nor does it detail what a given community's meetings look like. Treat the site as the starting point and the local community as the place where specifics get settled.