Accompaniment Is Not Efficient. It Is Essential.

Reflections from Witnessing to the Light of Christ: The Way, the Truth, and the Life, Indianapolis a USCCB gathering.

by Rosie Chinea Shawver, MDiv

I spent the last three days in Indianapolis with bishops, diocesan leaders, parish staff, and campus ministers from across the country, asking how to witness Christ in a Church and a culture that feels fractured. I came home with a workbook full of arrows, circled words, and notes scrawled sideways in the margins. The longer I sit with them, the more they arrange themselves into a single story about accompaniment.

What follows is not mine alone. It was gathered through synodal listening and shaped in collective prayer, and I offer it as the fruit of the Holy Spirit moving among us.

It began with the invitation that began everything: Come and see. When we were asked how we first encountered Christ, my mind went straight back to UC San Diego, where campus ministers invited me to come and see and, in doing so, changed the direction of my life. Campus ministry has never been an abstraction for me. It is how I came home. Around my table, leaders from Peoria to Covington told their own versions of that story, and the same threads kept surfacing: simplicity, relationship, community, surrender, hospitality. At the top of the page I circled one word, listen, because nearly every story began with someone who had first paid attention.

From there the conversation turned to what it means to walk with people over time, and I wrote one line down twice: accompaniment is not efficient, but it is essential. It means meeting people where they are, one on one, until they know they are seen, known, and loved. It means teaching them to pray by praying with them, because that relationship with Christ is what will hold them long after we are no longer in the room. Accompaniment is mutual. It never coerces. And it doesn't really end.

We were honest about how often we get the order wrong. Jesus healed, proclaimed, and taught, rarely in a tidy sequence, yet we tend to lead with the hard sell and ask for someone's whole heart before they have met the One asking for it. A participant wondered, half-joking, whether a person could start by simply flirting with Jesus. The room laughed, but the point stayed with me. Curiosity is a beginning, and we should treat it as one.

The harder question is how any of this happens at scale. Accompaniment is not a program, but it does need structure, whether that is a small group, a lay movement, or a weekly dinner where people share life. That question is the reason CCMA exists. Campus ministers accompany students, and we accompany campus ministers, so that no one carrying this work has to carry it alone.

The later sessions deepened the picture. We were reminded that people are not projects, and that the sacramental life, both the Sacraments themselves and the small, everyday moments that point to God, is meant to move us with wonder rather than settle into routine. Someone observed that the Last Supper was not the first supper. Jesus ate with people again and again before that night. It left me asking whether we are truly a Eucharistic people, and whether the way we treat one another, especially when we disagree, reflects the table we share. We talked about the difference between bringing people to church and forming people who can lead, and about how mission always flows from a person rather than a plan.

The final session, on the Holy Spirit, turned the question back on each of us. Where does our yes come from: fear, or trust? Control and perfectionism quietly make ministry about us, when it was always God's. Two phrases from that afternoon are now written inside the cover of my notebook: speak without attacking, and listen without defending. A third may be the truest thing I heard all week. Surrender is not disengagement. It is the interior freedom to let God do His work. We still live in the apostolic age, held between the littleness of who we are and the grandness of what we are called to be.

For those of you serving on campuses, I keep picturing what all of this looks like on an ordinary Tuesday in the student center. It starts with listening before inviting, asking how Christ is already present in a student's life and beginning there. It means letting curiosity be enough for now, praying with students rather than only for them, and never assuming they know the words we use, including what we mean by discipleship. Many arrive without rhythms or limits, carrying anxiety and depression, and a weekly dinner or a regular time of prayer may be the first stable community they have known.

It also means building for both breadth and depth: investing deeply in a few student leaders and equipping them to accompany others, because you cannot walk with everyone, and you are not the right companion for every student. It means planning for life after graduation, connecting seniors to parishes, mentors, and communities before they leave, and helping them see their families and their work as their own apostolate. And it means paying attention to where your own yes’ come from, slowing down long enough to hear the Spirit, and remembering that this ministry was never yours to carry alone.

On the first page of my notes I had written a question I didn't expect to still be holding at the end: Who are we invited to become? I think the answer is a Church that listens before it speaks, accompanies even when it is inefficient, trusts the Spirit more than its own plans, and forms people who go on to form others. That is the work happening on the front lines of campus ministry, on 375 campuses every day. It is how we build a movement.

Come and see.