Council of Higher Education Ministries records

The Council for Higher Education Ministries (CHEM) was established in the mid 1990s as an umbrella agency with three work groups: the Council for Ecumenical Student Christian Ministry (CESCM), Higher Education Ministries Arena (HEMA), and United Ministries in Higher Education (UMHE). CHEM dissolved as a 501 c 3 not-for-profit corporation in 2007 and its activities merged into the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA.

The three CHEM work groups were all involved with ecumenical work with students and had overlapping goals and participants. The Council for Ecumenical Student Christian Ministry was founded in 1987, shortly after the collapse of the earlier National Ecumenical Student Christian Council. CESCM was established "in order to create new opportunities for involving students and campus ministries in the work to rebuild an ecumenical student Christian ministry in the United States." In 1995 the CESCM was affiliated with the World Student Christian Federation as a member movement.

In the late 1980s, negotiators from United Ministries in Education and the Education in the Society Unit of the National Council of churches began exploring the possibility of creating a new national higher educationon ministries entity to be lodged within the reorganized NCC. The result was the creation of the Higher Education Ministries Arena (HEMA), first as a part of Ecumenical Ministries in Education (a program ministry of the Education, Communications, and Discipleship Unit of the NCC) and later separately incorporated. According to a 1992 memo, the Higher Education Ministries Team of United Ministries in Education (previously and later known as United Ministries in Higher Education) continued to exist after the formation of HEMA because "certain partnerships to be maintained and services to be rendered....could not be adequately sustained through the Higher Education Ministries Arena."

United Ministries in Higher Education (UMHE) was comprised of the higher education staff of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Presbyterian Church USA, United Church of Christ, Church of the Brethren, and Moravian Church. It characterized itself as "a national staff collective to provide vision and oversight for developing progressive, ecumenical student Christian leadership." The last records from UMHE date from 2005.

Higher Education Ministries Arena evolved into The Ecumenical Campus Ministries Team (ECMT), which is part of the Education and Leadership Ministries Commission of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA. ECMT provides a structure through which seven denominations work ecumenically to achieve common goals in higher education ministries: American Baptist Churches, USA , the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church (USA), United Church of Christ, and United Methodist Church.