Campus Ministry at the Ivies

One of our alum­ni, Eliz­a­beth, emailed me this fas­ci­nat­ing NYT arti­cle: On a Chris­t­ian Mis­sion to the Top. It’s an arti­cle about min­istry at the Ivy League schools focus­ing on a group called Chris­t­ian Union

. There’s a relat­ed NPR sto­ry.

I real­ly appre­ci­ate their vision. I’ve often thought that some­one ought to estab­lish evan­gel­i­cal min­istry cen­ters at the top tier uni­ver­si­ties, so I’m glad to see that they’re run­ning with it.

Any­way, this para­graph leapt out at me:

By the 1970’s, Assem­blies church­es were sprout­ing up in afflu­ent sub­urbs across the coun­try. Recent sur­veys by Mar­garet Polo­ma, a his­to­ri­an at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Akron in Ohio, found Assem­blies mem­bers more edu­cat­ed and bet­ter off than the gen­er­al pub­lic.

I’m speech­less.

The Assem­blies of God and edu­ca­tion are not two con­cepts that are often linked in the minds of the pop­u­lace at large (with rea­son, I might add: I’ve actu­al­ly heard these words uttered at a min­is­te­r­i­al gath­er­ing with absolute­ly no hint of humor, “The prob­lem with the Assem­blies is all this eddikashun.” More­over, I saw sev­er­al heads nod in agree­ment). Per­haps that instance has unfair­ly taint­ed my per­cep­tions of the move­ment as a whole, but I’ve nev­er been par­tic­u­lar­ly impressed with our intel­lec­tu­al prowess in the Assem­blies.

On the flip side, one of our AG min­is­ters in San Fran­cis­co is a Har­vard grad who lives in a bus and min­is­ters to the home­less. And of my three dis­trict offi­cials (bish­op-equiv­a­lents) one has his doc­tor­ate and anoth­er just needs to fin­ish his dis­ser­ta­tion. A pas­tor I know in the San Joaquin val­ley was once nom­i­nat­ed for a Pulitzer. Come to think of it, I know lots of sharp, well-edu­cat­ed min­is­ters and even more sharp, well-edu­cat­ed laypeo­ple.

I just always assumed they were a minor­i­ty. I should real­ly rethink that.