One of my favorite subjects to talk about is the strategic nature of campus ministry. As I was reading the most recent issue of Books & Culture scar divx
, one passage from a book review popped out at me:
I saw a striking pattern in these books [Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in the Global South: Africa children shouldn t play with dead things download /Latin America/Asia] that the editors and authors did not mention: a distinct source for much of the more principled evangelical social and political engagement across the regions. Repeatedly, the leaders of parachurch ministries and reform-minded NGOs that worked on behalf of the poor and the vulnerable, who spoke up for human rights and electoral reform and against corruption and autocratic rule came from two sources: student Christian movements and the worldwide network of evangelical leaders affiliated with the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship joined the People Power movement in the Philippines, while Campus Crusade played a central role in the formation of the Citizens Committee for Economic Justice in South Korea. Likewise in South Africa, it was the members of Youth Alive, the evangelical student fellowship started in Soweto by Caesar Molebatsi, who drove the Concerned Evangelicals movement to resist apartheid in the 1980s. The Latin American Theological Fraternity, an evangelical network with strong ties to both the Lausanne Committee and the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, figures prominently in pro-democratic evangelical work across Latin America.
INFEMIT [the International Fellowship of Evangelical Mission Theologians] itself is a product of this network, which might help explain these authors’ interest in highlighting this strain of evangelical social thought and action. But it is indeed significant. Little could the Anglo-American founders of the Lausanne and campus ministry movements have imagined that their emphasis on thoughtful Bible study and a “whole gospel for the whole world” would help animate democratic movements around the globe.
source: “Now What? Revivalist Christianity and Global South Politics” by Joel Carpenter. Books & Culture March/April 2009, page 36.
If you want to change a culture, change its campuses. They are the steering wheels of society.
This is so true Glen. Universities are the place where ideas are formed and shaped. If we want to influnce a generation, or multiple generations, Chi-Alpha is the way to go. I am greatful for my experience with the Chi-Alph group that meets at Western Washington University when I went to school there.