Category: Stanford/Ministry News

Lawrence Lessing, Stanford law prof, will be arguing Eldred vs Ashcroft before the Supreme Court, asking the justices (four of whom are Stanford alumni) to lessen the duration of copyright protection.

[note–edited for usage (thanks to Andrew for catching a homonym error!)]

Beloit College has released its 2006 college mindset list.

From the intro: This year’s entering students have grown up in a country where the Presidents have all been Southerners, and in a world with AIDS and without apartheid. Saturns have always been on the street, the Fox Network has always been on television, and prom dresses have always come in basic black. The evil empire is not earth-bound, the drug “ecstacy” has always been available, and with the breakup of AT & T, nobody has been able to comprehend a phone bill.

Some of the more humorous items:
11. Barbie has always had a job.
14. A “Hair Band” is some sort of fashion accessory.
15. George Foreman has always been a barbecue grill salesman.
21. The United States has always been trying to put nuclear waste in Nevada.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my mission field!

Paula and I have been out of town the last three days, and it was great! 

The Nor Cal / Nevada District hosted a golf tournament.

No–we didn’t play. We did something much, much better.

We drove around in a golf cart all day both days and handed out free ice-cold drinks to parched pastors! The temperature on the first day was around 102 F and set a new record for the area, which meant that the golfers were VERY happy to see us. There were around 80 golfers, and we gave away around 400 drinks over the two days of the tournament.

It was a great way to bless the pastors, and it was also a great way to build some name recognition for Stanford Chi Alpha among this key constituency. It was also a great way to become the most loved people on the golf course!

Yet another way Stanford is changing the world: here’s a list of companies founded by members of the Stanford community. Among them:

Hewlett-Packard
Cisco Systems
Silicon Graphics
Sun Microsystems
Electronic Arts
Yahoo!
EBay
Nvidia

Turns out that 40% of the revenue in Silicon Valley is generated by companies that emerged from Stanford, and the employees earned around 6.5 billion dollars in 1999. Wow!

By the way, that 6.5 billion dollars would work out to $650 million dollars in tithes. For comparison’s sake, the Assemblies of God gave $350 million in 2001.

In a recent article about the arrival of the freshmen at Stanford was this little tidbit:

For the first time in the university’s history, the majority of the members of the Class of 2006 are persons of color. According to statistics from Office of Admission, 40.6 percent of the new class are white, 23.4 percent of the class are Asian American; 11.6 percent are African American; 10.3 percent are Mexican-American; 5.5 percent are international students; 3 percent are other Latino and 1.9 percent are Native American/Native Hawaiian. In addition to being the most ethnically diverse, the class is the one of them most geographically diverse ever admitted.

Here’s another reason the American university is such a strategic mission field–there are about 14,000,000 university students attending college in America and almost 4% of them are from other nations.

The most recent statistics I could find show that over half of them are from Asia and 7% are from the Middle East. Many of these nations forbid any sort of missionary work–but they send their future leaders here to be trained! In fact, the Navigators claim that 7 of the top 10 countries that send students to the U.S. are closed to typical misssionary efforts.

That’s impressive enough, but I’ll up the ante even further. I’ve heard that every major world leader except Saddam Hussein has studied in America, but I wasn’t able to verify that claim. What I can do is list of some of the world leaders trained on United States campuses. Imagine the potential world impact of reaching the future leaders of the world today (incidentally, I have a related essay focused on America)! The political scene is so tumultuous that I won’t bother pretending this is current. Assume that they’re possibly out of power unless you hear their names on the news.

Ehud Barak, Former Israeli Prime Minister, Stanford
Alejandro Toledo, president of Peru, Stanford
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister, MIT
Benizar Bhutto, first female Prime Minister of Pakistan, Harvard U
Carlos Salinas, president of Mexico, Harvard U
Lien Chan, Premier of Taiwan, University of Chicago
Lee Teng Hui, President of Taiwan, Iowa State and Cornell
Saud Al-Fasial, Foreign Minister of Saudia Arabia, Princeton
Adul Al-Awadi, Kuwaiti Minister of State, Harvard
Kai-Wen Mao, Chinese Minister of Education, UC Berkeley and Carnegie-Mellon
Dhoukan Al-Hindawi, Deputy Prime Minister of Jordan, University of Maryland
Osama al-Baz, Chief Advisor to President Mubarak in Egypt, Harvard
Bir Birkram Sha Dev Birenda, King of Nepal, Harvard
Tahir al-Masri, Prime Minister of Jordan, University of North Texas
Yosuko Matsuoka, Foreign Minister of Japan, University of Oregon

You don’t have to imagine the potential impact, ministry to international students has already had worldwide ramifications. Consider this telling example:

A number of years ago, Hal Guffey (former president of International Students, Inc.) was speaking to a group of Christians about the opportunity to befriend international students. At the end of his talk a young lady from another country approached him. She told him that though her father had not become a Christian as a result of his student days in the U.S., nonetheless he had returned home with a favorable impression of Christians. Many years later he found himself in a position to decide whether Christian missionaries should be allowed to remain in his country. He decided they should be allowed to stay. (source)

If you know of any others world leaders who should be on the list, let me know via the comment box!

In BMOC: Big Mandate On Campus, World Magazine covers the amazing indoctrination that some schools put incoming freshmen through. I would have written the article differently, but it’s got a lot of good data.

They don’t mention Stanford, but I’m curious to see what sort of experience the incoming freshmen have in the next few weeks.

Here’s an excerpt: Others say outright that such presentations are designed to shake the soil from new students’ small-town roots, dismantle traditional values they might have brought from home… “I really want [freshmen] to understand that they are no longer at home, they’re not in high school anymore, and a lot of the values and morals they may have had from those experiences may change here over the next four years,” said diversity issues coordinator Marcus Newsom of Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa.

Thanks to blogs4God for bringing this link to my attention.

It’s already been a full year. It’s hard to believe. I was scheduled to preach at an AGTS chapel service that morning. As soon as I saw the planes hit I began changing my message, although I fully expected the phone call that came shortly afterwards: “We’ll reschedule–we just feel like we need to devote the full service to prayer.” 

In that year I’ve moved from there to here, and I was surprised to learn how Stanford was affected by the terrorist attacks on our culture.

A few items in no particular order:

I found this brief story about the 40 Iranian nationals who study at Stanford interesting. I also thought this administrator’s perspective on their plight was interesting.

I also was shocked to learn that Stanford received fake anthrax mailings last October. Those incidents spawned an emergency response force. I did find it mildly humorous that the biosafety manager had to get special permission to just analyze everything herself. I’m sure the Stanford research laboratories were much better equipped (and the researchers more highly trained) than at the Santa Clara county facilities.

The community as a whole seems less traumatized and polarized than many other campuses: both Berkeley and San Francisco State have seen some pretty angry encounters over Middle-Eastern issues, but tempers at Stanford have been much cooler.

This is pretty dated, but I just ran across it: according to the 2001 Nationwide Freshman Survey, college students are becoming less and less religious:

RECORD NUMBER REPORT NO RELIGIOUS PREFERENCE

When asked to indicate their current religious preference, an all-time high of 15.8 percent of students reported none, compared with 14.9 percent last year and 6.6 percent in 1966. The growth in students with no religious preference parallels the growth in the percentage of students who report no religious preference for at least one parent. A record high of 12.4 percent of freshmen describe their fathers as having no religious preference, and a record high of 7.8 percent report no religious reference for their mothers.

Additionally, there is a decline in the percentage of students who pray or meditate at least once a week (from 67.7 in 2000 to 65.7 percent in 2001). A new survey question asked students to rate their level of “religiousness” as compared to the average person their age, with results of 31.7 percent rating themselves above average or in the highest 10 percent. This represents the second-lowest figure among all 21 self-rating measures.

Another reason to see Christ proclaimed on the college campus!

For a while now I’ve been meaning to add this our site, but I’ve been a little too busy. I should have read Jon Walker’s article Did Jesus Rush Through His Week?!

My wife and I are considered missionaries by the Assemblies of God. That catches some people off-guard. After all, aren’t missionaries people who serve exclusively in pagan lands (preferably while wearing a pith helmet in the jungle)?

Not necessarily. A missionary is someone who is called to proclaim the gospel where there is no church to proclaim it.

There are a lot of nuances and qualifications I could add to that definition of a missionary, but I think it will suffice for this discussion. The key phrase is where there is no church to proclaim it.

That describes the college campus. College campuses (excluding commuter schools) are communities unto themselves. Students can attend classes, sleep, eat, watch movies, play games, do laundry, and shop for the necessities without ever leaving their campus. In fact, many campuses don’t even allow freshmen to have vehicles.

What’s the ramification? It doesn’t matter how many churches there are in the surrounding town–the college campus is a different world. Students are in great need of the gospel, yet they are insulated from the churches that proclaim it.

And so when we minister on campus we’re proclaiming the gospel in a place where there is no church to proclaim it. We’re missionaries.

That’s not to say there aren’t any differences between us and other missionaries. For example, the goal of most missionaries is to establish an indigenous church that is self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating. In other words, they’re trying to establish a church that makes the missionary unnecessary!

Our goal is different. We can’t create a church at Stanford that meets all three criteria (being self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating) because of the nature of the campus and the students who inhabit it. The challenges are chiefly in the area of self-governance (the students keep graduating, making totally student-run groups unstable) and self-support (college students have no money to provide for a full-time pastor). Incidentally, that’s why we raise missionary support.

In other words, the college campus is a perpetual mission field. We simply can’t build a church that will make our ministry unnecessary or redundant. 

And that’s why universities need missionaries–they are self-sufficient communities that are isolated from any nearby churches. Since the students won’t come to church, the church must go to them.

And that’s missions.

Oh–I shouldn’t finish this without mentioning two more details:

1) There are roughly 14,000,000 college students in America: almost half the nations in the world have lower populations!

2) The world comes to America for education: of those 14,000,000 students over 500,000 are from other nations (over half of those are from Asia and another 7% are from the Middle East). Walking across virtually any college campus you can find students from countries that don’t allow missionaries entry. They’ve come here and they can be reached here. That’s one of the reasons Chi Alpha emphasizes International Student Friendship Ministries so strongly.