Category: Stanford/Ministry News

Scanning the news that backed up for me while I was away, I notice that Stanford was the best sports program in America for the 10th year in a row.

Woohoo!

I honestly didn’t think we’d get it this year. Shows what I know.

Along athletic lines, I found Supreme Court Justic Sandra Day O’Connor’s comment at graduation pretty funny:

“I am expecting to see any day at the Court a ne exeat petition from Stanford for an order to prevent these departures. As I count it, we have at least four Stanford votes on the Supreme Court at present.” (referring to coaching changes–basketball coach Mike Montgomery and tennis coach Dick Gould are leaving)

One of the bittersweet things about college ministry is watching the people in your ministry graduate and move on.

That’s fresh on my mind because I bumped into two students who recently walked the line.

This weekend Julia Heng (who just got her master’s degree in Management, Science, and Engineering) dropped by for a few minutes to return some stuff she had borrowed from us. I hadn’t seen her since our graduating students celebration–she’d been gallavanting around the country with her parents (it was her mom’s first time in America). Then she headed back to Singapore.

And then this morning I had breakfast with Nate Flake. Nate just graduated from Stanford with a degree in linguistics. He speaks more languages than anyone else I know.

He wasn’t able to join us for the celebration that we hold right before graduation, and he’s been on the road since receiving his diploma. This was the first time since then that we’ve been able to connect.

And tomorrow he flies to China for a year. He’s not sure what he’ll do there, he just knows that he doesn’t want to teach English. He’s angling for a job as a translator or something.

Good luck and Godspeed, Julia & Nate! We’ll miss you.

I get blown away sometimes when I think about how innovative Stanford is. I’m still trying to figure out which dorm room Google was founded in (I bet it’s in Escondido Village).

Anyway, I started thinking again about the incredible technological breakthroughs at Stanford when I read that the Farm raked in $45.4 million last year from royalties.

That’s a lot of money.

Wow. Wow backwards.

Dana is two months old now! We took her to the doctor for her check up and she is doing great. She now weights 10 lbs 1 oz and is 22 3/4 inches long. She is growing so fast!

New things that Dana can do now: smile, coo, and move around in her bed. She is hardly ever in the same position that we put her in.

As always you can see new pictures of Dana in her photo album.

5 star digital camera

Hey–glad you stumbled across the site.

You’re welcome to poke around here and learn more about Paula and I. Just so you know, this website is a tool we use to keep family, friends, and ministry partners up-to-date on our lives and ministry.

So if you came here wanting to learn more about Chi Alpha, check out Chi Alpha @ Stanford or national Chi Alpha.

If I’m Freaking You Out
If you just stumbled across this website while searching for something else and are growing increasingly horrified as you read of my nefarious plans to engage students in spiritual discussions, allow me to explain myself.

Some students are really uptight about religion, but most are not. Students generally enjoy having a non-pushy and thought-provoking discussion with someone about interesting things like the meaning of life, the existence of God, the nature of morality, and the power of religious belief.

Those are the people I interact with. I don’t roam about the campus like a lion seeking unwitting students to devour. I talk with people about things they want to talk about.

For the record, Chi Alpha is an organization in good standing with Stanford Associated Religions and is also a registered voluntary student organization at Stanford. That means our presence is sanctioned by the university.

So chill.

If I’m Freaking You Out Now
If, on the other hand, you were fine with everything I said until I explained that I’m not pushy and obnoxious, read on.

Being pushy and rude isn’t the Biblical model for evangelism. Don’t believe me?

• Consider the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12), wherein Jesus tells us to treat others the way we want to be treated. That applies to evangelism, too. If you wouldn’t want an atheist, Muslim, or Mormon talking to you a certain way, don’t talk that way to others.
• Notice Peter’s advice that we are called to live in such a way that people ask us questions about our beliefs, and when they do we answer them gently and respectfully (1 Peter 3:15–16)
• Consider Paul’s prayer request in Colossians 4:3–4, in which he prays for opportunities. Note that he does not announce his clever plans for tricking people into talking with him. He prays that God would bring the conversations about.

In other words, I’m not shirking back from proclaiming the gospel clearly, nor am I capitulating to some insane campus speech code, nor am I living in fear of the secular status quo. I’m merely being wise and biblical.

Just think about it: I’m an ordained minister and nationally appointed missionary with the Assemblies of God, which the world’s largest Protestant denomination and which is considered by many to be the most effective missionary movement in the history of the world (reflect on this: we didn’t exist 100 years ago and are now one of the largest religious movements anywhere). The Assemblies of God didn’t send us to reach Stanford because we’re some kind of cowardly wimps. They sent us because they believe we are called, gifted, and guided by God for this task.

So chill.

This is not particularly related to Stanford, but it is related to university life in general.

Alexandra Robbins went undercover as a sorority girl to figure out what life is really like in the modern Greek scene. She discovered a world of dysfunction, and she writes about it in her new book Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities.

If you’d like to learn more, read an eye-opening interview with the author.

Excerpt: NEWSWEEK: Why did you go undercover?
Alexandra Robbins: Originally I was openly going to be a reporter in a house on a specific campus. I had been to some meetings, and I had started to bond with these girls. Then one day, the adviser of the sorority sat me down and she said something like I cant let you be here unless the national office allows you, and I really dont think theyre going to. And then she said, and Ill never forget this: And if they do let you in, I simply cannot allow you to write about the drugs. I called the national office, and it turned out that the 26 national Panhellenic sororities had instituted a media blackout because they were upset with the MTV show Sorority Life. It turned out that the only way to get behind the scenes in a sorority house was to fly under the radar.

Last night’s Chi Alpha meeting was off the charts–Curt Harlow spoke and did an excellent job!

That would have been encouraging enough, but we had a high-water mark in attendance (all the people who sometimes show up showed up at once, and we had six first-time guests). That was extremely gratifying. I try not to be driven by numbers, but I definitely like having more bodies in the room…

I was on campus today and noticed a huge crowd in the Student Union–turns out that someone had set up a screen and a sound system and was showing the PAC 10 tournament.

We won our first game, by the way.

Anyway, it was interesting to watch how many students were engrossed in the game. It’s the week before finals here, and usually that means students are cramming like crazy.

I guess they just love dominating at a major sport.

At the Campus Ministers’ Conference in Atlanta last weekend, Curt Harlow stuck a video camera in my face and told me to be profound. You can see my best effort in a two-minute video at chialpha.com.

Before you cast any stones–try being profound on the spot. It’s not as easy as you might think. In fact, it’s only due to the editing genius of Curt Harlow that I didn’t come off looking like a raving lunatic.

Anyway, I highly recommend that you poke around the video blog archives. There’s some good stuff there.

If you’re a minister, know that there are several outstanding sermon/sunday school ideas you can *ahem* borrow.

If you want to use one of these video snippets in your meetings (as a call to worship or to illustrate a sermon point) here’s how to integrate it into PowerPoint.

1) Upgrade QuickTime to QuickTime Pro. It’ll cost you thirty bucks and you can do it online in seconds.
2) Open the mov file in QuickTime Pro and click File/Export to export it as an avi file.
3) You can now either insert it into PowerPoint or edit it in Windows Movie Maker (free with Windows XP). Be sure to download the latest version.

If you’re using a Macintosh, you can probably just insert it into PowerPoint without dinking around.

I used the one titled “Gross Stuff phone booth dvdrip ” this week to open the meeting, and it worked really well.

Back at SMS I used to head to the campus bowling alley in the student union and help students process questions about God. It was right when the television series Ed (about a bowling alley lawyer) was getting popular, and so I called myself the Bowling Alley Theologian. It was a lot of fun.

I had flashbacks today as I spent 5 hours in a long and rambling conversation with a student. We talked about the existence of God, the nature of truth, epistemology, morality, the nature of Scripture, archaelogy and the Exodus, evolutionary psychology, the mind-body problem, and the relationship between facts, faith, doubt, and skepticism.

It was a lot of fun.