Pray for the new students!

Some spe­cif­ic prayers you can offer on behalf of stu­dents.

This Thurs­day the new stu­dents will begin arriv­ing at Stan­ford for ori­en­ta­tion week.

As the web­site says, 1,752 fresh­men and trans­fer stu­dents will take part in NSO 2002 from Thurs­day, Sept. 19 to Tues­day, Sept. 24.

Wow.

These stu­dents needs prayer, and lots of it.

1) That those far from Christ would encounter Him.
2) That those who serve Him would remain pure in the midst of temp­ta­tion.
3) That those who serve Him would be bold in their wit­ness to God’s over­whelm­ing grace.
4) That all stu­dents would select their friends wise­ly.

Great Weekend With Brian and Courtney Jacobson

Some old friends vis­it, and we get to vis­it a Stan­ford foot­ball game.

bj_courtney.jpg We just had a great vis­it from Bri­an and Court­ney Jacob­son, alum­ni from our last min­istry.

It’s inter­est­ing: we’ve lit­er­al­ly had guests in our house every oth­er week since we’ve arrived. Our rate of vis­i­ta­tion was much low­er in Spring­field, MO. Hmm­mm.…

Also, one of the high­lights of their vis­it was the Stan­ford-San Jose State foot­ball game. We won 63–26! Woohoo!

I enjoyed the game (espe­cial­ly since we stomped the oth­er team), but I was pret­ty dis­ap­point­ed about two things:

1) There were no stu­dents there. Class does­n’t start until Sep­tem­ber 23rd. It just seems lame that at quar­ter sys­tem schools the team has to play their first home game with­out stu­dent sup­port.

2) The sta­di­um was pret­ty rat­ty. I was shocked. I was expect­ing sharp, clean mark­ings on the field. I thought the screen would be high-tech and sharp. Wrong on both counts. It’s not like Stan­ford’s hurt­ing for money–so why the under­im­pres­sive sta­di­um?down­load few good men a dvd

Mormons Have Their Own Bikes?

In which I announce my dis­cov­ery that there are spe­cial Mor­mon-only bicy­cles!

A church recent­ly vol­un­teered to pur­chase bicy­cles for Paula and I. That’s a super-prac­ti­cal way to sup­port our min­istry since the cam­pus is so vast!

Any­way, the pas­tor asked me to research bicy­cles and let him know what we need­ed.

All the bicy­cle sites online seemed to be focus­ing on upper-end triathalon-type bikes, which just aren’t what we need. So I start­ed think­ing about it, and I real­ized that Mor­mon mis­sion­ar­ies prob­a­bly know more about the type of bicy­cles we’re look­ing at than any­one else.

So I decid­ed to do some research, and I was amused to find that there is a com­pa­ny that makes spe­cial­ty Mor­mon mis­sion­ary bicy­cles. In fact, that’s all that they sell–and no one except Mor­mon mis­sion­ar­ies can pur­chase them.

I love this quote: As for theft, long a prob­lem for mis­sion­ar­ies, Spence notes: “If you see a hip­pie guy with long hair rid­ing a Lia­hona down the street, and he does­n’t have a shirt and tie on, you know the bike’s not his.”

I knew that the Mor­mons have spe­cial Mor­mon under­gar­ments (which I under­stand Sen­a­tor Orrin Hatch wears), but I had no idea they had spe­cial bikes as well!

Another Example of America’s Universities Gone Insane

Schools go nuts try­ing to con­vince fresh­men that their morals are stu­pid.

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.

Ministry Wishlist

Want to make a one-time gift? Here’s what we can use it for!

DISCLAIMER: this infor­ma­tion is on our web­site because some peo­ple actu­al­ly come here look­ing for it. Oth­er peo­ple get hor­ri­bly offend­ed at the men­tion of mon­ey and dona­tions online. If you’re not of the for­mer, chill. Just fil­ter out this mes­sage and look at some of the more enter­tain­ing stuff on this site.

You’re still here? Good. 🙂

Some­times peo­ple are more inter­est­ed in mak­ing one-time dona­tions than in becom­ing a month­ly part­ner (and some­times month­ly part­ners want to make a spe­cial gift).

If that’s you, then here are some needs that we have in our min­istry.

Expensive Items

$10,000,000 to estab­lish a min­istry cen­ter near Stan­ford.

Yeah, it real­ly would cost at least that much. We’d be look­ing at pur­chas­ing an exist­ing reli­gious cen­ter or a busi­ness prop­ert adja­cent to cam­pus and then remod­el­ing it.

Fail­ing that, $1,000,000 to pur­chase a home near Stan­ford.

Again, it real­ly would cost that much. We’re cur­rent­ly rent­ing about five min­utes from Stan­ford and there’s a home across the street on the mar­ket for $1.1 mil­lion. And it’s not a real­ly nice house–housing prices are just ridicu­lous here. This mat­ters because the nature of our min­istry is rela­tion­al, and so we have stu­dents over all the time. If we had a home with­in 15 min­utes of Stan­ford we’d be bet­ter stew­ards of God’s mon­ey (not spend­ing it on rent) and we’d be able to up the qual­i­ty of our min­istry to stu­dents rad­i­cal­ly. We’d have more stu­dents over more often and accom­plish more in the way of dis­ci­ple­ship and mod­el­ing. Plus, we’d be able to host oth­er min­is­ters in our house for a week or two at a time and expose the stu­dents to them and their min­istries, there­by increas­ing the like­li­hood that stu­dents would “get it.”

Midrange Items

$6,000 to set up a mul­ti­me­dia stu­dio.

This would cov­er a dig­i­tal video cam­era, a ded­i­cat­ed com­put­er for video-edit­ing, and the soft­ware nec­es­sary to do high-qual­i­ty videos. With such a stu­dio, we could cre­ate high-qual­i­ty train­ing videos for col­lege min­istries across Amer­i­ca. We could also do some neat stuff in our large-group meet­ings at Stan­ford.

$500 for a smart­phone.

This would help Glen be more organized–and he needs all the help he can get!

Inexpensive Items

Any­thing from Glen’s Ama­zon Wish­list or Deli­cious Wish­list.

These are almost all books or oth­er resources use­ful for min­istry. Of course, some are just ran­dom.

If you would like to pur­chase any of the above items, either give online or just send a check for the amount need­ed to
  Chi Alpha #2650299
  1445 N Boonville Ave
  Spring­field, MO 65802

Also be sure to email us and let us know what you’ve done so that we know the pur­pose the funds are des­ig­nat­ed for!

9/11 @ Stanford

Some com­ments on how Sep­tem­ber 11th, 2001 touched Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty.

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.

Larry Wall Discusses His Faith in Scientific Perspective

This is a fol­low-up to our arti­cle about famous liv­ing sci­en­tists who are Chris­tians:

Lar­ry Wall, cre­ator of the pro­gram­ming lan­guage Perl, is a Chris­t­ian. In a recent inter­view on Slash­dot he was asked the fol­low­ing ques­tion:

I remem­ber read­ing at some point that you are a Chris­t­ian, and there have been sug­ges­tions that some of your ear­ly mis­sion­ary impuls­es (a desire to do good, help oth­ers) are per­haps part of the zeal you have put into Perl over the years.

Pre­fer­ring a sci­en­tif­ic view, I am not reli­gious, and have no desire to be. Per­haps there is a God, but if there is, I think he/she has no oppos­able thumbs; in oth­er words, has no pow­er to change any­thing; real­i­ty is just play­ing out accord­ing to the laws of physics (what­ev­er those are).

Please tell us how in the world a sci­en­tif­ic or at least tech­ni­cal mind can believe in God, and what role reli­gion has played in your work on Perl.

If you’re a sci­en­tif­ic sort of per­son, I encour­age you to read his answer. It’s ques­tion num­ber 7 in the inter­view.

Pledge Forms Online

Our pledge form is now online in PDF for­mat.

You can down­load our pledge form

as a PDF file. The form is around 110k.

If you can’t open it on your com­put­er, down­load the free Adobe Acro­bat view­er and try again.

If you don’t know what a pledge form is or why you would want to fill one out, check out these pages:

How Mis­sions Is A Part­ner­ship
The Bib­li­cal Basis for Sup­port­ing Mis­sion­ar­ies
Ques­tions and Answers About Sup­port-Rais­ing
How to Part­ner With Us

College Students Increasingly Irreligious

The 2001 fresh­man sur­vey indi­cat­ed record num­bers of stu­dents with no reli­gious pref­er­ence.

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!

Some More Thoughts on Christian Baptism

Bap­tism is an expres­sion of sal­va­tion, and not a means of sal­va­tion as held by cer­tain church­es. Bap­tism is of vital impor­tance in the life of the believ­er and is more than an archa­ic rit­u­al, yet it is not ulti­mate­ly salvif­ic.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a chance to respond to all the things that Nota Bene and Integri­ty Blog have said in ref­er­ence to bap­tism.

Mea culpa–I’ve been run­ning around like a chick­en with my head cut off. Which I under­stand is quite a sight, although I’ve nev­er per­son­al­ly wit­nessed it. Which puts me in mind of Mike the Head­less Chick­en.

But I digress…

We’re dis­cussing what it means to fol­low Jesus, and how bap­tism relates to that. The Catholic posi­tion is that bap­tism is the way one nor­mal­ly becomes a Chris­t­ian. So far I’ve lim­it­ed myself to dis­cussing one spe­cif­ic pas­sage that Sean first men­tioned. They’ve made a LOT of obser­va­tions since I’ve post­ed, so I encour­age you to read their blogs to see what they’ve been say­ing. There’s no way I could respond to it all with­out this being my full-time job, so I’ll just do what I can. Hey guys: if I mis­un­der­stand, mis­rep­re­sent, or fail to address what you con­sid­er to be your strongest argu­ments please let me know: I am being selec­tive, but I’m try­ing to be selec­tive with integri­ty.

In this post I’ll try to pro­vide a broad­er under­stand­ing of bap­tism. It may be long, so buck­le your seat­belts! My basic the­sis will be that bap­tism is an expres­sion of sal­va­tion, and not a means of sal­va­tion as held by cer­tain church­es. Bap­tism is of vital impor­tance in the life of the believ­er and is more than an archa­ic rit­u­al, yet it is not ulti­mate­ly salvif­ic.

Jack and Sean’s obser­va­tions fall into two cat­e­gories: scrip­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal.

I’d like to begin by offer­ing my own scrip­tur­al obser­va­tions.
The Bible is clear that sal­va­tion issues from plac­ing one’s faith [belief plus trust] in Jesus. There are sev­er­al rel­e­vant pas­sages of Scrip­ture, ref­er­enc­ing a few should suf­fice: John 3.16–18, Acts 16.31, Romans 3.23–24, Gala­tians 3.26–27, Eph­esians 2.8–9, 1 John 5.1.

These pas­sages are clear: God adopts us into His fam­i­ly when we place our faith in Jesus. I don’t see such a clar­i­ty in the pas­sages Jack ref­er­ences or in the ones that Sean ref­er­ences. I do see an empha­sis on the impor­tance of bap­tism, but I don’t see a demon­stra­tion of bap­tism as a means of sal­va­tion.

The only texts Jack raised which might even seem to teach salvif­ic bap­tism are towards the end of his post, The Church would also point to the words of Peter and Paul on how bap­tism incor­po­rates us into the Body of Christ: Romans 6:3–4; Col 2:12 … 1 Cor 6:11. [note: I edit­ed slight­ly for length]. In each of these vers­es, Paul is speak­ing descrip­tive­ly: all the believ­ers had been bap­tized, so he can speak of bap­tism as a syn­onym for being a believ­er.

Now I’d like to make a few his­tor­i­cal com­ments:
First, I’d like to acknowl­edge that the ear­ly church clear­ly thought that bap­tism was salvif­ic.

I’d also like to say that it’s an unper­sua­sive point. The­ol­o­gy evolves. Over time the church grad­u­al­ly comes to a deep­er under­stand­ing of the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of the Bible’s teach­ing and incor­po­rates it into our the­ol­o­gy. The most well-known exam­ple is the doc­trine of the Trin­i­ty. All the clues were in the Bible, it just took the Church a few cen­turies to put them togeth­er in a con­sis­tent way.

The ear­ly church fathers were wrong about bap­tism. They clear­ly did not under­stand the Scrip­tures at this point. In fact, I’m will­ing to bet that there were diver­gent views among the ear­ly church the­olo­gians about bap­tism (I just don’t have the his­tor­i­cal exper­tise to know them off the top of my head or the time to fer­ret them out).

I’d like to close by explain­ing what bap­tism does.
Jack asked me what exact­ly I think bap­tism does:
1) Bap­tism forces peo­ple to pub­licly pro­fess their faith in Jesus Christ as Lord.
2) Bap­tism requires a pub­lic dis­play of sol­i­dar­i­ty with the Church.
3) Bap­tism is a test of obe­di­ence. Some­one unwill­ing to fol­low Christ in such a small thing can­not be prop­er­ly called a fol­low­er of Christ.
4) Bap­tism is an object les­son in faith, and pro­vides excel­lent sym­bol­ism that can be used to help peo­ple under­stand the gospel.

Bap­tism does all these things, and prob­a­bly a good deal more. It does not, how­ev­er, save any­one.