{"id":50,"date":"2002-08-09T19:20:11","date_gmt":"2002-08-10T03:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/archives\/2002\/08\/09\/where-are-all-the-smart-pentecostals\/"},"modified":"2002-08-09T19:20:11","modified_gmt":"2002-08-10T03:20:11","slug":"where-are-all-the-smart-pentecostals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2002\/08\/09\/where-are-all-the-smart-pentecostals","title":{"rendered":"Where Are All The Smart Pentecostals?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today I received from the <a href=\"http:\/\/religiouslife.stanford.edu\/index.html\">Stanford Office for Religious Life<\/a> the names of all three of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ag.org\/\">Assemblies of God<\/a> students planning to attend Stanford next year. That\u2019s right\u2013three. Out of around 1,400. There was also a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.foursquare.org\/\">Foursquare<\/a> student and a few from independent charismatic churches. Let\u2019s say there are about 10\u201315 Pentecostal\/charismatic students in&nbsp;total.<\/p>\n<p>Even given that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.barna.org\/cgi-bin\/PageCategory.asp?CategoryID=37#SPIRITUALITY\">only 4% of teens attend a Pentecostal or Charismatic<\/a> church, that\u2019s pretty sad. If even 4% coming to Stanford were Pentecostal\/charismatic that would be over 50 incoming freshmen. That\u2019s a discrepancy of 70% (in other words, 70% fewer students are Pentecostal or Charismatic than you would expect)!<\/p>\n<p>That doesn\u2019t bother me for the reason you might think. <a href=\"http:\/\/xastanford.org\/\">Chi Alpha @ Stanford<\/a> is primarily an evangelistic organization. While we do want to take care of incoming Christian students and help them mature in their faith, we\u2019re primarily concerned with reaching the majority who have no religious background at all (much less a Christian one).<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not so much that I wish there were more students to plug into our group as I wonder why more coming in aren\u2019t believers. These numbers, while only directly reflecting on Pentecostals are representative of what the other ministries are receiving.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s been a massive renaissance in youth ministry over the last decade, and there\u2019s tons of articles on the burgeoning evangelical intellectuals: so why aren\u2019t there more arriving at Stanford? Is it that we <a href=\"http:\/\/www.christiancollegesearch.com\/swhy.html\">strongly discourage our gifted youth from attending secular schools<\/a> or is merely the sad fact that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.glenandpaula.com\/archives\/000003.html#000003\">most \u201cChristian\u201d students can\u2019t wait to escape from their youth group<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>In any event, if the other elite schools are seeing similar trends the intellectual future of American Christianity isn\u2019t looking particularly robust\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I received from the Stanford Office for Religious Life the names of all three of the Assemblies of God students planning to attend Stanford next year. That\u2019s right\u2013three. Out of around 1,400. There was also a Foursquare student and a few from independent charismatic churches. Let\u2019s say there are about 10\u201315 Pentecostal\/charismatic students in&nbsp;total. \u2026 <a href=\"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2002\/08\/09\/where-are-all-the-smart-pentecostals\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> \u201cWhere Are All The Smart Pentecostals?\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stanfordministry-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Ded-O","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}