Vanderbilt students pray outside Vanderbilt Board of Trust meeting

But that is the policy that Vanderbilt University has chosen. Student religious groups who wish to retain their status as officially registered campus groups (with all of the privileges that provides) are no longer allowed to require that their leaders share the group’s core beliefs.

This dispute has been accelerating all year long, as the religious student groups (including Cru and the Christian Legal Society) have appealed the change in policy—and so far been denied.

Christian professor Carol Swain (Professor of Political Science and Law at Vanderbilt and faculty advisor to Vandy’s Christian Legal Society) sees the policy shift as “part of a movement around the country to secularize campus religion.” Dr. Swain notes, “The groups that are seen as most threatening are the ones that try to live by the Biblical principles that are a core part of who they are—those were the groups that were singled out.”

Ironically, the university’s stance has served to promote leadership among the student leaders of the threatened groups. Cru’s campus ministry staff at Vanderbilt say they are “amazed at how these university students have responded to these trying events with such grace and integrity.”

In the midst of national media attention, Vanderbilt’s Christian students—from eleven different campus religious groups—continue to keep Jesus the main issue.

They pray together (including for the administration and trustees who oppose them).
They worship together.
They also find that the policy dispute gives them opportunities to launch conversations with fellow students and professors about Jesus.

Vanderbilt’s Christian students face the question: “Is my faith important enough for me to take a risky, sometimes unpopular stand on campus?” And they find that it is!

These students are stepping up and speaking to the issue:

• In letters, articles, and press releases
• With legal counsel, with their legislators, and with Vandy alums
• In front of university officials, courageously asking bold questions

…because they know that as leaders in their campus religious organizations, what they believe matters.

Hear their voices yourself:

We all know stories of young people raised in Christian homes who abandon their faith shortly after arriving at college. There are (sadly!) many professors who consider this one of their goals for their students.

Sometimes—when Christians on campus talk about their faith in Christ—it happens the other way around. Such was the case with Molly Scherer at Purdue University.

“Up until college, I never had anything to do with religion or God,” she explains. “I didn’t believe in God, and my family never went to church.”

Purdue student Molly Scherer

But Molly kept encountering Christians among the new friends she was making at college. She liked them; and she was impressed with her new friends’ passion for Jesus. So when they invited her to church and other Christian events, she went along.

One of these events was Purdue’s Symposium, an annual event sponsored by Faculty Commons along with many other campus organizations and local churches. Spearheaded by Faculty Commons’ staff Corey Miller, the annual Symposium addresses head-on the issues that keep many spiritual seekers from knowing Christ.

It accomplished exactly that for Molly. “I had always believed that science and Christianity were conflicting, that you had to choose one or the other, so I was interested in going to the Symposium to hear what the speaker had to say about that,” she recalls.

“I remember he said something about trying to measure the weight of a chicken with a yardstick and compared that to science attempting to prove the existence of Jesus or God.  I learned a lot that night.”

Molly filled out a card indicating that she would like to talk further about these issues. So Erin, one of Cru’s student ministry staff at Purdue, met with her to answer her questions and explain the gospel. Erin gave Molly a copy of Josh McDowell’s More Than a Carpenter, which tackles the arguments in more depth.

It was just a few weeks later, Molly says, “after reading the Bible and continuing conversations with Erin and Christian friends, I admitted that I don’t have control over my life, that God was real and He loved me and I wanted to live my life for Him!  It was a good day, March 26th 2009 :)”

Three years later, Molly is a senior leader in Cru’s student ministry at Purdue. She leads a Bible study and tells others about the faith in Jesus that she discovered her freshman year. In fact, she recently returned from co-leading her fellow Cru Purdue students on a spring break mission trip to college students in Berlin, Germany—most of whom are in the same spiritual condition that Molly was when she arrived at Purdue.

Faculty Commons’ Corey Miller continues to organize the annual Symposium at Purdue. This year’s events on February 17-18 drew nearly 2,000 people. Corey and other Christians at Purdue are meeting individually now with faculty and students who want to continue the spiritual conversations begun there.

Molly gratefully sums it up: “God definitely used that speaker at the Symposium as well as getting connected with Erin to guide me toward Him.”

• Is God a Moral Monster?
• Does God know about the Big Bang?
• If a loving God exists, then why isn’t He more obvious?
• Why does God seem judgmental and intolerant?
• Can Christianity contribute to the rebuilding of business morality in China today?

Ten Christian academics addressed those topics and many more in a campus-wide outreach at Purdue University February 17-18. Sponsored by Faculty Commons and thirteen other campus organizations and churches, the symposium addressed head-on the issues that keep many seekers from knowing Christ.

Dr. Paul Copan, professor and current president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, spoke to a crowd of 1,000 on the subject Is God a Moral Monster? Good, Evil, and the Old Testament.

More than an hour after the lecture ended, the lines behind the open microphones were still long when Faculty Commons staff and event emcee Corey Miller had to end the Q&A time. Almost all of the questions came from people who were not believers in Jesus: international students, members of the Society of Non-Theists, leaders of Muslim groups and the Pagan Academic Network.

Everyone heard a clear and concise presentation of the gospel from Corey Miller, and brief testimonies to their faith from several Purdue professors. Take a look yourself at these Professors who are Confessors.

The weekend succeeded in making God a topic of discussion on campus, and will promote spiritual conversations for the year to come. “I’ve begun follow up and have already had some good discussions with some non-believers,” Corey told us.  “This was really a legacy building event.  We saw fruit all year long in follow-up [from last year’s similar event], and I suspect this year will be even better.

WKU Christmas ad snip

Recognize this? These QR codes are popping up in more and more places lately. Through an app on a smart-phone, these codes will connect you with a website. Some airlines even use them as electronic boarding passes.

The Christian faculty group at Western Kentucky University uses QR codes to connect college students with the gospel.

For 25 years, hundreds of Christian faculty groups have published ads that proclaim their faith in Jesus in their campus newspapers. Spiritually-hungry students can seek out one of the professors listed in the ad if they want to dialogue about spiritual topics.

The WKU ad filled three-fourths of a page in the campus newspaper in early December. It stood out since it was the only color ad that day. The 84 Christian faculty names in the ad represent a 50% increase over the “welcome back to school” ad the group ran in September.

Note the QR code on the package under the tree. The WKU Christian faculty group believes that students with smart phones (and that’s almost all of them) can’t resist using them on anything “techy.”

The QR code links to “Who Is Jesus . . . Really?” (whoisjesus-really.com). This Campus Crusade website offers information about Jesus in 40 different languages, so it reaches most international students as well as English-speakers.

Dr. Larry Caillouet, the WKU prof who organized this ad, has even bigger plans for QR codes that link to websites about Jesus. “Our campus, like most others, is looking for any way to squeeze out a little extra revenue, so they sell ad space inside the shuttle buses,” Larry explains.

“We intend to put more QR codes there.  Unlike a campus newspaper that lasts just a few days before it’s thrown out, the bus ads can run for weeks or months.  And students don’t have a lot to occupy themselves with while riding the bus, so I think they will read the ads and follow the QR codes.”

Using normal web analytics, the WKU professors will be able to track how many students have clicked through from the QR code to the websites about Jesus, how long they stayed on the site, etc.

Not a bad use for 21^st century technology—connecting college students with the first-century man who offers them hope, peace, and new life!

“The Exhibit and family salon opened a new window for me. It’s amazing experience. I really appreciate your invitation.”—email from Chinese grad student to his Christian professor

Twenty Chinese graduate students were encouraged to use their time in the U.S. to explore the Bible during an evening gathering at a Christian professor’s home in Dallas last fall. Dr. Smith (not her real name) invited Chinese graduate students at her university to view the China Bible Ministry Exhibition at Northwest Bible Church.

A delegation from the registered protestant church of China took this exhibit of ancient Chinese Bibles and artifacts to four U.S. cities. For most of the students, this was the first time they had seen a Bible translated into their native language.

After sharing a dinner of authentic (not Americanized!) Chinese food at Dr. Smith’s home, an expert on Chinese cultural issues spoke to the students about the difference that the Bible and Jesus can make in their lives. Each student had been given a Chinese/English Bible at the exhibit, and he challenged them to read it and seek to discover if its words are truth.

The students, though unfamiliar with the Bible, were very curious. One asked her American friend if they could study the Bible together. Another commented at the end of the evening, “Since we have the freedom while we are in America to explore the Bible, we should learn all we can about it so that we can tell others when we go back to China.”