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.”