Faculty Commons

helping you bring the hope of Jesus Christ to the academy

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The Whole Campus - The Whole World

Faculty Commons^® is a ministry of Cru. We want to help you bring the resources of the university (fellow faculty, grad students, students, and ideas) to the world for the advance of the loving rule and reign of Jesus Christ. We dream of the day when movements of Christian faculty and grad students like you live out of “A Grander Story” and willingly wrestle with the ever-challenging question: “As Christ-followers, what should we do in the academy?” We’re here to help.

“If I could start Campus Crusade for Christ over again, I would begin by working with professors.”

William R. Bright (1921-2003)

Founder, Campus Crusade for Christ

“There are few things that give me more pleasure than to praise the work of Faculty Commons. Their unique contribution on campus is to nurture those who are professors now and those Ph.D. candidates who plan to be professors in the future. They challenge us to be truly Christ-like—even when there are costs to our discipleship.”

Robert P. George

McCormick Professor of Jurispudence, Princeton University

Join A Grander Story

How do we faculty members thrive in God’s grander story?

A Grander Story: An Invitation to Christian Professors answers this question by providing a biblical understanding of a professor’s identity in Christ and unique calling to Christian scholarship, teaching, and department life.

By showcasing a theology of the grander story, six faculty narratives, resources, and discussion questions along the way, A Grander Story both inspires and equips Christian faculty to think differently about their lives and work.

This book is a celebration of our high calling as Christ followers on the university campus . . . Read this book to be uplifted, to find your place in God’s grand story, to know you are not alone, to integrate your faith and work, and to be equipped for ministry. Then give a copy to every Christian professor you know.–Charles M. C. Lee Moghadam Family Professor of Management Stanford Graduate School of Business

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Download Intro and Chapter 10 Free

“I know of no other ministry that trains, mobilizes, encourages and sends Christian professors into the spiritual battle on the university campuses as effectively as Faculty Commons.”

Henry F. Schaefer III

Graham Perdue Professor of Chemisty, University of Georgia

FC Missional Moments

During the Fall and Spring semesters, we offer weekly ideas for thinking and living missionally as faculty & grad students on today’s campus.

Most of these Missional Moments come from fellow faculty who are living missional lives.

Subscribe to the right. Always opt in/opt out.

April

College Student

My Story–A Student’s Perspective

“Nothing makes sense to me and I don’t know if it is ever going to. I am completely lost.” April, a freshman, was nearly finished with her latte in a campus coffee shop. She was talking with Paul, a doctoral student in philosophy and a teaching assistant for one of her classes. She discovered that many professors view Christianity not as “the truth” but as “one culturally-relative view among many.” April found this approach confusing and depressing. Paul, a Christian involved with Faculty Commons, had a different perspective. She sought out his opinion and asked: “If everyone in the world is searching for meaning in different ways and each claim they have found it, how could there be a universal meaning?” “What if I need to believe in some kind of ultimate reality, some kind of perfection behind all the chaos in the world, some kind of transcendent power…because I cannot live with the idea of being utterly alone in both life and death?” Paul explained the good news of Christ to April and answered many of the objections to Christianity she had learned in several of her college classes. He also connected April with Lisa, a Cru staff member. The two met weekly to study the Bible. A few weeks later, April e-mailed Paul: “A couple nights ago, I finally decided to go for it and invited Christ into my life. Thanks for talking to me.”

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Resources

Check out these ideas submitted by Christ-following faculty.

Friday Night at the Movies

For many years, Walter Bradley (Walter Bradley retired recently as a distinguished professor of engineering at Baylor University. He was previously a professor of mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University for 25 years, including 10 years as department chair.) used a “Friday Night at the Movies” resource to provide an opportunity for students to be exposed in a thought-provoking way to the big questions about life and to engage in discussion of these questions. Find out more here.

What We Don’t Say in The Classroom Event

Over the last several years, Christ-following faculty have hosted a “What we don’t say in the classroom” event to expose faculty and students to the story of their spiritual journey. Find more here.

A Newspaper Ad sponsored by Christian Faculty

Do a newspaper ad sponsored by Christian profs across the campus.

Pray for the strategic outreach of faculty on your campus.
Challenge those profs to put an ad in the school newspaper.
Good times to do an ad: start of semester, Thanksgiving holiday, Christmas, Valentine’s day, and Easter. The ad will usually have a theme to it.
Samples of ads. Go to our resources page. Usually an ad will include name and department of professor. Include a link to everystudent.com or other similar links.
Call the school newspaper for details about ads. You want the ad to be the biggest ad on the page, but it doesn’t have to cover the entire page. Normally, a student organization can get a greatly reduced price. Have the local CRU movement help set it up. Find out the price. Find out when you need to have the ad submitted by for publication.
Challenge the professors to pay for the ad. Or use other means of funding the ad.
Have the local CRU movement be praying for the release of the ad.
Help prepare the professors to know how to respond when they get comments about the ad.

Dr. Adegbola Adesogan

Faculty

Nilson Award Winner

It is our extreme pleasure to announce the 2017 Nilson Award winner.

He is Dr. Adegbola Adesogan of the University of Florida. He is a professor of animal nutrition who is widely published and has received millions in grants.

Howie and Nance Kauffman have worked with him since 2002. Here is how Howie describes him:

“My wife, Nance and I have known Gbola since 2002 and in all that time, we’ve only heard good things about him. He’s a well-respected elder at his church where he has opportunities to preach and I’ve heard from faculty in his church that he knows and loves the Word. This is also evident when he leads devotions at our faculty leadership meetings and when he speaks at our monthly faculty luncheons. Anyone who hears Gbola pray, knows this is a man of faith; one who connects deeply with the Lord.”

Frontlines: Quarterly Newsletter

News, Trends And Opportunities At America’s Universities

Over 1000 faculty and friends of Faculty Commons receive this quarterly mailing. You’ll find the articles and resources helpful.

(To receive hard-copy by mail, click: US Address or non-USA Address)

Recent Examples:

Apri 2021

Nov 2020

When God Proves Us Wrong.

As Christian professors I believe many of us think of the university as being pretty resistant to the knowledge of God.

Sometimes, God proves us wrong.

This story may make more sense if you understand my background. An interest in science made me an avid reader in high school. It also cooled me toward the teachings of Christianity in which I had been brought up. Intellectuals, I concluded, tended to disbelieve in God or at least did not take religion seriously.

I entered college as an agnostic and spent the next decade quite comfortable in this. Then the vicissitudes of graduate school led me to doubt my doubts; extensive reading of CS Lewis, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn led me to Christ.

Bayesian Decision Theory and God

Around this same time, I was taking courses in theoretical statistics, including Bayesian decision theory. Bayes’ theorem can be used to evaluate the probability of a hypothesis based on evidence. A few years later as a professor at Oklahoma State University I tried my hand at using Bayes’ theorem to evaluate the probability of the existence of God.

Later I found that Richard Swinburne had made very sophisticated use of Bayes’ theorem in his book The Existence of God to argue for God’s existence. Oxford philosopher Swinburne is one of the foremost living philosophers of religion.

Eventually, I decided to email Dr. Swinburne about Bayes’ theorem and also invited him to come to Oklahoma State University. As I had never met Dr. Swinburne and did not work in his academic field, I did not expect to get a reply from him. To my surprise, he did respond and proposed that he would be able to visit OSU when he would be traveling to other universities in the U.S.

Dr. Swinburne suggested I contact the OSU philosophy department about the possibility of him lecturing there. Surprisingly to me, we obtained the complete cooperation of the department — including funding for an honorarium to deliver the Converse-Yates-Tate Lectureship: “Arguments for the Existence of God.”

On the night of the lecture, the theater was completely packed; we had to use an overflow room where others could view remotely. After his talk, there was an extensive question and answer period. One questioner familiar with his work said that Dr. Swinburne had “saved his faith.” The following day, Swinburne delivered a lecture to the philosophy department on the existence of the soul. Before his public lecture, he also had dinner with many of the faculty and grad students.

Since then I have wondered: are there opportunities to engage the university at large in conversations that we may be discounting? — Tom Lynch, OSU

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