reconciliation

Working for Shalom on Campus

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Sat, 14 Nov 2015 02:13:31 +0000

Gordon Govier

Working for Shalom on Campus

��ñ�� staff and students were among those swept into the maelstrom at the University of Missouri-Columbia this week as the pain of unresolved racial tensions boiled over on campus, resulting in the resignations of the school’s president and chancellor, followed by threats of violence against the Black student community.

Matthias Chan, one of four volunteer staff re-planting an Asian American chapter at Mizzou, found the students he talked with unsurprised at what happened. As members of an ethnic minority they see frequent examples of systemic injustice. They were disappointed at how people were responding to the events but not quite sure how to respond themselves. Asian Americans often feel like outsiders looking in at the issue.

But rather than sit out the dispute, a group of Asian American and international students felt called to engage and support the Black students out of their conviction that God wanted to see his shalom recognized on campus, and an end to racism and marginalization.

Late in the evening on Wednesday, November 11, 2015, ��ñ�� team leader Adam Leong reported on their efforts to provide healing and hope on campus:

We put out a prayer box in case folk needed prayer. No one took us up on it, but it was there.
We bought 30 pizzas for the students at the Black Culture Center (BCC). The pizzas were greatly appreciated and quickly consumed.
There was a march scheduled for 5:00 p.m. with students from Kansas City, St. Louis, and Jefferson City, but it was called off due to a tornado watch.
Once the tornado watch passed, students walked the short distance from the BCC to the Student Center and held a rally. The rally consisted of solidarity chants followed by students getting into groups and sharing about their experiences as Black students in college. Non-Black students who were at the rally formed their own group to workshop how to be allies and advocates.
We bought a whole bunch of Chinese food and a few more pizzas for dinner. Again, it was greatly appreciated and quickly consumed.

Our staff team worked tirelessly in a number of essential ways:

Megan Leong coordinated food and logistics. She also baked cookies that were delicious and helped ��ñ�� students think through racial justice in their own contexts.
Charis Chan coordinated dinner and used her bilingual skills to get us a great deal.
Matthias continued to engage with our Asian American students.
Omolara Josephine Lawal connected with Black students at the BCC, let me use her car to pick up food, and did an interview for the student newspaper.
Willin Weng made copies of our prayer sheets for us to give to students at the BCC.

��ñ��’s vision is to see students and faculty transformed, campuses renewed, and world changers developed. Our hope is that renewed campuses will be places where students are appreciated for their innate human dignity and not marginalized because of their ethnicity.

Adam's blog: How My Hat Cost ��ñ�� $650

Jazzy Johnson, ��ñ�� staff member in the Chicago area, posts a report from Northwestern University

Greg Jao, ��ñ��'s Vice President and Director of Campus Engagement, is interviewed by CBN News in a story about the University of Missouri

��ñ��'s Asian American Ministries joined with other similar ministries in a Joint Statement on Recent Racial Tensions on College Campuses

_{University of Missouri photo by Jay Buffington via WikiMedia Commons}

News Keywords

University of Missouri

Shalom

reconciliation

Fruitful Conversations on Campus

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Fri, 04 Sep 2015 16:59:41 +0000

Press Room

Fruitful Conversations on Campus

(Madison, WI) – ��ñ�� Christian Fellowship students are starting the 2015-2016 school year by quizzing fellow students about their bucket list. Conversations about goals and aspirations are not new among students on the college campus but ��ñ��’s queries are aimed at helping reveal deeper motivations.

At the beginning of this semester, on more than 100 campuses across the country, ��ñ�� students are asking, “What’s on your bucket list?” (Watch the video here.) These conversations are taking place around what ��ñ�� calls Proxe Stations, artistic displays designed to encourage deeper conversations about spiritual topics. Students who are interested in further discussions about purpose and meaning in life will be invited to participate in small group Bible studies, a hallmark of ��ñ��’s campus ministry.

Campus conversations can be trivial. They can also be life-changing. This past year, many ��ñ�� chapters engaged in conversations and activities as a part of the national dialogue in response to events that have highlighted social and systemic issues affecting the Black community. ��ñ�� values racial reconciliation and multiethnicity, and as we deal with questions that students have, students open up to spiritual change in their lives because they want to make a difference in the world.

In a major study released ten years ago by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, 75 percent of responding students said they were “searching for meaning and purpose in life” and they expected their college education to help them with their emotional and spiritual development.

��ñ��’s experience in the past year has been that more students than ever are finding meaning and significance through the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A total of 4,269 first-time professions of faith were reported by chapter leaders in 2014-2015, up 21 percent from the previous year and up 172 percent from the same number ten years ago. ��ñ�� has more chapters (985) on more campuses (649) than ever before.

Jim Lundgren, ��ñ��’s interim president, noted, “College students are the leaders of tomorrow. We hope that they will lead with the skills they gain in college, but also with a purpose that comes from discovering Christian values that aren’t always taught on campus.”

��ñ�� Christian Fellowship has been active on U.S. college and university campuses for 74 years. ��ñ�� is a charter member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, ranked as a 4-Star Charity with Charity Navigator, and a founding member of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students.

For more information:
Gordon Govier
ggovier@intervarsity.org
608/443-3699

News Keywords

“I Am Worn Out from My Groaning”

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Fri, 26 Jun 2015 15:53:06 +0000

News

Paula Fuller and Jim Lundgren

“I Am Worn Out from My Groaning”

“I am worn out from my groaning.”

Those words from Psalm 6, written so long ago, are an apt description of our souls after the violence in Charleston last week. But the exhaustion is not just from Charleston. It has been a long year, with so many incidents of racial violence, accompanied by so much grief and pain.

Many people think we are living in a post-racial society, where there is no longer systemic injustice to fight. With a Black president serving in his second term, they reason, we are well past the Civil Rights days of Martin Luther King Jr. But the events of the past 12 months have disabused us of that notion. Racism is real. Systemic injustice is real. They are widespread, and still deeply ingrained in the fabric of the United States. And they are evil. To call what happened in Charleston anything else is to ignore the truth.

��ñ��’s Black staff and students—who themselves are often in churches during the week, serving and praying as the nine killed in Charleston were—are especially exhausted. But, even beyond that, they are traumatized. They’re angered and hurt by the seeming lack of understanding about and acknowledgment of the reality of systemic injustice. Their souls are, as Psalm 6 puts it, “in deep anguish.” Every incident of racial discrimination heightens the fear they live with quietly every day and makes it harder to have hope that change is possible.

For ��ñ��, lament is starting to feel like a staple of the year. Many of our campus chapters have led and participated in public and private laments throughout the past 12 months, crying out to God for reconciliation and justice and hope. At our Multiethnic Staff Conference in March, Asian American, Black, White, Latino, and Native American staff spent an evening lamenting the brokenness and division that exist in our world, our country, the campuses we serve on, the students we lead, our organization, and our own hearts. And this week, our 130+ new staff who are gathered in Madison for ten days of training lamented and mourned for Charleston. We are asking, with the psalmist, “How long, Lord, how long?”

We’ve been asking that question since our early days as an organization in the 1940s. Multiethnicity has always been important to ��ñ��. Developing staff of all ethnicities and reaching students from every culture and background have continually been a high priority. We have not always pursued these goals perfectly, but we have continued to press forward through difficult conversations, misunderstandings, and deep hurt and pain.

By God’s grace we have persevered thus far—but not because we want to simply look like a multiethnic organization or because we want to attract more students to our chapters. We have done the incredibly hard work of building a multiethnic organization because reconciliation is at the heart of the gospel, and the call to be reconciled to each other—to honor each other as ones made in the image of God, all with unique gifts and talents that are necessary and valued, and to see each other as true brothers and sisters in Christ—is essential to be true followers of Jesus.

So we don’t lament simply because we have Black colleagues in the room. We lament because God calls us to grieve the evil in the world. We lament because our Black staff members are our friends, our brothers and sisters, our partners in ministry and supervisors and mentees, and they are in deep pain. We lament because systemic injustice breaks God’s heart, and we want to enter into the Father’s grief over the sin that sent his Son to the cross. And we lament because we want to be part of God’s work of setting this world right—of restoring his creation to the way it is supposed to be, with true equality and justice for all—and that work starts by acknowledging what should not be.

God’s call to us now as an organization in the area of multiethnicity and reconciliation is still to persevere—to not back down out of fear or exhaustion but to continue to press on in reaching students of every ethnicity, helping them be reconciled to God and to each other, and sending them out into the world as reconcilers equipped to participate in God’s work of setting things right and making all things new.

So we will keep lamenting. We will keep talking about racism and systemic injustice. We will keep building both ethnic-specific chapters and multiethnic chapters that, in different ways, help students understand and accept the goodness of their own ethnicity as well as that of others.

In this, we ask for your prayers. We are thankful for the assurance in Psalm 6 of God’s attentive ear in the midst of our groaning:

The Lord has heard my weeping.

The Lord has heard my cry for mercy;

the Lord accepts my prayer.

Pray for wisdom for us as an organization. Pray, in particular, for our Black staff, who are trying to minister to their communities and students near and far even as they mourn deeply.

And pray for courage. As Ephesians 6 reminds us, “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” The forces of evil are strong; Charleston is yet another reminder of that. Pray that we will stand firm in the truth and power of Jesus’ death and resurrection—acts that defeated sin and that point toward the day that is coming, when his perfect justice and mercy and truth will fully reign. May we be faithful to labor with him toward that end.

Father, may your kingdom come and your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Paula Fuller is ��ñ��’s vice president and director of multiethnic ministries. Jim Lundgren is ��ñ��’s president.

News Keywords

reconciliation

Multiethnic Ministry

forgiveness