University of California-Berkeley

Simple Steps in Campus Ministry

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 16:55:37 +0000

Gordon Govier

Simple Steps in Campus Ministry

When Sara Fong and Osup Kwon began talking about marriage, Sara knew she would be moving from the San Francisco area to Knoxville, where Osup was attending graduate school. She hoped she would be able to continue working in campus ministry, but God needed to open a place for her.

In her earliest conversation with Area Director Eric Peterson, Eric told Sara that she could be a part of something new. Ann Ding, an alumna of the Vanderbilt Asian American ��ñ�� (AAIV) chapter, had volunteered to spend one year planting an AAIV chapter at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK).

AAIV chapter plants are rare. Most AAIV chapters are spin-offs from a larger multiethnic undergrad chapter. But the UTK chapter took root and grew under Ann’s guidance and the visionary leadership of chapter president Jason Chu. When Sara arrived in fall, 2014, there was a job waiting for her.

Working with Asian American students in Tennessee is quite a bit different than working with Asian American students in California. “I’m still learning the nuances,” Sara said. “I knew it would be hard but you still feel how hard it is as you go through it.”

Asian Americans make up only about 3 percent of the Tennessee student body. The ratio is closer to 40 percent in California. Sara is frequently mistaken for an international student.

But she is used to handling cultural differences. She was a Campus Staff Member at the University of California—Berkeley for six years, for two-and-a-half of those she worked with the LaFe chapter. She took over for Javier Tarango-Sho when he went on sabbatical and credits Javier for preparing her well to work with Latino students. “His best advice was, ‘You’re not me, so lead as you are,’” she said. “He was good at giving me simple steps to take to build trust and transition well. I felt empowered by him.”

Sara is using some of those same steps to build trust with the UTK AAIV chapter. Thankfully, the new chapter has lots of leaders.

GETTING HER QUESTIONS ANSWERED

Sara joined ��ñ�� as a UC—Berkeley freshman, after she was invited by a friend she had met at church camp. “I went because I was intrigued by manuscript Bible study and I continue to be intrigued by manuscript study,” she said.

After her sophomore year she attended ��ñ��’s Bay Area Urban Project (BAYUP). “That was where things started to make more sense about the bigness of God’s kingdom, and things like shalom, justice, and racial reconciliation all started to be very important to me,” she said. “A lot of the questions I had about whether God was big enough or good enough were answered for me.”

Sara also felt challenged to place her aspirations before God and ask him to lead her into the right career. She realized that she had chosen to be a pre-med student because of the security, financial stability, and prestige that a medical career offers. By the time she was a senior she felt God was calling her on staff with ��ñ��. “I started to realize I really love doing ministry and I want to spend more of my time doing that,” she said.

Helping students grow in their faith and find healing in their lives are parts of doing ministry that Sara enjoys most. Part of the challenge of working with Asian American students at UTK is what Sara calls “colorblind theology,” expressed by students who believe America is a big melting pot and that ethnicity doesn’t matter. “Students often quote, ‘In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free,’ that whole thing,” she said. “But then I discover that many times they were made fun of when they were younger. They have a lot of hurtful experiences of ethnic identity and being Asian.”

Part of Sara’s walk with God as an undergraduate was coming to terms with her own ethnic identity. With both Japanese and Chinese ancestors, that included acknowledging the trials of World War II internment camps and the Angel Island immigration experience. “I started to see God saying, ‘Your history matters, it's affected you,’” she said. “The more I explored it the more I started to feel healed.” She is hoping for the same healing for the students she’s working with.

The AAIV chapter is not the only new ��ñ�� chapter at UTK. Shelly Scott is planting a multiethnic chapter. And a Collegiate Black and Christian chapter has been thriving for several years. Sara said all three chapters joined together in an evangelistic outreach this October called the Awesome Proxe. “We had some people walk up and say, ‘What group are you? There’s black students here, white students, Asian students. We never see this on campus, what is this?’ Doing this together was a witness for God,” she said.

Sara hopes that ��ñ�� will be able to help lead the dialogue for racial reconciliation on the UTK campus as a part of its Christian witness. She’s starting with some simple steps.

News Keywords

Asian American ��ñ��

University of Tennessee

Knoxville

University of California-Berkeley

Nobel Surprise

AD-16225 — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 19:02:51 +0000

News

Gordon Govier

Nobel Surprise

PhD student Hannah Fakhouri woke up on October 4th to the news that her faculty adviser had won a Nobel Prize. University of California-Berkeley Physics professor Saul Perlmutter was one of three winners of the annual Nobel Physics prize.

“It’s definitely been an honor to work with Saul, who continues to have the same passions that he did 15 years ago, that led him to the discovery of the accelerating universe,” Hannah said. “Everybody in the field knew the magnitude of the discovery and knew that some day he would win a Nobel Prize. But his name carries a little more weight in the broader community now.”

When she gets her degree, having the signature of a Nobel Laureate on her recommendation letters can only help her job prospects. The hubbub over winning the prize may also make it a little harder to find time to meet with her adviser. But right now it’s an exciting time to be a part of the Physics Department at UC-Berkeley. Everyone involved in the project participated in a panel discussion about it, the day the award was announced.

“He is so excited about the science and about how much fun it was to make the discovery,” she said. “It was a lot of hard work and a lot of late nights, but his wanting to share the honor with everyone else has been very striking.”

��ñ�� at Berkeley

Hannah is one of the leaders of Veritas Fellowship, ��ñ��’s fellowship for Graduate Students at UC-Berkeley. She connected with Veritas Fellowship almost immediately upon her arrival at Berkeley in 2006, after earning her undergraduate degree at the University of Kansas.

“In Veritas I found a community of whole hearted and diverse Christians,” she said. Like any top tier university, Berkeley has people in many different fields of study, from all kinds of backgrounds, and from many different countries. “I have made incredibly close friendships and have continued to grow in the Lord. I am very thankful for the community and the fellowship that I have in graduate school.”

Hannah said that being involved in Veritas Fellowship has made a big difference in her success in graduate school. “I love that we have some people who have been in the faith forever, and some who came to faith as undergrads and so are relatively new. We have some people who study Physics, such as myself, and some who are in social welfare. The diversity of fields is a big strength that we have,” she said.

Small Group Communities

Hannah meets with a small group of women for a weekly Bible study. It’s a group with which she can share her frustrations and difficulties, as well as her victories. “Not having that would make it hard to weather the ups and downs, make it hard to remember in the trying moments that I believe God has called me here,” she said.

When she first arrived at Berkeley, Hannah was involved in a Physics Prayer Group that also met weekly. Most of the members attended Berkeley’s First Presbyterian Church. “We saw so much of each other and we had so many shared experiences, being in the same field of science, that we bonded,” she said. “There were such deep friendships in that group.”

One of the members of the group was Onsi, a Lebanese Christian who had been raised in Dubai, and attended MIT before he came to Berkeley. Hannah and Onsi were friends for about a year and a half until, Hannah said, “something clicked.” They began dating and about two years ago they were married. When they were still dating they both happened to be included in a public television video report on Saul Perlmutter’s research.

Carrie Bare, an ��ñ�� Campus Staff Member who formerly worked on the Berkeley campus, said that Hannah and Onsi have been key leaders in the chapter. “Both committed early on to regular fellowship with this group, both the large group meetings as well as regular involvement with small groups,” Carrie said.

Hannah’s ��ñ�� involvement has also led her to consider future options that may lie beyond the world of physics. “Being on the leadership team with ��ñ�� has helped me develop a skill set that I didn’t necessarily know to identify in myself,” she said. “Coordinating and organizing and leading groups seems to be something that God has gifted me in.”

No Conflict Between Science and Faith

Having been raised by parents who encouraged her to grow both spiritually and intellectually, Hannah doesn’t see a conflict between science and faith, between her physics research and her evangelical Christian beliefs. “The creation is something marvelous and it’s in line with God’s heart for us to study it and pursue it and to understand it with the same sort of rigor that we would approach anything we’re talking about related to God,” she said. “Learning about God’s creation and how it works, only magnifies the glory of God that I see.”

Hannah said that her passion for understanding how the universe works comes from dark nights on the Kansas prairie as she was growing up, observing the power and magnitude of the star studded sky overhead. Today, as she continues to pursue answers to some of the same questions that helped win Saul Perlmutter a Nobel Prize, Hannah still sees the glory of God reflected in the heavens.

News Keywords

University of California-Berkeley

Nobel Prize

��ñ�� alumni