New York University

Spiritual Conversations that Change Lives

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Tue, 20 Nov 2018 21:46:57 +0000

Gordon Govier

Spiritual Conversations that Change Lives

The atheists on the other side of the room at New York University (NYU) were not happy when the Christians sang their worship songs. And that was the beginning of Mickey Sanchez’s journey to becoming an ��ñ�� Campus Staff Minister.

“NYU put us in the same room together, with just a little dividing wall between us,” he recalled. “We bothered them when we did worship. We didn’t know they were there.”

The Christians turned down their music when they realized what was happening, and the two groups continued to meet in the same large room, as assigned. Later, Mickey crossed the dividing wall to talk with the atheists. He was curious to know why they believed what they believed. They shared back and forth, and the atheists invited Mickey back the following week.

At the same time Mickey was struggling with his biochemistry lab work. It was more tedious than he expected. “From that point on, I realized I was much more interested in having conversations with atheists than running DNA trials,” he said.

As the philosophical discussions continued, Mickey switched his major to political science, a field that he perceived as applied philosophy. After graduation he found a job at the New York City Council office but stayed connected with the Christian fellowship and the atheists’ club at NYU because he wanted to continue the conversations. “Eventually I realized I should be doing ministry and not politics, if that’s where all my energy is,” he said. Both he and his wife decided to go to seminary.

Seminary took them to Boston and it was there, while on staff at a church, that several people told him he would be a good fit for ��ñ��’s campus ministry. The opportunity to lead an Alpha course with veteran ��ñ�� Campus Minister Jeff Barneson in the Harvard Business School, during which two people in the class were baptized and two others came to faith, clinched it.

“I saw that as God’s confirmation that I should be doing campus ministry,” he said. As Mickey joined ��ñ�� staff at Harvard and began to work with the various Graduate School fellowships, he discovered each school had a different culture. When it came to Bible study, for instance, there were similar passions but varying applications.

“In the Business School they didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing the text,” he noted. “They went straight to application. In the PhD world they analyzed the text most of the time and probably didn’t get to the application enough.”

Mickey expected to stay at Harvard long term, but after just four years there his wife landed a job at the national office of the Evangelical Covenant Church in Chicago. So three years ago he began working with the graduate students at Northwestern University.

Instead of overseeing several different chapters and having a fellowship of ��ñ�� staff to work with, Mickey is now staffing one single grad chapter that numbers over 50 students. But like at Harvard, ��ñ�� grad student ministry has a long history at Northwestern. They had been praying for a staff minister for a number of years. Mickey is pleased that the group has a missional focus to reach every corner of the graduate school campus.

Adjusting to the Midwest after living on the east coast for most of his life has been easier than he expected. He’s been working on getting acquainted with other groups of Northwestern graduate students, building connections, and finding ways to cosponsor events with them.

Recently, one of the chapter’s small group leaders bumped into a huddle of students in the Physics Department, who were talking about Graduate Christian Fellowship. They were complimenting the fellowship’s activities, in particular a dialogue that had been held with the Queer Pride group.

“What we’re doing here at Northwestern is creating bridges for people to consider the gospel,” Mickey said. “We’re trying to remove obstacles that are unnecessary. Our dream of reaching every corner of the campus is starting to happen.”

Grad students tend to be more isolated than undergrads, and connecting about faith issues can be difficult. But Mickey believes that opening up dialogue and having spiritual conversations among grad students and faculty can change the culture of a campus. “It’s easier for undergrads to be open to faith when there are spiritual conversations among grad students and professors,” he said.

From biochemistry to politics to campus ministry, it took a few turns before Mickey found his calling. As ��ñ�� embraces the 2030 Calling to reach out to every corner of every campus, he is looking forward to seeing how ministry to graduate students and faculty can lead the way.

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New York University

Graduate and Faculty Ministries

Harvard

Northwestern

Alpha

NYU's Socratic Happy Hour

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 19:53:34 +0000

News

David Williams

NYU's Socratic Happy Hour

Questions define some of our deepest concerns, questions such as: Does the separation of church and state mean the separation of religion from politics? Do my sexual desires define me? Is education really the solution (and is ignorance really our biggest problem)?

At New York University (NYU), where I am an ��ñ�� Campus Minister working with graduate students, I host what I call Socratic Happy Hours: civil and convivial conversations about the Big Questions. At these gatherings, Christian and non-Christian graduate students engage in generous debate and serious dialogue about both perennial questions and present concerns. Our motto is, “Friends don't let friends live unexamined lives.”

A few months ago, I hosted a Socratic Happy Hour on the question, Given the amount of gratuitous evil and innocent suffering in the world, how could there be a God? A young grad student from Pakistan—I’ll call her Sara—was joining us for the very first time, as was another grad student I’ll call Ramiro, who is a devotee of Albert Camus’s existentialist philosophy.

Our conversation centered on a heart-wrenching scene from Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night, in which the SS guards at Auschwitz hang a young boy in front of their horrified prisoners. Wiesel wrote, “Behind me, I heard [a] man asking: ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’ And from within me, I heard a voice answer; ‘Where is He? This is where—hanging here from this gallows.’”

As we read the passage Sara’s eyes grew wide. “How did you know?,” she asked. “How did you know this was my question?” I pressed her for more details, and she sheepishly explained that, though she still considered herself religious, she had not prayed in many years.

In her home country she had witnessed injustices—she could not bring herself to elaborate—which she could not square with the existence of a good God. Not having a safe space to discuss her doubts in her own community, Sara had been silently undergoing a crisis of faith. But here at the Socratic Happy Hour, she had found a space to ask her questions.

Ramiro, on the other hand, resonated with a passage from the book River Out of Eden by the famous atheist and Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins: “In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

From Ramiro’s point of view, because there is no God, life, the universe, and everything are objectively meaningless. The only meanings and, therefore, the only morals, are the ones we make for ourselves.

I pressed Ramiro on this point: If what he and Dawkins were saying were true, then they could not say that what happened to that little boy in Auschwitz was actually, objectively, wrong; at most, they could say that they did not happen to like it. Ramiro, shifting uncomfortably in his chair, conceded that that was an implication of his view, but insisted he still believes that that’s just the way it is.

As the evening drew to a close we asked everyone to share one thing that they would be chewing on after our conversation. My friend Erick, a Lutheran church planter and newly minted ��ñ�� volunteer, said, “I am going to be thinking about that little boy from Night. It kills me that we live in a world where that could happen, where an innocent kid could suffer like that.

“But I am also struck by Wiesel’s answer to the question ‘Where is God?’ There hanging from the gallows. Wiesel meant, of course, that God is dead. But the Christian gospel says something similar but infinitely more powerful: God is not distant and aloof, but he has chosen to suffer with us and die for us.

“When we look at Jesus on the cross we see God on the gallows, letting evil do its worst, and then overcoming evil and death in the resurrection. I know that that doesn’t quite answer the question of how God could let horrible things happen. But it does tell us what the answer to that question isn’t: It isn’t because He doesn’t care.”

Sara’s eyes got wide again. “That is beautiful,” she said.

Sara and Ramiro are now regulars at the Socratic Happy Hour. They suggest topics for future conversations, they bring their questions, they’ve started bringing friends, and with each gathering they open up more and more. Please pray that we would be effective witnesses to them and that God would draw them to himself.

Having a safe place to talk about Big Questions is one way God is bringing transformation to students at NYU.

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