The Emerging Scholars Blog

Much evangelism happens on campus — indeed, the college campus might be the central place where evangelism takes place in US culture — but I’d wager that very little evangelism happens within the academy, inside the formal and informal structures of scholarship, teaching, and academic service.

At my church, I’ve just started teaching an 8-week series on evangelism to my adult bible fellowship. I’m using the following working definition of evangelism:

Introducing nonChristians to the good news of Jesus Christ with an implied or explicit offer to respond

This definition is quite narrow on purpose — I want to focus on the act of sharing the gospel and inviting people to follow Jesus, rather than diffuse our discussion with other (important) forms of witness and service.

My definition, however, ignores the usually-necessary progress from being indifferent or even hostile to God to being ready to make a commitment to Jesus. Further, if we’re talking about evangelism in the academy, there are few opportunities where one can share the gospel and invite a response without violating academic integrity. As Daryl and Teri McCarthy of IICS are fond of saying, “If you’ve been hired to teach math, and you instead work as a missionary, you are stealing from the university.” How then do we share the gospel in the academy?

Doug Schaupp and Don Everts’ idea of thresholds of conversion (PDF) might offer some ideas. As outlined in their book I Was Once Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us About Their Path to Jesus, these thresholds try to describe a series of steps to entering the kingdom in a postmodern culture, where the Christian meta-narrative is neither assumed nor trusted.

Thresholds of Conversion

1. From distrust to trust
2. From complacent to curious
3. From being closed to change in their life to being open to change
4. From meandering to seeking
5. From darkness to the kingdom of light

This series of thresholds — which might not be necessary for everyone, or even followed linearly — might open up some ideas for how evangelism might happen within the academy, rather than just on campus. For example, in his essay Being Open About Your Faith Without Turning People Off, University of Virginia professor Ken Elzinga shares several ways to build trust. I’ve heard other stories of faculty who earned an opportunity to share the gospel with a colleague because, after years of mutual trust, their friend came to a place of spiritual seeking and openness.

What do you think of these thresholds of conversion? Do you have any experience — or concerns — with evangelism within the structures of the academy?

One of the frequent struggles that ESN hears from students and faculty is the difficulty in bringing it all together. Here, “all” refers to the vast scope of the Christian life in the context of campus. Read through InterVarsity’s 13 (!) core values, and you’ll see what I mean. Even InterVarsity Graduate and Faculty Ministry’s Four Core Commitments present a daunting challenge for anyone:

• Spiritual Formation
• Community
• Evangelism & Service
• Integration of Faith, Learning, & Practice

I would say that most Christian communities — on campus or not — have one or more flat sides among these four commitments, perhaps even within the commitment itself. For example, I’ve seen communities that are great at service but awful at evangelism, or doing groundbreaking work at integrating faith and learning, but never seem to get around to practice. Graduate and faculty fellowships sometimes live up to the stereotype of “all head, no hands or heart.”

When it all comes together, however, it’s beautiful thing. Last month, the Ohio State Price of Life brought it all together. Read the rest of this entry »

Do we enter the fall with the anticipation of colleagues coming to faith? Several years ago, InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministry Staff Christian Anible wrote The Conversion of a Scholar: A Reflection on Augustine’s Confessions.  Take a few minutes to read his essay and prayerfully consider who God has called you to be present with in the coming minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, even decades.  To God be the glory!

we must not succumb to the temptation to impose Augustine’s story as a kind of template for evangelism among today’s scholars. While some commonalities certainly exist, every individual is unique, and the business of making disciples cannot be reduced to technique. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Augustine’s conversion is that it took time — years of time! In this, Monica is our best model. Her patience and faithfulness in prayer reveals a confidence, not in her ability to persuade the one she loved, but in a greater Lover whose wooing would finally win out.

Here’s how Augustine relays his conversion and the response of his mother, taken from Book VIII, Chapter XII of Confessions: Read the rest of this entry »

As you may know, evangelism is a core value of InterVarsity, and InterVarsity’s Graduate and Faculty Ministries (of which ESN is a part) has named “Evangelism and Service” as one of its four core commitments. But several of us within InterVarsity have been discussing the unique challenges for faculty who want to share the gospel with their colleagues. By extension, these challenges apply to those who want to become faculty, as well. Evangelism by an undergrad who expects to graduate within a few years, or by a campus minister who is already an outsider on campus, is one thing, but evangelism when you hope to spend your career at the university – a career which might be considerably shortened by your evangelism! – is something else entirely. Read the rest of this entry »

After listening to Professor Ken Elzinga of the University of Virginia on ways to evangelize on and off campus “without turning people off,” I came away both excited and with questions. I am a first year professor at Loyola College in Maryland, a Jesuit institution where Christian faith (and probably other faiths as well) can be much more easily discussed, in contrast to UVa, a secular institution whose heritage is shaped by Thomas Jefferson’s strict church-state separation.

Elzinga’s announcement at the start of each semester to “serve students” and his request that they hold him accountable strike me as a courageous promise and offer. That he prays before office hours that the Lord would reveal at least one student with whom he can share the gospel or help in some tangible way is a challenge to me to transform office hours from a “necessary evil” to an opportunity to serve. That he had few expectations or strong desires to get tenure and so was freed to be faithful to Christ was a surprising (and enviable) perspective.

My questions arose from his practice of offering prayers for every student that walked in his door, something he hoped new professors would do right away, rather than wait 20 years as he had. Clearly, over the years his approach and dedication to love others as himself has won over department chairs and big names who were offended by his Christian faith; his care for students – who may suspect he is Christian during the term but only learn definitively so at the term’s end – has also won many of them over, if not to conversion, at least to respect.

In fact, many students return to ask for prayer again. Others, he reported, seemed puzzled or pleased by his prayers for them. None has refused his offer. And even Muslims and Jews have appreciated his prayers.

Yet Ken dismissed secular colleagues’ suggestions that students may be intimidated by his stature as a full professor and so be too afraid to say no. I am not so sure those concerns should be easily dismissed.

After all, as professors, we do carry a substantial measure of power. We hold the power over students to give them grades; perhaps as important, we are accorded authority for having trained and studied for years to master the subjects we teach. Might that power and authority not intimidate undergraduates from expressing discomfort? Jesus seemed to rarely wield authority over others, unless attacking the hypocritical Pharisees.

Perhaps I am being overly sensitive, and perhaps such worries compared with the results of students returning for prayer (and even making up econ problems to have excuses to visit Ken and ask for prayers!). Is it enough that the gospel is preached, no matter the way, as St. Paul wrote in Philippians in response to complaints of preaching out of envy?

I’d like to hear comments from students and professors, new and old, of their experiences.