
Yesterday, Colleges and Evangelicals Collide on Bias Policy ran on the front page of the NY Times.
For 40 years, evangelicals at Bowdoin College have gathered periodically to study the Bible together, to pray and to worship. They are a tiny minority on the liberal arts college campus, but they have been a part of the school’s community, gathering in the chapel, the dining center, the dorms.
After this summer, the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship will no longer be recognized by the college. Already, the college has disabled the electronic key cards of the group’s longtime volunteer advisers. . . .
Michael Paulson’s insightful piece gives attention to significant Campus Access Concerns faced by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and other campus ministries across the United States.
. . . At Cal State, the nation’s largest university system with nearly 450,000 students on 23 campuses, the chancellor is preparing this summer to withdraw official recognition from evangelical groups that are refusing to pledge not to discriminate on the basis of religion in the selection of their leaders. And at Vanderbilt, more than a dozen groups, most of them evangelical but one of them Catholic, have already lost their official standing over the same issue; one Christian group balked after a university official asked the students to cut the words “personal commitment to Jesus Christ†from their list of qualifications for leadership. . . .
“It’s absurd,†said Alec Hill, the president of InterVarsity, a national association of evangelical student groups, including the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship. “The genius of American culture is that we allow voluntary, self-identified organizations to form, and that’s what our student groups are. . . .
If you have not already done such, I encourage you to take the time to prayerfully consider and discuss Colleges and Evangelicals Collide on Bias Policy. The below material is a distillation of what I have posted on Facebook (InterVarsity Faculty Ministry and InterVarsity Emerging Scholars Network) and received through InterVarsity’s ministry as a whole. Pray for God’s continued granting of discernment. As you have particular prayer concerns, please share below and/or drop me a line. May this article signal “a changing tide in matters of public policy and faith, principled pluralism and freedom of association”. To God be the glory!
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