One of the people I support is a couple who are working in evangelizing students at my old university. I don’t give the alma mater money — and they keep on sending me emails and begging letters — I give Tandem Ministries support. The universities are a place where we need to evangelize, and a domestic mission: Tertiary education is sold around the world here, and the government monitors the international status of our universities, aiming to remain in the top 500 in the world, so that places can be sold and income generated.
But it seems that these student ministries not acceptable in the USA: one wonders about the value of degrees from places which have become an ideological monoculture.
Similar conflicts are playing out on a handful of campuses around the country, driven by the universities’ desire to rid their campuses of bias, particularly against gay men and lesbians, but also, in the eyes of evangelicals, fueled by a discomfort in academia with conservative forms of Christianity. The universities have been emboldened to regulate religious groups by a Supreme Court ruling in 2010 that found it was constitutional for a public law school in California to deny recognition to a Christian student group that excluded gays.
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.
[…]The evangelical groups say they, too, welcome anyone to participate in their activities, including gay men and lesbians, as well as nonbelievers, seekers and adherents of other faiths. But they insist that, in choosing leaders, who often oversee Bible study and prayer services, it is only reasonable that they be allowed to require some basic Christian faith — in most cases, an explicit agreement that Jesus was divine and rose from the dead, and often an implicit expectation that unmarried student leaders, gay or straight, will abstain from sex.
“It would compromise our ability to be who we are as Christians if we can’t hold our leaders to some sort of doctrinal standard,” said Zackary Suhr, 23, who has just graduated from Bowdoin, where he was a leader of the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship.
The consequences for evangelical groups that refuse to agree to the nondiscrimination policies, and therefore lose their official standing, vary by campus. The students can still meet informally on campus, but in most cases their groups lose access to student activity fee money as well as first claim to low-cost or free university spaces for meetings and worship; they also lose access to standard on-campus recruiting tools, such as activities fairs and bulletin boards, and may lose the right to use the universities’ names.
Well, losing space on the campus matters but a little: the local churches can (and in Dunedin, do) support the student ministries. Grace Presbyterian, for instance, in Dunedin, runs its own student ministry in parallel to Tandem. We expect that the political elite — who use PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) to groom the next generation of party hacks — will oppose us. But in NZ this is matter for the student council and arguments, not for the courts. Another virtue of not having a constitution.
One has to change one’s tactics according to the conditions, and work on multiple projects, for one cannot tell which one will succeed. It is important to work regularly and give consistently on all projects, and not put “all the eggs” into one thing. It is better to have a portfolio of projects.
But not a portfolio of morals.
1Send out your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will get it back. 2Divide your means seven ways, or even eight, for you do not know what disaster may happen on earth. 3When clouds are full, they empty rain on the earth; whether a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where the tree falls, there it will lie. 4Whoever observes the wind will not sow; and whoever regards the clouds will not reap.
5Just as you do not know how the breath comes to the bones in the mother’s womb, so you do not know the work of God, who makes everything.
6In the morning sow your seed, and at evening do not let your hands be idle; for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good.
7Light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun.
8Even those who live many years should rejoice in them all; yet let them remember that the days of darkness will be many. All that comes is vanity.
16Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. 18But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. 19Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, 20idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, 21envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
22By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. 24And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
Now, the issues that are causing the University to kick the Christians off the campus (and it will be interesting to see if they do the same to the Buddhists or Muslim — both of which will have very similar rules for leaders around being within the faith and chaste (or married) — is that they want to tolerate not merely fornication and impurity, but a culture of licence (particularly around bongs and booze), and the worship of the current secular idols. Moreover, diversity mandates factions, so that the elite can neatly classify, divide, and rule in perpetuity. As far as drunkenness, there is a reason that my son lives at home and not in a university hostel: he does not like booze and getting plastered on Thursday night is compulsory in most halls of residence.
These are the works of the flesh, and we all have our own weaknesses here. We are instead to demonstrate generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. We are not to let our emotions rage, or assume that any correction is offence.
Heh RT @patsajak: Sorry, but I refuse to join either Thought or Speech Police until they get some really cool uniforms.
— Tammy Bruce (@HeyTammyBruce) June 11, 2014
And in doing this, having a bunch of things we do is useful. A few years ago I realized that if I did not find some new hobbies — particularly as I could not compete in cross country races due to continual injuries — I would become very boring, very fast. I tried some things and gave them up. Other things stuck: photography, playing in an orchestra. Going to concerts. The gym instead of running (although I miss running). I have a portfolio of interests: at certain seasons some things are not done — such as at exam marking time. And by supporting and helping many I have a network of friends.
But if one stuck to a sense that one cannot ever be offended, that diversity is one’s idol, and that there are no standards — one would eat what one ought not to every day instead of occasionally, one would have no discipline, and one would make a lonely hell of your own fears and disabilities.
The elite are smoothing the road to damnation. They are not progressive, their road leads to tyranny and destruction. Do not join them, and do not act like them.
