Faith based life on campus?

TomServo
Thu, 14 Jun 2012 17:14:14 +0000

This is all on you, gospelgirl, not the external world. Outside forces won’t drive you away from Christ if your bond with Christ is solid to begin with. The downside of being raised in an exclusively Christian environment is that your beliefs are rarely tested and you are never confronted with opposing viewpoints, there is never any incentive to develop serious apologetics because everybody already agrees with you, and worst of all you don’t learn how to interact with non-Christians or how to express yourself in a Christ-like way to non-believers because you can only think of them in terms of “the enemy.” There is no Biblical example for Christians to behave this way.

What is going to be your reaction when you have a gay or transsexual teacher?

How will you handle it when overhearing people talking about the drinking and premarital sex they got up to last night?

How will you handle being surrounded by people in revealing, some might say skanky, clothing?

What about when you have to take a biology class and study evolution?

Paul and Peter and the other early church leaders didn’t avoid putting themselves in the middle of non-believers, they deliberately traveled to areas that were hostile to Christians. And when they got there they didn’t make it their primary mission to tell people how to behave and what things they were doing wrong. No, their primary mission was to spread the story of Christ and God’s love and the forgiveness of sins and eternal life.

A lot of people raised in very conservative Christian environments do a complete 180 once they get out in “the real world,” but it’s not because the world did something, it’s because they were never truly committed in the first place (or in some cases, because they were angry at God). Passionate, yes, but did they really know Christ?

What better thing for a college-age American Christian to do then go to a secular campus and be a good ambassador for Christ? Many agnostic and atheistic people in America have little or not direct personal experience with true Christians, their experience is based on their family, or a bad experience they had at a bad church, or what they see on tv. A gay person on campus may have never met a Bible-believing Christian who was actually genuinely nice to them.