Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship Research Articles

Judge rules against university

Case name: Intervarsity Christian Fellowship USA, et al. v. Board of Governors of Wayne State University, et al., No. 19‐10375 (E.D. Mich. 09/20/19).

Judge rules against university

Case name: Intervarsity Christian Fellowship USA, et al. v. Board of Governors of Wayne State University, et al., No. 19‐10375 (E.D. Mich. 09/20/19).

Judge rules against university

Case name: Intervarsity Christian Fellowship USA, et al. v. Board of Governors of Wayne State University, et al., No. 19‐10375 (E.D. Mich. 09/20/19).

Judge rules against university

Case name: Intervarsity Christian Fellowship USA, et al. v. Board of Governors of Wayne State University, et al., No. 19‐10375 (E.D. Mich. 09/20/19).

Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: Christian formation meets indigenous resurrection

Undoing all forms of domination – including, in particular, religious domination – remains a crucial imperative of our time, given that domination constitutes a spirit-killing dynamic that distorts, oppresses and throws living beings (both human and non-human alike) out of synch with themselves. One form of domination in colonial contexts is the totalising claim to a monopoly of ‘the’ truth that effectively delegitimises and demonises all other ways of seeing the world. This essay grapples with the question: What happens when the ‘One True Story’ encounters other faith stories? Riffing off my (coedited) anthology, Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory (dedicated to the memory of the Filipino indigenous women and men healers impaled on stakes by early Spanish missionaries and left on river banks for crocodiles to feast on), I narrate my personal journey growing up as a Filipina Methodist pastor’s kid, becoming a born-again believer and an aspiring Christian missionary trained by Philippine Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and the Navigators, and belatedly coming to grips with my relationship to my country’s colonial history and its consequences for me and my people’s struggle for wholeness and authenticity. What happens when my wholly formed Christian subjectivity becomes challenged by the resurrecting call of spirit to indigenous and earth well-being? Informed by a multilayered cultural memory, I trace my faith learnings from an encounter with deep ancestry in the ‘belly of the beast’ and its larger significance for today’s social movement struggles for sustainability and global coexistence.

Postwar American Evangelicals and World Religions: A Case Study of Intervarsity’s Urbana Student Missionary Conventions

This paper traces the major discussions of “world” or “non-Christian” religions in the speeches, promotion, and scholarly texts related to InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s triennial “Urbana” Student Missionary Convention, beginning with its 1946 initiation at the University of Toronto and concluding with the final 1960s convention, held in 1967 at the University of Illinois’s Urbana-Champaign campus. The author argues that Urbana sources enlarge the understanding of postwar American evangelicals’ concerns about non-Christian religions by showing that evangelicals assessed the religions’ implications for global evangelization as secondary to those of other geopolitical developments, chiefly Communism, postcolonial nationalism, and internationalism.

Philosophy, Grace, and Reconciliation: Reflections of a Catholic Revert

Philosophy, Grace, and ReconciliationReflections of a Catholic Revert* Francis J. Beckwith (bio) On April 28, 2007, I was received back into the Catholic Church. My reversion caused quite a stir,1 since it occurred while I was serving as president of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS), an academic association of Protestant biblical scholars, theologians, philosophers, historians, and ministers that in 2007 had a membership over 4,300. On that evening I wrote the other members of the ETS executive committee, telling them of my reversion. Although I assured them that I could remain as ETS president since there was nothing in the society’s doctrinal basis with which a Catholic could not agree,2 it was naïve for me to believe that this was possible. Within a week I resigned, realizing that I could not remain as ETS president without causing a scandal. Several days later I resigned my membership as well. Although I have published a memoir,3 as well as contributed to the book Journeys of Faith,4 in this article I want to offer some additional reflections on what I have learned and continue to learn about my journey. My focus will be on the role that philosophy played in helping me to be more receptive to the Church’s understanding of grace, and how that understanding has been instrumental in deepening my spiritual life. [End Page 66] I I had left the Catholic Church in the early 1970s as a young teenager, having been drawn to Evangelicalism as a consequence of a variety of factors. As a young Catholic who had a penchant for theological inquiry and a desire to follow Jesus, the Evangelicals that I had encountered, both in person and in print, seemed to be far more serious and authentic in their faith than what I had known as a Catholic. Like most Catholics of my generation, I was poorly catechized, despite the fact that I attended parochial schools from first to twelfth grade. After my high school years, in which I became less interested in my faith, though I still attended Catholic Mass with my parents, I found myself again gravitating back to Evangelical ministries that I had first begun exploring a few years earlier. As my college days commenced, I no longer considered myself Catholic. I became involved with several college ministries including Campus Crusade for Christ and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. It was in those groups that I became acquainted with many Evangelical authors who shaped the trajectory of my spiritual and intellectual development. These authors included popular speakers and writers such as Walter R. Martin, J. Vernon McGee, and Charles Swindoll to more academically oriented authors such as Norman Geisler, Ronald H. Nash, Clark Pinnock, Alvin Plantinga, R. C. Sproul, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and John Warwick Montgomery. I was also influenced by some thinkers outside the Evangelical orbit, including Peter Kreeft and Mortimer Adler. In college I switched my major to philosophy, largely because of my growing interest in Christian apologetics. I had been advised by several people that it was the major that would best prepare me for advanced work in apologetics if I chose to pursue it. Interestingly enough, the two Evangelical philosophers who had the biggest influence on me were Norm Geisler and Ron Nash, an Aristotelian Thomist and a Platonic Augustinian, respectively. I had no idea at the time that these were not widely held schools of thought in [End Page 67] the Evangelical world. Both thinkers saw nothing untoward in the positive use of philosophy in the formation of doctrine including philosophical theology and the nature of the human person. This too was highly unusual in the Evangelical world, but I did not realize it at the time. It was only years later that I came in contact with the writings of Evangelical theologians who didn’t have many nice things to say about the role of philosophy in theological development. Colin Brown, for example, offers an analysis typically held by his Evangelical peers: “The first [side effect of Aquinas’s thought] is that, where a theology is based partly upon Christian revelation and partly upon alien philosophical ideas, the result is often a misguided...

Moral minority: the evangelical Left in an age of conservatism

In 1973, nearly a decade before the height of the Moral Majority, a group of progressive activists assembled in a Chicago YMCA to strategize about how to move the nation in a more evangelical direction through political action. When they emerged, the Washington Post predicted that the new evangelical left could shake both political and religious life in America. The following decades proved the Post both right and wrong-evangelical participation in the political sphere was intensifying, but in the end it was the religious right, not the left, that built a viable movement and mobilized electorally. How did the evangelical right gain a moral monopoly and why were evangelical progressives, who had shown such promise, left behind? In Moral Minority, the first comprehensive history of the evangelical left, David R. Swartz sets out to answer these questions, charting the rise, decline, and political legacy of this forgotten movement. Though vibrant in the late nineteenth century, progressive evangelicals were in eclipse following religious controversies of the early twentieth century, only to reemerge in the 1960s and 1970s. They stood for antiwar, civil rights, and anticonsumer principles, even as they stressed doctrinal and sexual fidelity. Politically progressive and theologically conservative, the evangelical left was also remarkably diverse, encompassing groups such as Sojourners, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Evangelicals for Social Action, and the Association for Public Justice. Swartz chronicles the efforts of evangelical progressives who expanded the concept of morality from the personal to the social and showed the way-organizationally and through political activism-to what would become the much larger and more influential evangelical right. By the 1980s, although they had witnessed the election of Jimmy Carter, the nation's first born-again president, progressive evangelicals found themselves in the political wilderness, riven by identity politics and alienated by a skeptical Democratic Party and a hostile religious right. In the twenty-first century, evangelicals of nearly all political and denominational persuasions view social engagement as a fundamental responsibility of the faithful. This most dramatic of transformations is an important legacy of the evangelical left.

The Technologizing of Faith: An Ethnographic Study of Christian University Students Using Online Technology

This article examines the complex relationship between Christian living, online technology, and the “Christian Net Generation.”1 It is the culmination of a yearlong ethnographic research project in the lives of Christian undergraduate students and staff who are part of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. These Christian students use the Internet as extensions of their lives. They experiment with their faith online, which enhances their embodied spiritual experiences: attending church, sharing meals, communal Bible studies, and living together in communal housing. They demonstrate that it is possible to follow Jesus through the technologizing of their faith.

Embodying the Global Soul: Internationalism and the American Evangelical Left

In the last half of the twentieth century, neo-evangelicalism moved from an anticommunist nationalist consensus to a new internationalism characterized by concern for human rights, justice, and economic development. Case studies of World Vision, a global relief and development organization, and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a campus ministry, demonstrate that this trajectory was due in part to a growing global reflex in which many missionaries and third-world evangelicals “spoke back” to American evangelicalism. Interpreting the Bible for themselves—and increasingly for American evangelicals—substantial numbers of non-Western converts and missionaries offered sharp criticisms of American politics, culture, and capitalism. These critiques, sacralized by their origins on the mission field, helped turn some young evangelicals toward Vietnam protests, poverty relief, civil rights, and a tempered nationalism. By the 1970s, these progressive elements—and a more resolute global concern generally—had become important markers of the evangelical left.

Motivational Interviewing

Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a valuable tool for nurses to help patients address behavior change. MI has been found effective for helping patients with multiple chronic conditions, adherence issues, and lifestyle issues change their health behaviors. For Christian nurses, MI is consistent with biblical principles and can be seen as a form of ministry. This article overviews the process of MI, stages of change, and offers direction for further learning.

Social Engagement in an Evangelical Campus Ministry: The Case of Urbana 2006

This article uses a case study of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship to explore the social engagement of campus evangelicals. It focuses on InterVarsity’s massive Urbana student missions conference, a gathering that drew 23,000 young evangelicals to St. Louis in 2006. Drawing on ethnographic field observations, it profiles a campus group on the center-left of evangelicalism. Although InterVarsity promotes some conservative positions, it is increasingly progressive on issues of poverty, the environment, and race.

:A Long Eclipse: The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920–1970.(McGill‐Queen's Studies in the History of Religion, number 32.)

When I entered college in 1958, I joined the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF). Two years later, my religious views having become more liberal, I moved over to the Student Christian Movement (SCM). By the time I received my B.A. degree, I had lapsed into a non-aggressive and durable agnosticism. These personal details illustrate one aspect of the phenomenon that Catherine Gidney discusses in her study of liberal Protestantism and the Canadian universities from 1920 to 1970: the decline of Protestant influence on Canadian campuses. Her focus is on six English Canadian institutions. It is no surprise that, during the first half of the twentieth century, Protestantism dominated the ethos of the denominational universities she discusses: the University of King's College in Halifax (Anglican), Victoria University, Toronto (Methodist/United Church of Canada), and McMaster University in Toronto (to 1930) and Hamilton, Ontario (Baptist). The same was true, however, of the three nonsectarian universities she studies: Dalhousie University in Halifax, University College in the University of Toronto, and the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver. Dalhousie had its roots in Presbyterianism, but by 1920 it was private and nondenominational. University College and UBC were both founded as provincial, nondenominational entities.

Bill Bright & Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America (review)

Reviewed by: Bill Bright & Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America Adam Laats Bill Bright & Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America. By John G. Turner. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2008. Bill Bright never achieved the headline-grabbing status of evangelical leaders such as Billy Graham or Jerry Falwell. Nevertheless, by the time of Bright's death in 2003, his Campus Crusade for Christ had grown from a small campus ministry to one of the largest evangelical organizations in America, with annual revenues of almost $500 million, and a worldwide staff of almost 30,000. John Turner describes the ways Bright's strong, sometimes stubborn leadership led to such impressive growth. Just as important as Bill Bright's story, Turner considers the ways the history of Campus Crusade can illuminate important themes in the wider history of postwar evangelicalism, such as the changing roles of evangelicals on secular campuses, the increasing connection between evangelicals and conservative politics, and the ways Crusade leaders accommodated themselves to America's changing gender mores. As Turner recounts, Campus Crusade for Christ's early success came in large part from its strategy of targeting charismatic student leaders, especially among fraternities and sororities. Its Dale Carnegie-style sales approach in the 1950s allowed it to overcome students' prejudices about evangelicals as "stuffy and fanatical" (61). Turner's account is at its best when he explores the ways the Campus Crusade story sheds light on common evangelical experiences, such as Crusade's tense relationship with evangelical competitors in Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. Bill Bright also shared the struggle of many evangelicals as he was forced to choose between the more ecumenical approach of Billy Graham and the stricter separatism of the Bob Joneses. In supporting Graham, Bright revealed his primary concern for effective soul-winning over theological niceties. Such pragmatism was also evident in the late 1960s, when Crusade evangelists coopted the style and tactics, if not the substance, of leftist student activists. [End Page 180] As Campus Crusade grew into an influential international organization, Bill Bright slipped more and more into active involvement with conservative Republican politics. He struggled to keep the Crusade officially politically neutral. By the time of the 1980 presidential election, however, Bright's continuing assertion of political neutrality sounded increasingly divorced from reality, given Bright's political activism against abortion and in favor of Reagan's candidacy. Turner focuses on Crusade's domestic activities, but it would have been instructive to have included a fuller discussion of Crusade activism beyond the shores of the United States. Of course, it is impossible to include every important theme, but evangelical organizations have traditionally thought of themselves as essentially transnational. Campus Crusade was no exception. By 1977, as Turner acknowledges, Campus Crusade had shifted its focus primarily to overseas missions. Yet for understandable practical reasons Turner gives only relatively brief mention to this central aspect of postwar evangelicalism. Overall, however, Turner provides a balanced and thorough account of this important organization, and offers a thoughtful analysis of the things Campus Crusade can teach us about postwar evangelicalism. His insights are particularly compelling due to his rich pool of sources. He relies on extensive interview material with leaders and activists in the Campus Crusade hierarchy to compose a convincing portrait of a sincere if bullheaded Bill Bright and his Crusade. Adam Laats Binghamton University (SUNY) Copyright © 2009 Mid-America American Studies Association

Rx for Compassion Fatigue

Rx for Compassion Fatigue

Nurturing hope: a vital ingredient in nursing.

Mary Thompson, RN, MSN,is director of Nurses Christian Fellowship—USA®, a division of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship®, in Madison, Wisconsin. She has taught seminars on the topic of hope.

Book Review: For Christ and the University: The Story of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship of the U.S.A., 1940–1990

Book Review: For Christ and the University: The Story of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship of the U.S.A., 1940–1990

Urbana ′90—A Student Missionary Convention and Missiological Event

The following article is a report and reflection on the large missionary convention sponsored by Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and attended by thousands of university students in December, 1991. Samuel Escobar evaluates Urbana ′90 from a Third World and missiological perspective. Mary Fisher follows with a report on the planning and objectives showing that this celebrated convention steered a new course by consciously trying to reflect all of the values of the kingdom, including both a passion for evangelism and a concern for social justice. J. Christy Wilson concludes with reflections and comparisons between this event and the first conference which he directed in 1946.

Recruitment of Students; for Mission

Students have always been deeply involved in world mission. This came to a focus particularly in the history of the Student Volunteer Movement and in the current work of the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. Three other international student movements are examined to assess their contribution to this worldwide task. Finally, an effort is made to evaluate how the vision of these several movements is related to the task of recruiting students for world missions.

Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ronald J. Sider. Hodder paperback. (copyright 1977 by Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship of USA) £1.00.

Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ronald J. Sider. Hodder paperback. (copyright 1977 by Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship of USA) £1.00.