Campus Gleanings Sept 14, 2009

Dear Friends of Campus Ministry,

By now the semester is in full swing, and the relaxing pace of summer is but a distant memory.  I am happy to begin this edition of Gleanings with a moment of encouragement from Brian Walsh, our Campus Pastor at University of Toronto.  "Elizabeth's Prayer" is below, I hope it will be a blessing to you too.  Thanks for sending this, Brian.

September, Prayer and Campus Ministry

Brian Walsh

“This was the first time that I have prayed in public in six years.”

September is always a bit of a challenge for me. Maybe I’m not that unique and other campus ministers have an ambivalent mixture of excitement and dread as the academic year begins. But my transition in September is intensified by the contrast between life on an organic farm two hours outside of the city and the deeply urban reality of ministry at the University of Toronto. Don’t get me wrong. I love campus ministry and I love downtown Toronto. But it sure is different from feeding animals, harvesting crops and the daily adventure of farming.

So when well-meaning folks ask me, “Are you excited about getting back to campus?”, I know what the right answer is. But I can’t always quite give it. Yes, I’m excited. Sort of. But you know, living half the week in my office on campus and half the week at home with my family on the farm isn’t the best of lifestyles.

That’s all a way to set up what happened this morning. Something that doesn’t take away the ambivalence, nor does it erase the intensity of the contrast, but something that gave me a hope and a joy that is pretty hard to express adequately.

I had sent out an email late Sunday night inviting folks to join me for prayer at the beginning of this semester on Tuesday morning. I hadn’t even checked this out with the other members of our staff team, and I didn’t place an expecation on my colleagues to attend. And this morning I didn’t really know if I’d be praying alone or with a room full of people. Five showed up. We talked for a while, and then spent some time in prayer. Good time. Good prayer. Community enriching prayer.

And then, while we were sort of packing up and getting ready to move on with the rest of the day, one of the students present said to me, “This was the first time  that I have prayed in public in six years.” And she thanked me for making this possible for her.

Elizabeth has been a part of our ministry community for three of those six years. And come to think of it, I’d never noticed that she hadn’t prayed any sentence prayers in our midst.

Then she said that she was excited about reading Romans with our Wine Before Breakfast community this year because we had been reading Romans that first year that she joined our community. And then she told me that my last sermon of that year (in April of 2007) had been profoundly healing for her. That sermon had given her permission to be a member of a believing and worshipping community, even with all of her doubts and all of her hurt and disappointment with the church.

But that wasn’t everything. The last thing that she told me was that she was finding ways to give voice to her Christian faith in the context of a course that she is teaching in the social sciences. Elizabeth went in to the social sciences fully cognizant of the insistence on religious neutrality in that kind of scholarship.
She knows the methodological and pedagogical rules and by and large obeys them. But she now wants to quietly and gracefully allow her own Christian faith to shine through her teaching and research.

Can you imagine how excited I am about my short conversation with Elizabeth? Because she found a place in a worshipping community, gathering around a table of bread and wine, participating in the liturgy and a community of hospitality, she can now pray. Because she met Christ in our midst, in the preaching of the Word, in the sacraments, in table fellowship, in an openness of conversation that refuses to censor, she can now pray. And because she can pray, she can begin to imagine what a grace-filled Christian scholarship might look like.

I still miss my family and my life at Russet House Farm. Elizabeth doesn’t take away that longing. But Elizabeth does remind me of why we do campus ministry and why worship is at the heart of it all.

1.  A reminder from Jamie VanderBerg about theICS Conference:

As you may already know, the  ICS Worldview Conference "Rekindling Christian Imagination," with David  Smith, ICS alumnus and Director of Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching  and Learning at Calvin College, and local respondents John DeBoer, James  Olthuis, Angie Hocking, and Grace Wu will be held at  King's Christian Collegiate in Oakville, ON on Sept 26, 2009.

The following link  provides more information about the conference http://www.icscanada.edu/events/20090926wc/ 

There are also the following  incentives for registration: Toronto Early Bird -Register and pay for the Toronto Conference before
September 16 and you will automatically qualify to enter a draw to win one of 3 prizes for auditing an ICS 2010 summer course.   The prizes are transferable.

Bring a group of 7-10 people and receive one complimentary registration and a free disc of the keynote.

2.  Some reading recommendations from Peter Schuurman, who has not forgotten us:

1. Jamie Smith’s new book is finally available:  Desiring the Kingdom:  Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation.  Baker Academic Press, 2009.  It is the first in a trilogy of “cultural liturgies”, and an important one for campus ministers because the focus is on the meaning of education.  The basic thesis is that while worldview is important for education, to focus on the cognitive dimension alone is to miss what is more basic to education: the practises, the rituals of the school.  This includes much of what Jamie has shared with us through the years (and he even acknowledges the CRCMA on page 14).

2.  One of the more refreshing reads of the summer for me was David Bentley Hart’s  Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies. (Yale, 2009).  Hart rips apart the now cliché argument that historically speaking Christianity is the Dark Ages in-between the civilized worlds of the pagan classics and modern Enlightenment.  He scolds the “new atheists” for their poor scholarship and fallacious arguments.  Its a passionate correction to the general (cynical) consensus on institutional religion.  His tone carries a depth of urgency (at times even ridicule) because he believes you cannot take Christ (and the church) out of culture-making and have much other than banality (consumerism) or monstrosity (militarism).

Terry Eagleton, a prominent Marxist literary theorist, has also written a chastisement of the new atheists.  Read more on Jamie Smith’s blog (Aug. 31) at http://forsclavigera.blogspot.com/.

3.  The Christian Courier had an article from The Christian Post that was noteworthy on how Humanities students, more so than science students, are likely to see their faith erode while in university.  Check it out at: http://www.christianpost.com/article/20090803/study-humanities-major/index.html

4.  Former campus minister to Dalhousie, Steve Martin, had a good “summary of the literature” article in the Banner recently, entitled “Augustine’s Great Comeback”. See http://www.thebanner.org/magazine/article.cfm?article_id=2203.    Likewise did Otto Selles, our last Calvin Lecturer on the subject of tolerance.  http://www.thebanner.org/magazine/article.cfm?article_id=2269.

5.  I just finished reading The Brothers K by David James Duncan.  If you want a good story with lots of religious references mixed up with some baseball lore, this will hold your interest for 650 pages.  Recommended by Paul Verhoef.  Great characters, great dialogue, and a romp of a plot.

Blessings,

Angela