Evangelism: God & Man on 800 Campuses

Is faith in an inerrant Bible compatible with the insights of science and psychology? At least 18,000 U.S. college students believe that the answer is unquestionably yes. To prove it, they combine classroom study with missions to fellow students in the fast-growing Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship.

Founded by a group of Cambridge University undergraduates in 1877, the fellowship organized an American branch in 1940. There are now chapters on 800 U.S. campuses, most of them secular rather than church-related, and within the last four years membership has doubled. Between Christmas and New Year’s Day more than 7,000 students gave up part of their vacation to gather on the Champaign-Urbana campus of the University of Illinois for the largest meeting in the fellowship’s history, whose threefold theme summed up the students’ conservative Christian zeal: “Change Unparalleled, Witness Unashamed, Triumph Unquestioned.”

Coaches lor Christ. For five prayer-filled days, the students gathered together to sing hymns and read Scripture, listen to lectures by faculty professors and missionaries on such topics as the dynamics of evangelism and the responsibilities of Christian ministry. Among the guest speakers were Billy Graham and Dr. Clyde Taylor, general director of the 2,000,000-member National Association of Evangelicals.

Inter-Varsity aims to keep alive the youthful faith of young Christians on secular campuses, introduce the nominal believer to the “living personality” of Jesus, and persuade at least a few chapter members to join foreign missions. The fellowship has a full-time adult staff of 105, including 70 traveling “coaches” who help out the individual chapters. Members usually meet once a week for prayer and Bible study, spend many of their off-duty hours trying to convert fellow students. At the University of Illinois, for example, the Inter-Varsity chapter sends a welcoming letter to freshmen, sponsors lectures by conservative theologians.

What Did He Say? Fellowship members range from Pentecostals to Greek Orthodox, although all must affirm their belief in the authority of the Bible, the divinity of Christ, and the historical fact of Resurrection. What the fellowship seeks to do, explains its new U.S. general director, University of Wisconsin Geographer John Alexander, is to answer five basic questions: “What did Jesus say? Why did he say it? What did he do? Why did he do it? And, finally, what is the significance of the answers to these questions to me as an individual?” In pursuit of the answers, Inter-Varsity members read Salinger and Camus along with the Bible.

Inter-Varsity evangelists are, of course, suspect to many of their quizzical college contemporaries, and John Worden, head of the University of Wisconsin chapter, admits: “In numerical terms, we don’t make very many converts.” One reason, suggest Protestants critical of the movement, may be that Inter-Varsity is too narrowly and introspectively concerned with personal behavior. In answer, Inter-Varsity leaders argue that the fellowship’s Bible-centered brand of discipline uniquely equips young Christians to witness for Christ in their post-college jobs. “We train a man to be a football player,” says Alexander, “and then let him decide which football team he wants to play on.”