Exposed!

Campus Crusade for Christ, RealLife Boston, Agape Christian Fellowship. Call it what you will, the game is up. The Boston Globe Magazine published a long expose on these groups (which, if you aren't aware, function rather like Russian nesting dolls. Agape looks like RealLife just smaller; likewise RealLife is a mini-Crusade, and is within Crusade). Neil Swidely investigates...

After lagging far behind the rest of the nation, where a June Gallup Poll found that 41 percent of Americans identified themselves as "evangelical" or "born-again," New England is beginning to close the gap, with congregations sprouting in rented schools and office parks. Nowhere is that more true than at Boston's elite, soaked-in-secularism colleges... Danielle DiTullio from Stoneham is in her third year at Northeastern University. She has an electric smile and wears a stud in her nose and her dirty-blond hair pulled back. She grew up in Stoneham, marinated in Catholic culture -- church every Sunday, parochial school all the way through. "But," she says, "it never really connected with me." As a freshman at Northeastern, she met a group of women in her dormitory who invited her to Bible study. "I held off for a while, not knowing if it was cultish," DiTullio says. "All I knew about evangelicals was that they were people who hand out pamphlets and yell at you." Yet DiTullio found herself attracted to their passion and eventually realized they were not a cult. They were also patient. "They prayed for me to come to Jesus," she says. "They prayed for a whole year." Their prayers worked. She went to a meeting at the end of her freshman year, then a worship service, and later a citywide Campus Crusade meeting. "I could literally feel my heart grow," she says. Her involvement deepened last year, though her parents remain concerned. "We're still trying to get through it," DiTullio says... Somewhere along the way, evangelical Christianity -- which a generation earlier had been a mark of embarrassment, a sign that you had checked your brain at the gate -- became not just tolerated but cool.

You hear that? We're cool. More importantly, we're growing. Most importantly, God has more cool up his sleeve than Neil Swidely has ever seen. Where I come from, we call it "revival", but it's the Globe, so "cool" will do.

This article was an answer to prayer. When my friends were interviewed (Danielle made it into the article, but he interviewed a lot of folks), Bethany came to me and excitedly reminded me that in September, at our daily 7am prayer meeting, I'd prayed that a revival would reach the college campuses so much that the Boston Globe would have to write about it. So yeah, that great God? He answers prayer! Speaking of which, Dubya pointed out that the article ends with prayer requests, like any Christian newsletter would:

Yet for every Steve Douglass, there are many more students whose intense involvement slackens after commencement. That's when all the attributes that made the evangelical groups so appealing to students -- their premium on tight-knit social circles, their student-run, non-hierarchical approach, their funky, late-night culture -- can begin to work against them in meeting the needs of the post-college crowd. To keep them in the fold, the groups try to serve as feeders for evangelical churches in the area. It's hardly a seamless transition, though, and these bustling churches have their own continuity problems. Park Street Church sees its congregation turn over by half every three years. In the end, the evangelical groups have resigned themselves to a certain level of fall-off among graduates. That's acceptable, because next fall, on just about every campus, there will be a new batch of bright-eyed, bewildered freshmen snaking through a student activities fair. And for now at least, no matter what kind of candy bars are being handed out, they know they'll find plenty of hungry souls.

We certainly haven't resigned ourselves to that. Of course, in the sense that people will be less active after college, that's assumed. I suppose it's asking too much of the Globe to understand spiritual health, and how it has a lot more to do with the time you spend on your knees than the time you spend at the mic. Nonetheless, the prayer request stands: graduating students who had fellowship in college and move into the "real world" without strong ties to fellowship and lack a sense of priorities risk losing much of their focus and passion. Pray for those of us who are graduating to stay strong in our faith, and to get involved wherever our lives takes us next! There's a big world out there, and its fate is more important than getting a job or even a spouse!