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Day by Day

Full lyrics and lead sheet Link for non-US folks to listen to the song I often tend toward a compartmentalized or over-intellectualized faith. But every so often something hits me on a deeper level and suddenly I feel and understand God’s love, my own and our own human brokenness, and the beautiful reality of redemptionContinue

A Christian Response to Christian Privilege

In an interdisciplinary class I recently submitted a paper: “A Christian Response to Christian Privilege.” I’ve decided to post some of my key points in a blog post as a resource for Christian students and university parachurch leaders. ============= Intersectionalism — which includes feminism, critical race theory, post-colonialism, and queer theory — is increasingly mainstreamContinue

Do’s and Don’ts for Partnership Between Local Churches and College Parachurch Groups (Move Parachurch – Get Out the Way! Part 4 of 4)

Some of the most beautiful, rewarding partnership I’ve experienced in ministry was through local churches that genuinely rejoiced in how God was at work in the parachurch group I advised and sought to bless, complement, and strengthen what God was already doing. I hope these churches were equally blessed by that partnership; I desire manyContinue

Gifts of College Parachurch Ministries to the Church (Move, Parachurch – Get Out the Way! Part 3 of 4)

This is the very belated part three of my series on local church relations with parachurch college ministries. Part one covered the common myth that “parachurch college ministries should move out of the way now that local churches can do their job.” Part two assessed the commonly held and partly true belief that “too manyContinue

Move, Parachurch – Get Out the Way! (Part 2 of 4)

“Too many students replace the church with their parachurch college fellowship” I’ll address this commonly repeated idea somewhat differently from my previous post. “The church wasn’t doing its job but now it can so the parachurch should move out of the way” reflects legalistic anti-Gospel thinking, conflated aspects of “church,” historical fallacies, and a distortedContinue

Move, Parachurch – Get Out the Way! (Part 1 of 4)

“The parachurch only exists because the church wasn’t doing its job. Now that it can, parachurch ministries should move out of the way of church-based ministry.” I’ve heard such statements quite a few times in my 9 years of full-time college parachurch ministry. I personally wrestled with them when I first began and several yearsContinue

Six Stages of My Reaction to Moody Professor Bryan Litfin’s Letter

Following an apology for comments he made on social media about a campus diversity event, Moody professor Bryan Litfin wrote a Letter to the Editor of the student-run Moody Standard asking that in Christian dialogue we rescind use of the term “white privilege.” The president of Moody had already distanced himself from such views andContinue

A Day in the Life

“Hey, I can be Asian American, right?” an undergraduate who is white exclaims to me during a regional Christian conference I am staffing of about 800 students from throughout Wisconsin. “Ni Hao! Ahn Young Ha Saeyo! [followed by more Korean phrases]. How does my Korean sound? So am I Asian American now?” I politely ask him toContinue

Vote!

This is a bit late and irrelevant at this point, but several students in AAIV came to me feeling ill-equipped on how to vote so I decided to write a simple, no-nonsense and (mostly) non-partisan guide on how I hope typical InterVarsity students or alumni would go about voting. It’s too late for this electionContinue