If imitation is the greatest form of flattery, then Cru is getting epic accolades. This handy blog post amplifies a trend picked up by no less than the New York Times: major brand retailers are doing campus evangelism . The video at the bottom of the link is stunning: Freshman evangelism is being done by companies on a campus near you; right down to the personal testimonies, the freshman dorm move-in and the freshman parties.
How can this be? Two years ago at Staff Conference, Tim Keller rightly proclaimed that “evangelism is an outrage” and “one of the few secular sins.” If this is true, why would major companies like Target and American Eagle risk censure for committing this outrageous secular transgression?
Two reasons:
#1 Evangelism is effective. The best way to convince someone of anything is through personal relationship. Personal relationships provide the trust and context necessary to move others from ignorance to knowledge to action.
#2 Evangelism is not a secular sin; evangelism about Jesus is secular sin. Almost weekly, right outside of our office, I am buttonholed by someone asking me to believe in Greenpeace, help the homeless, try a yogurt or some other attempt at “conversion”. This kind of evangelism is so common in a “secular” city like Boston ( notice how often Boston shows up in this detailed post ) that it is hard to believe that evangelism is secular sin. The sin is in proclaiming that Jesus is “ the way, the truth and the life and no one comes to ” God except through Jesus. This kind of metaphysical certainty is a secular sin of pride and ignorance.
Yet for those of us who have given our lives to Jesus as our living King and savior, how can we shrink from sharing him, when others will go to the trouble of sharing jeans or yogurt in exchange for a paycheck or networking opportunities? If grace, mercy, peace and the fullness of human flourishing is what Jesus is about (and it is), then the acme of social entrepreneurism is to share the evangel, the good news of Jesus’ perfect life, atoning death and bodily resurrection; and to work toward answering this prayer: “ may your kingdom come, may your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven ”.
Now that more people see the importance of doing “evangelism” with and through college students, perhaps it will be easier to explain why Cru has done it for sixty years. Moreover, perhaps it will be a motivation to continue with greater zeal and effectiveness, now that Christians aren’t the only students doing evangelism on campus.
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