In a collision between religious freedom and anti discrimination policies Christian groups are being removed from campus. Any group holding to the policy that one must be a Christian to be in leadership is being systematically removed this Fall.
We who work on the campus have known this was coming for a while, but this recent NY Times article brings it to the forefront for many of you.
At Cal State, the nation’s largest university system with nearly 450,000 students on 23 campuses, the chancellor is preparing this summer to withdraw official recognition from evangelical groups that are refusing to pledge not to discriminate on the basis of religion in the selection of their leaders. And at Vanderbilt, more than a dozen groups, most of them evangelical but one of them Catholic, have already lost their official standing over the same issue; one Christian group balked after a university official asked the students to cut the words “personal commitment to Jesus Christ” from their list of qualifications for leadership.
You can read the whole article here
Alec Hill, the President of InterVarsity, weighs in also,
“It’s absurd,” said Alec Hill, the president of InterVarsity, a national association of evangelical student groups, including the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship. “The genius of American culture is that we allow voluntary, self-identified organizations to form, and that’s what our student groups are.”
For those of you who were not aware of this situation, please keep us that work on the college campus in prayer. God will not be stopped by this ruling. Many will still come to know Jesus and we need creativity with how to engage on campus without having campus standing. Campus standing gives us rooms, money, and access to many helpful things.
Here is InterVarsity’s Statement:
Today, the New York Times published a front-page article about InterVarsity.
We love college students. We love the university. Our students are people of integrity and excellence who go on to lead in every sector of our society.
Everyone is welcome in our chapters. But we require our student leaders to be Christians, in line with historic belief and practice.
Some college administrators have decided they don’t want InterVarsity on campus, due to this requirement.
We continue to love these administrators. We continue to love college students. We continue to work for the good of the campuses we serve.
Please SHARE this if you agree that religious freedom is important for everyone (even religious people).
#principledpluralism #pluralism #religiousfreedom
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/us/colleges-and-evangelicals-collide-on-bias-policy.html
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