Declare His Glory on Campus (1976)

Message from Urbana 76
by Lemuel Tucker

"You are not his witnesses because of the number of souls that you may have saved or won to the Lord, or because you have been a Christian for ten years or for two days. You are his witness because you belong to God. You and I have God's last name; we are in Christ."

As I began to think about "declaring God's glory on the college campus," I was a little confused. I had always thought of missionary work as something that happens "over there." It has been hard for me to think that the "over there" of missionary work could happen in the "over here" of the student center and the locker room.

But the gospel is to be spread, our Lord tells us, beginning from Jerusalem and then to Judea, and then Samaria, and then to the uttermost part of the world. And it seems that there - the uttermost part, the outer corners of the world - is where the gospel should be preached. That's a much better place than, say, the student center or the locker room. But, as Christ tells us, the task of declaring his glory must begin in our own Jerusalem. You will receive the training for your missionary trip to France as you take your first missionary trip to the fraternity house.

As I thought about declaring God's glory on the campus, I thought of it in three ways: the task, the scope and the agenda.

The Task of Declaring God's Glory

First of all, what is the task of declaring God's glory? We must begin by understanding the biblical "why" of Christian witness. We ought to be a model of the heavenly community, a paradigm of paradise. We witness because of what God has brought about, because of what he has accomplished for us in Jesus Christ, because this Word came and dwelt among us. We witness because Jesus, who is the perfection of the eternal community, took on human flesh and became himself our solution by paying the price for our pollution.

John the Baptist proclaimed the wrath to come because he knew both the sinfulness of man and the holiness of God. He knew that if the heavenly Messiah were to come, it could only mean one thing for the earth-a total baptism in fire. And the Messiah did come. Yet not to judge by law, but to save by grace. This is what John 3:16 is really all about. God's giving love for the unlovably lost.

This is the "grace and truth" in Jesus the Messiah that Christians possess. It is ours. We really possess that grace. We know that Christ has ransomed us from the judgment which we have so rightly earned. It is this grace that has given us our place as new creatures in the new creation. We have been called out of the old order, this perverse and passing world, and now have been commanded to live according to our call-as sons of the new creation, as sons of the living God.

We must learn to think of our lives in terms of our status before God and not our performance for God. When Christ says, "You will be my disciples," he doesn't mean you will become my disciples if you do this or that. He means that, because he has made us a part of his family, we have already become his disciples. We are his witnesses. That is what makes us witnesses. We belong to him.

Just think of your own family situation. You are a representative of your earthly family whether you feel like it or not, or even whether you are good at it or not. You can't use the excuse that you don't know enough, and you can't use the excuse that you haven't been in it long enough. You have your family name.

In the same way we are witnesses, no matter how faithfully or unfaithfully, because we are disciples. You are not his witnesses because of the number of souls that you may have saved or won to the Lord, or because you have been a Christian for ten years or for two days. You are his witness because you belong to God. You and I have God's last name; we are in Christ. So the task of declaring God's glory is first of all the recognition of who we are in God's glory.

I think you can see how defining our task primarily as being rather than doing changes the way we think about success in our ministry. When we speak of successful campus witness, we must think first of success in God's eyes. Success is not how much you are able to score big in different projects of campus witness. Too often we judge success by the world's standard. We have too much of an eye toward the quantity and not the quality: Success is not evaluating how well we did in our campus witness in terms of how many people came to a program.

Another way we judge success by the world's standards is with regard to suffering. We live in a society which praises success and looks at suffering as a sign of defeat. We Christians, unfortunately, think too much like this as well. Computerized and programmed models for successful ministry rarely, if ever, include failure and suffering.

As our brother Samuel Kamaleson told us last night, God may desire to use your suffering for great witness to his glory and to his sovereignty. And as Paul Little has said, there are times when there is a real struggle in committing ourselves to the will of God; dying to ourselves is never pleasant. It is excruciatingly painful. But there is a paradox: In that pain comes the deepest satisfaction this side of heaven.

The Scope of the Task

If the task of our campus ministry is to be his disciples, what then is the scope of that task? To whom do we declare our witness? What kind of people are there? What kind of place is the American or Canadian campus today? It's a place of the newfound gurus, Hare Krishna, Baha'i, Sun Moon, the palm readers, the TM Maharishis. It's a place of great psychic search, what TIME magazine has called the new narcissism. People are turning inward.

No longer is there student power, like that of the 60s; the search is now for inside power. A men's clothing commercial with an in-vogue male voice shows how self-centered this shift can be. It goes like this: "You know, five years ago my biggest problem was how to save the world - peace, love, the whole bit. Today, my biggest problem is how to do the hustle and the bump without splitting my pants."

Or as another student has more seriously put it, "We do not care ... about the movement of history any more. We want to experience inside power." The search for inside power has led many students on the campus to suicide-the number-one killer of college students.

Despite the unprecedented wealth and education of our student generation, students are perplexed, disconcerted and looking for a way out. Or should I say looking for a way in?

Most students introduce themselves today by their first name. I think they are saying, "Know me as me; no more impersonal structures, please." They are asking for the personal touch. They want to be known as persons.

When we look at the classroom and its curriculum, we are told that it is completely neutral, completely objective and completely scientific. Yet when we look behind these liberal arts labels, we see the presuppositions of Freud, Hegel and Darwin. The consequence of this devalued and compartmentalized system is that students have to do the integrating of all the brute facts themselves. So students then become the center of their whole education. They become the arbiter of the facts, the captain of their academic souls.

False views, the use of lies arrived at by such a self-integration process, invariably become self-centered. In fact, all self-made ideologies can be nothing more than idolatries. As one student said, "I just take courses ... nothing seems to fit." The modern university is the world's greatest fact machine. It can give you the beads but nothing to string them on. It can tell you how to build a hospital or bomb but not which of the two is more important. It can teach you how to psychoanalyze people and their problems but not whether being homosexual is wrong. It can tell you how to legislate to save the eagle, but not whether saving an unborn baby from abortion is a still higher moral premium.

So Jesus, in Matthew 28, commands us to be his witnesses among the nations. Now when he used the word nations he was not referring exclusively to a geopolitical entity the way we might define a nation in the twentieth century. Instead, it seems more precise to say that the word ethnos, from which comes our English word ethnic, means all the distinct groups of non-Christians, all the homogenous social units of unbelief. These are the nations. And therefore the college community, the college campus, the island community that it is, is very much to be viewed as a nation. That means, as well, all the nations within the campus community, all the distinct groups of non-Christians, all the sororities, all the fraternities, all the athletic teams, the blacks, the social cliques, the whites, the international students, the down-and-outs, the up-and-ins – all the nations. That's the commandment. And so this is the scope of our mission on the campus. This is the nation to which we go.

There is, I would propose, little use in thinking about the call of God to Asia or Latin America if we are not thinking about the call of God to the College of William and Mary or the University of Iowa. As someone has put it, bloom where you are planted. Bloom where you are planted. For we will not be ready to witness everywhere until we are ready to witness somewhere.

Agenda for Declaring God's Glory

Having examined our task of declaring God's glory on the campus and having looked at the scope of that task, let us begin to formulate finally our agenda for declaring God's glory. Our agenda may be thought of in two parts: What is our commitment to worship, and, flowing from this, what is our commitment to witness?

The worship agenda includes corporate worship in the church, fellowship and individual worship. We must be committed to the enterprise of spiritual holiness. Holiness is the characteristic the Bible ascribes to the people of God. As Peter says, "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light" (1 Pet. 2:9). The unity we have with Christ is to be expressed in the community we have with other Christians.

It is here, my brothers and sisters, that I find the church characterized by less than total holiness. Peter says we are to be the people of a holy nation. And yet as I see the church today, it seems to be divided into at least the two peoples of the black and white nations. As I see how Christ prayed for the unity of the church, I often weep that the unity we have to offer the world is reflected in the telling question, why is Sunday morning at 11:00 a.m. the most segregated hour in America? I love the church, and yet it is within the church that I have encountered so much racism. We cannot believe that unity without community is the expression of a biblical Christianity.

How does this fit into our agenda for campus ministry? It fits because it is on the college campus that blacks and whites will mix. We will have to deal with this question of spiritual commitment to holiness. For good insights into the whole problem of racism in America, I recommend The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But as you deal with this problem, remember that the values and prerogatives of spiritual holiness must come first.

Commitment to spiritual holiness also means we all should be involved in the local body of the church. I would encourage you all in addition to the normal life of the church, to avail yourself of relationships with older members of the body. I reflect on the several such relationships that I had in college with the local pastor, families in the congregation and Christian faculty. It was a very sustaining and profitable time in my life, so please don't cut yourself off from the church.

Being committed to other Christians on the college campus is also part of our personal commitment. Simon and Garfunkel were wrong when they sang, "I am a rock, I am an island." God has called you to a community, and as such you can function effectively only through the body. In principle, you should always be experiencing this body life in your home congregation. It is from such a base that you should be applying similar principles in your Inter-Varsity groups.

One last area for our agenda of worship is the development of our personal habits of worship, meditation and memorization. We must begin to develop an effective prayer life of confessing, thanking, petitioning and praising. This is what we need for our personal worship. But building an effective prayer life is not an overnight thing. For some juicy insights on prayer, read Walter Trobisch's pamphlet Martin Luther's Quiet Time.

It may be helpful for you to keep a prayer list with a pen in hand when you pray. Be honest with your prayers, for what will severely hinder worship through prayer is not what you don't know about prayer but that you won't be honest about what you do know. And don't get caught up in half-truths by telling everyone you are praying for them. Learn to be obedient within the daily routine of prayer.

The agenda for worship becomes the agenda for witness when our walk with the Lord is directed toward other people. Just as the essence of worship is being with the Lord, so the essence of witness is being with men. Jesus is our model for this, for he is the incarnate One and he was God's personal touch to us. As others see him in you personally, it will mean much more than all the perfectly planned and engineered programs you can put together.

But this may call for a lot of sacrifice. The personal touch is not a matter of investing time, money and energy into programs in order to fatten people up for the slaughter which you then accomplish by browbeating them into the kingdom. It is not a slaughter engineered by man that we are after, but rather the harvest planned by a personal God. People do not respond to know-it-alls, but rather to those who come as did their Savior, clothed in humility and with love for the lost.

Personal attention will always be creative. We must be creative in our witness within the bounds of God's Word. Don't let your creativity get trapped and ensnared in the ordinary. Francis Schaeffer says it is the Christian whose imagination should go beyond the stars. This is true for us who are on the college campus declaring God's glory.

Let me give you some quick examples. Say at freshman orientation you put up a sign to the weary, weak and heavy laden: Free Lemonade. But then in addition pass out announcements about when you have your meetings or your small group Bible studies. Also, a book-table several times a year in strategic places will serve as channels of the personal touch. Ask the campus librarian as well as the student center director about having several HIS subscriptions delivered throughout the year.

Another key area of personal contact is the dormitory. Here you have a chance to spend a lot of time -even if you do go to all your classes. For example, one thing you might try is to go around at the beginning of the year and get to know everybody in your section. Get their names and tell them where you're living so they can stop by. Take the initiative. You will need to do that. Or start an evangelistic Bible study. I once put up a sign that was like a math equation: "The Bible / Life = (a) 0 (the null set), (b) infinity, (c) none of the above, (d) interested in a rap over coffee & donut?" Then I added the time and my room number.

The classroom is also a key area for witness. Here particularly we need the armor of God. For each of your courses ask, What has God said about this subject? This insight might cause you to redefine your usual approach to the standard curriculum labels. For plenty of information about this, read the HIS Guide to Life on Campus (IVP).

Conclusion

Let me reiterate the task, the scope and the agenda for declaring God's glory. The task is to be his disciples, the scope includes all nations and the agenda calls for worship and for creative and biblical witness. This is to be our task, whether for another three and one-half years on campus, or just for another semester.

Declaring God's glory is not a matter of just being in college. It's not a matter of a curriculum for college. God is preparing us for life; for us the campus is our training ground, our field of labor, our turf for testimony. It is there we have been planted and there we must bloom. It is there we must make known the name of our Lord. But first we must make sure that his declaration meets with holy accord in our own lives.

If we do not know the greatness of our king, how can we share this greatness with others? How can we tell of his glory? Be cause we have seen his greatness and his mercy extended down from the cross, because we have been stirred to a radical discipleship by this vision, we are filled with praise and the determination to do his will. When we learn to be amazed at the work of God's grace in our lives, when we are set to wonder by this love, then we will be able to declare God's glory on campus.

(As of 1976) Lemuel S. Tucker is a student at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of William and Mary College (1974), where he was president of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship chapter and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

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Declare His Glory on Campus (1976)

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December 27-31, 2009