CAMPUS AND AREA
University Daily Kansan, March 7, 1984
Page 8
Religious groups provide support for students
EDITOR'S NOTE: Religious groups on the KU campus seem to be more prevalent than a few years ago, although their exact membership is difficult to determine. Recently a Kansan staff writer spoke with members of several of the groups to discover what attracted students to these groups.
By DAN PARELMAN Staff Writer
It's Tuesday night at the Big Eight room in the Kansas Union - Campus Crusade for Christ meeting night.
"Right now we're going to start with a little bit of sharing," the master of ceremonies says.
"God worked a miracle in my life this week. And I mean a miracle."
MIRACLES AND SHARING — two of the attractions that appeal to the hundreds of KU students participating in conservative Christian organizations on campus. The number of students seeking to share the message of Jesus Christ with each other and with those outside the groups remains steady, after rising sharply during the early 1970s.
There are about 11 of the groups at KU today
Attendance at the various organizations' meetings range from 30 to about 150, but exact figures cannot be determined because the groups do not keep lists of people who attend meetings and
William Arnold, KU associate professor of sociology, said the reasons students joined the groups were different than they were in the early 1970s.
"They're interested in bringing salvation to the world, but they're not as interested in changing the world," he said.
changing the STUDENTS DISILLUSIONED with politics in the '60s began to turn to religion for answers to world problems, according to Arnold.
They began undergrowing mass conversions in the early 70s. The majority of these students graduated by 1974 and 1975, and membership in conservative religious groups began to level off.
Despite the graduation of the students of the vos tricolor said that a new group of students had begun.
The parents of many of these students had formed conservative churches in the '60s in response to liberal movements in their original churches.
Arnold said that social support, the assurance of salvation and the satisfaction of converting
SALVATION AND conversion are important to the members because they believe that moral apathy pervades the University of Kansas and the world.
others attracted today's members, rather than goals, such as stamping out drug abuse, which attracted students to the religious groups in the early 70s.
Mark Preut, president of Icthus, one of the groups, said sin at KU was “pretty evident in just a lot of sleeping around, a lot of drunkenness, a lot of callousness, a lot of apathy about God.”
Dave Meserve, president of Campus Crusade,
said. "We see the need to talk to the students
about the claims of Jesus Christ and Christianity."
Meserve said his group had conducted surveys on Christianity at University residence halls.
"If they make a decision for Christ we make more appointments and plug them into Bible
TIM MILLER, KU lecturer in religion, said that students who belonged to the groups were more likely to change their religious beliefs.
The conservative groups tell students, "You can end your search by joining us," Miller said. Chris Alexander said that before he joined Maranatha Christian Center he didn't like
He said that one Sunday in August of 1980, after he arrived in Lawrence from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, he sat down by the Campanile and wrote a letter to God.
himself. He said that he was selfish and arrogant, was not a friend or a good example to his younger brothers and committed sins, such as premarital sex.
THAT DAY HE overheard two students in the lunchtime at Templin Hall mention Maranatha. He went to the Maranatha meeting that week and heard the preaching of Bob Duvall, the co-founder and first minister of Maranatha at KU.
Dvall said, " 'You've been asking who, what, why and when,'" Alexander said. "That was exactly what I had written in my letter to the Lord."
Today, Alexander is a student minister of Maranatha.
Alexander said the concept of lordship was the Maranatta belief that impressed him the most. Russ Berland, president of Maranatta, said, "Lordship is having your whole life under the benevolent dictatorship of Jesus and being willing to change to conform to his image."
SOMETIMES, MARANATHA members'
commitment to Jesus Christ manifests itself in
ways that members of other groups don't practice.
"One thing that people view as being strange about Maranatha is that we don't date. Berland
He said members of Maranatha trusted Jesus to provide them with their spouses. During prayer, members are told who their future spouse will be. When the future spouse has a similar experience, the two know they are meant to spend their lives together.
He said couples who dated developed emotional ties that could scar the two if they decided to move.
Campus Crusade also stresses prayer and living under the guidance of Jesus Christ.
Meserve said that accepting Jesus as one's personal savior was the only provision for being saved, and he believed it.
AND TO ACCEPT JESUS, one must have a personal relationship with him and undergo an
Those who go to a Christian church yet have not been born again are not Christians, Meserve said.
And Jews, Muslims and others who do not accept Christ will go to hell, he said.
The Center for East Asian Studies presents TIBET: THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
Two lecture/slide presentations by Molly McGinn Gary Wintz
"Tibetan Culture Today and the Chinese Presence"
Wednesday, March 7, 7:30 p.m.
Jayhawk Room
"Tibetan Buddhism in the 1980's: A Religion Reincarnated"
"Thursday, March 8, 7:30 p.m. Jayhawk Room
Molly McGinn and Gary Wintz spent 1981-82 teaching at a Chinese university. They managed to reside in Lhasa, and to travel extensively throughout Tibet, for several months in 1982-83. Their presentation promises to be a unique and exciting one.
Admission free of charge
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BULLWINKLE'S
ONLY AT
NATIONAL SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE DAY,1984 BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A PROCLAMATION
The values and freedoms we cherish as Americans rest on our fundamental commitment to the sanctity of human life. The first of the "unalienable rights" affirmed by our Declaration of Independence is the right to life itself, a right the Declaration states has been endowed by our Creator on all human beings--whether young or old, weak or strong, healthy or handicapped.
Since 1973, however, more than 15 million unborn children have died in legalized abortions—a tragedy of stunning dimensions that stands in sad contrast to our belief that each life is sacred. These children, over tenfold the number of Americans lost in all our Nation's wars, will never laugh, never sing, never experience the joy of human love; nor will they strive to heal the sick, or feed the poor, or make peace among nations. Abortion has denied them the first and most basic of human rights, and we are infinitely poorer for their loss.
We are poorer not simply for lives not led and for contributions not made, but also for the erosion of our sense of the worth and dignity of every individual. To diminish the value of one category of human life is to diminish us all. Slavery, which treated Blacks as something less than human, to be bought and sold if convenient, cheapened human life and mocked our dedication to the freedom and equality of all men and women. Can we say that abortion—which treats the unborn as something less than human, to be destroyed if convenient—will be less corrosive to the values we hold dear?
We have been given the precious gift of human life, made more precious still by our births in or pilgrimages to a land of freedom. It is fitting, then, on the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that struck down State anti-abortion laws, that we reflect anew on these blessings, and on our corresponding responsibility to guard with care the lives and freedoms of even the weakest of our fellow human beings.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, RONALD REAGAN. President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim Sunday, January 22, 1984, as National Sanctity of Human Life Day. I call upon the citizens of this blessed land to gather on that day in homes and places of worship to give thanks for the gift of life, and to reaffirm our commitment to the dignity of every human being and the sanctity of each human life.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this 13th day of January, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and eighth.
Ronald Reagan
Students for Human Justice publishes this statement, which preceded from President Ronald Reagan on January 13, 1984, to further bring to light this holocaust of abortion. We emphatically join the President in insisting that this unthinkable abuse of human rights cease.
PAID FOR BY STUDENTS FOR HUMAN JUSTICE—MARK ERLAND, TREASURER