InterVarsityAlumni's Xanga

Jason Ray

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:49:02 GMT

Please pray for the friends and family of Jason Ray, the University of North Carolina senior and Tarheels beloved mascot for three years. Jason who was struck by a car before UNC's sweet 16 game last week, and he passed away Monday night. Jason was an active member of InterVarsity and led Bible studies for off-campus upperclassmen.

Daily Tarheel Story about Jason's Death

The Religious Community's Response to the Challenge of Poverty: What Works?

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:15:48 GMT

This isn't an InterVarsity event, but I think it'll interest many of you.

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Beck Institute / Fordham University Conference on Religion and Poverty

Date: April 16, 2007 from 9:00 am to 4:30 pm EDT
Location: McNally Auditorium Fordham University School of Law

INTERFAITH CONFERENCE:
THE BECK INSTITUTE ON RELIGION AND POVERTY of the GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SERVICE FORDHAM UNIVERSITY will be convening an all day interfaith conference on CELEBRATING FAITH IN ACTION:

The Religious Community's Response to the Challenge of Poverty: "What Works"

Monday, April 16, 2007
9:00-4:30
McNally Auditorium
Fordham University School of Law
New York City

Morning Speakers

Rev. Dr. Bryan Hehir, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Dr. John Kretzmann, Asset-Based Community Development Institute, Northwestern University
Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes Jr., Senior Pastor, The Riverside Church

Afternoon Workshops

Advocacy - Cathedral Community Cares, St. John the Divine and St. Bartholomew�s Church
Congregational Organizing - B'nai Jeshurun and Jewish Funds for Justice
Creating Service Programs - The Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies
Education as a Human Right - National Center for Schools and Communities
Homeless Shelters and Addictions - The Bowery Mission
Housing - Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement
Inter-Religious Dialogue - TBA
Immigration - Tzu Chi Buddhist Foundation and The Latino Pastoral Action Center
Life Skills/Mentoring Programs - Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing and New York Catholic Charities
Living Wage - Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition
Post-incarceration - Exodus Transitional Program
Poverty and the Law - Legal Services for New York City and LAWHELP,NY
Soup Kitchens -West Side Campaign Against Hunger, Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew
Food Pantries - St. John's Bread and Life
Open to the Public

All workshop information and registration procedures for the conference will be posted on our website www.fordham.edu/beckinstitute on February 14, 2007.

For questions: beckinst@fordham.edu
1255 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027 | (212) 851-2300 |

Katrina Relief and March Madness!!!

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 17:10:57 GMT

Help college students rebuild New Orleans during March Madness!

College students will produce the most exciting basketball this month.

They will also be changing the world. As you root for your favorite college basketball teams this month, over 230 Boston area college students are spending their spring breaks rebuilding homes in New Orleans.

Help them along by joining our March Madness fundraiser pool on Yahoo! Join this pool for a suggested minimum donation of $25. There is a gift for the winner of the pool in the form of a $200 amazon.com gift certificate.

To join the pool, email me with the amount you'd like to donate. You'll receive details of the private group to enter your Yahoo bracket into. Make sure you complete your predictions before the first game starts on Thursday, March 15th.

You can donate by going online to: http://intervarsity.org/donate/to/BostonKatrina, or by sending a check to:

InterVarsity Christian Fellowship
Attn: Boston Katrina Relief Project
P.O. Box 7895
Madison, WI 53711

Money raised will go to support the Katrina Relief Urban Plunge run by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA. Students will be rebuilding homes in New Orleans during the day and exploring the intersection of faith and service in the evening. InterVarsity's Boston chapters are raising $38,000 to underwrite this project. InterVarsity exists to see students transformed, faculty and campuses renewed, and world changers developed.

For more information about the project, contact Jimmy

To donate without participating in the pool:
http://intervarsity.org/donate/to/BostonKatrina

Religion's Generation Gap

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 20:34:47 GMT

Wow, we’re really overdue for a post. So here goes…

Hopefully many of you made it to Urbana in December. Over 2,000 IV alums came to St. Louis to join over 22,000 other attendees worship God. Check out the updates on www.urbana.org.

In other news, the Wall Street Journal recently published an article about the new generation of religious children with secular and/or nominally religious parents. What happens when the kids are more devout than mom and dad? Of special note, InterVarsity’s very own Tom Lin (Midwest Regional Director) and Greg Jao (New York / New Jersey Regional Director) discussed why it’s so hard for the children of immigrants. Click here to see a copy of the article: "Religion's Generation Gap", Katherine Rosman, March 2, 2007

Urbana 06 Early Bird Registration Deadline: Sun Oct 15th

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 03:54:42 GMT

Hey guys, don't forget that Early Bird Registration for Urbana 06 ends this Sunday, October 15th! After that, prices go up $75.

If you're registering for the Open for Business Conference, use the registration discount code P14441 to get $55 off. The code expires Octiber 15th.

If you're an InterVarsity Alum, use the registration discount code A11023 to get $50.

And if you refer a friend, you can get $20 off for each friend that registers! (note: maximum discount codes of $100 applicable to registration; $20 refer-a-friend discount is unlimited, so you can actually go to Urbana for free if you get enough friends to come!)

Also, don't forget to check out the Urbana track focusing on the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Come discuss how we as Christians can and should face this horrible problem.

www.one.org

What is Urbana?

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 19:06:47 GMT

Are you wondering what is the Urbana Missions Convention? It's the largest missions convention in North America, and here is a good introductory video to give you a taste. This year’s theme is "You Have a Calling". Come worship God with 25,000 other Christians and hear speakers like Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-driven Life and pastor at Saddleback Church and Ajith Fernando, the National Director of Youth for Christ in Sri Lanka, discuss how God is using people to accomplish his purposes throughout the world.

If you are wondering how you might use your education, skills, and resources to share the love of Christ with people around the world, we warmly invite you to come to Urbana 06!

Urbana--Not Just for Students!

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 23:42:11 GMT

Think the Urbana Missions Convention is just for students? Think again! Here's a coupon for a great conference at Urbana for business professionals to explore how to make a global impact through business. Feel free to pass this on to others who may be interested.

God is changing the world through business. Are you willing to invest?

Christians in the emerging business-as-mission (BAM) movement are finding incredible opportunities for business to be a force for economic, social, and spiritual vitality all around the world. You can invest yourself in this movement by attending the Open for Business Conference at the Urbana 06 Missions Convention (St. Louis, MO, December 27-31, 2006). Open for Business is a specialized track for up to 1,500 delegates who have a passion or growing interest in business and global missions. From microenterprise to venture capital, from business student to CEO, Open for Business will network and resource businesspeople of all stripes and career stages who want to participate in this expanding movement.

In addition, Open for Business is sponsoring a $40,000 Business Plan Competition. If you're interested, please send an email of intent to enter by October 20th. Visit the website for more information.

For further details and to register, visit www.urbana.org/go/ofb. Use the special registration discount code P14441 and save $55 (discount expires October 15th, which is also the Early Bird registration deadline). Alumni can get $50 off for any track with the alumni discount code A11023. Remember, you can refer-a-friend and save $20 for each friend who registers! Register now and spread the word!

Questions? Email: questions@ofb.intervarsity.org
www.urbana.org
www.urbana.org/go/ofb

Two Articles of Note, One Sermon Text

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 03:40:47 GMT

Two articles from last week that are worth reading:

There was a surprisingly good Time Magazine cover article titled Does God Want You To Be Rich? The journalists give fair coverage to both sides of the issue while highlighting a growing trend not just for the US, but churches all over the world. God wants to bless us in many ways, and material comfort is not exempt from that list (see: Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Job, and David). At the same time Jesus said that foxes have holes, and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Song of Man has nowhere to lay his head. How should we understand wealth in God's kingdom?

Note: Non-Time subscribers can get the article for free by clicking on the "Get It Free!" link under the article abstract. You have to watch an ad, but it's well worth the 30 seconds.

Second, there was a New York Times article titled Clergy Again Shoulders Burdens of Consoling and Explaining about how houses of worship and spiritual leaders were once again called upon to help people deal with the aftermaths of 9/11. I remember that the Sunday after 9/11 Redeemer added extra services and *still* had to turn people away. The attendance waned not long after that horrible day, but as last week's anniversary showed, the hurt and troubling memories are very much still present. Not unlike the cleared but empty hole that is Ground Zero, people's lives have been cleaned up, but a very large emotional void hasn't been filled, and nothing has been rebuilt in its place. How do we as followers of Christ help fill that need and extend the good news in a post-9/11 world?

You need to be a Times Select member to view this article, but you can read a portion of it at this link.

The text of Tim Keller's sermon on September 10, 2006 can be found at his son's blog, but I've included the text below:

SERVICE OF REMEMBRANCE AND PEACE
FOR 9-11 VICTIMS’ FAMILIES
Ground Zero/St Paul’s Chapel Tim Keller
Sep 10, 2006

As a minister, of course, I’ve spent countless hours with people who are struggling and wrestling with the biggest question - the WHY question in the face of relentless tragedies and injustices. And like all ministers or any spiritual guides of any sort, I scramble to try to say something to respond and I always come away feeling inadequate and that’s not going to be any different today. But we can’t shrink from the task of responding to that question. Because the very best way to honor the memories of the ones we’ve lost and love is to live confident, productive lives. And the only way to do that is to actually be able to face that question. We have to have the strength to face a world filled with constant devastation and loss. So where do we get that strength? How do we deal with that question? I would like to propose that, though we won’t get all of what we need, we may get some of what we need 3 ways: by recognizing the problem for what it is, and then by grasping both an empowering hint from the past and an empowering hope from the future.

First, we have to recognize that the problem of tragedy, injustice and suffering is a problem for everyone no matter what their beliefs are. Now, if you believe in God and for the first time experience or see horrendous evil, you rightly believe that that is a problem for your belief in God, and you’re right – and you say, “How could a good and powerful God allow something like this to happen?”

But it’s a mistake (though a very understandable mistake) to think that if you abandon your belief in God it somehow is going to make the problem easier to handle. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from Birmingham Jail says that if there was no higher divine Law, there would be no way to tell if a particular human law was unjust or not. So think. If there is no God or higher divine Law and the material universe is all there is, then violence is perfectly natural—the strong eating the weak! And yet somehow, we still feel this isn’t the way things ought to be. Why not? Now I’m not going to get philosophical at a time like this. I’m just trying to make the point that the problem of injustice and suffering is a problem for belief in God but it is also a problem for disbelief in God---for any set of beliefs. So abandoning belief in God does not really help in the face of it. OK, then what will?

Second, I believe we need to grasp an empowering hint from the past. Now at this point, I’d like to freely acknowledge that every faith - and we are an interfaith gathering today – every faith has great resources for dealing with suffering and injustice in the world. But as a Christian minister I know my own faith’s resources the best, so let me simply share with you what I’ve got. When people ask the big question, “Why would God allow this or that to happen?” There are almost always two answers. The one answer is: Don’t question God! He has reasons beyond your finite little mind. And therefore, just accept everything. Don’t question. The other answer is: I don’t know what God’s up to – I have no idea at all about why these things are happening. There’s no way to make any sense of it at all. Now I’d like to respectfully suggest the first of these answers is too hard and the second is too weak. The second is too weak because, though of course we don’t have the full answer, we do have an idea, an incredibly powerful idea.

One of the great themes of the Hebrew Scriptures is that God identifies with the suffering. There are all these great texts that say things like this: If you oppress the poor, you oppress to me. I am a husband to the widow. I am father to the fatherless. I think the texts are saying God binds up his heart so closely with suffering people that he interprets any move against them as a move against him. This is powerful stuff! But Christianity says he goes even beyond that. Christians believe that in Jesus, God’s son, divinity became vulnerable to and involved in - suffering and death! He didn’t come as a general or emperor. He came as a carpenter. He was born in a manger, no room in the inn.

But it is on the Cross that we see the ultimate wonder. On the cross we sufferers finally see, to our shock that God now knows too what it is to lose a loved one in an unjust attack. And so you see what this means? John Stott puts it this way. John Stott wrote: “I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the Cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?” Do you see what this means? Yes, we don’t know the reason God allows evil and suffering to continue, but we know what the reason isn’t, what it can’t be. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us! It can’t be that he doesn’t care. God so loved us and hates suffering that he was willing to come down and get involved in it. And therefore the Cross is an incredibly empowering hint. Ok, it’s only a hint, but if you grasp it, it can transform you. It can give you strength.

And lastly, we have to grasp an empowering hope for the future. In both the Hebrew Scriptures and even more explicitly in the Christian Scriptures we have the promise of resurrection. In Daniel 12:2-3 we read: Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake….[They]… will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and…like the stars for ever and ever. And in John 11 we hear Jesus say: I am the resurrection and the life! Now this is what the claim is: That God is not preparing for us merely some ethereal, abstract spiritual existence that is just a kind of compensation for the life we lost. Resurrection means the restoration to us of the life we lost. New heavens and new earth means this body, this world! Our bodies, our homes, our loved ones—restored, returned, perfected and beautified! Given back to us!

In the year after 9-11 I was diagnosed with cancer, and I was treated successfully. But during that whole time I read about the future resurrection and that was my real medicine. In the last book of The Lord of the Rings, Sam Gamgee wakes up, thinking everything is lost and discovering instead that all his friends were around him, he cries out: "Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead! Is everything sad going to come untrue?"

The answer is YES. And the answer of the Bible is YES. If the resurrection is true, then the answer is yes. Everything sad is going TO COME UNTRUE.

Oh, I know many of you are saying, “I wish I could believe that.” And guess what? This idea is so potent that you can go forward with that. To even want the resurrection, to love the idea of the resurrection, long for the promise of the resurrection even though you are unsure of it, is strengthening. I John 3:2-3. Beloved, now we are children of God and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope purify themselves as he is pure.” Even to have a hope in this is purifying.

Listen to how Dostoevsky puts it in Brothers Karamazov: “I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, of the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; and it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify what has happened.”

That is strong and that last sentence is particularly strong…but if the resurrection is true, it’s absolutely right. Amen.

Day in the Sun, Sat. Sept 16th

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 05:19:14 GMT

Hey people, Saturday, September 16, 2006 in Battery Park City, come hang out with us in the sun. It’ll be at Rockefeller Park (click here for map) from 2-5pm, and click here for the evite. You can check out pictures from last year on our website.

p.s. *in case* it rains, the rain date is the following Saturday, September 23, 2006. Check back for updates.

And this has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but I just felt like posting it. It's called "Pandamania". Give it about 18 seconds to start.

Website Update

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 10:51:54 GMT

Hey everyone! We're glad to have met so many new people this summer, and we still have one more event to go! Check out the updates on our website at www.ivcfnyc.org/alumni, and click here to see pictures and find out more from our past events.