InterVarsity Christian Fellowship

And he and I have had a lot of conversations about faith and atheism.

And a very good friend of mine, very instrumental in my own life, Steve Hainer, who was president of InterVarsity for 13 years and then Columbia Theological Seminary.

And Steve was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2014.

He died at the end of January 2015.

So then fast forward to our sophomore year, and we had some mutual friends.

He was very involved in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, which is an on-campus Christian fellowship.

I was peripherally involved.

I was part of one of the Bible studies.

I just heard a statistic recently.

that InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, or possibly CRU, I think it was CRU, said that if you just cold walk up to people on campuses right now, like one out of 14, I think they said that they share the gospel if we'll receive Christ on the spot.

Wow.

Yeah.

And like she had the same mentality and it's how she like captured all of these very important people, which we'll get into later, who was on the board.

But like I worked for InterVarsity and their vision was every corner of every campus, like the gospel will be everywhere.

Yeah.

And I worked for One Hope.

So this is happening slowly, but more and more evangelicals are realizing the importance.

You're even having publishers like InterVarsity, things like Reading with the Fathers and Bringing Back the Fathers.

And lots and lots of Protestants have been converting to Catholic or Orthodox.

My own daughter became Catholic about a year ago.

So there's that deep root.

But I feel that they're getting over it, okay? More and more.

So InterVarsity is publishing all my books.

Do you know who published On the Shoulders of Hobbits? Moody Press, right? Moody Press used to be against any kind of fantasy, right? And now they're publishing a book I wrote on Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings.

But, uh, um, so I knew about Christ and the Bible from a very young age, uh, going to church and all that.

But in my life, my real spiritual growth happened when I went to college, um, and that is where I got connected with the Evangelical Union or what is known in the US as InterVarsity.

And that's where I understood, uh, a deeper level of having the personal relationship with Christ, uh, discipleship, and also the whole world of missions, no? It opened up to me because of, uh, um, my fellowship with, uh, InterVarsity in India.

So as God got ahold of your heart, both for your personal walk with Jesus and this call into mission, what did that look like in practice for you, and what steps were you called to take that you followed in?

I mean, uh, with regard to faith, we have to be disciples and serious about it, you know? Uh, and that means that giving up many things that we would like to do, but walking the narrow way.

But coming to the larger cause of missions and Bible translation, it was my involvement in InterVarsity that exposed that whole world of missions.

And then, uh, after I finished my undergrad, I went on a missions trip.

Uh, in fact, it was a training exposing us to different aspects of ministry we could consider, and that's where I first heard about Bible translation.

He spent time at Westminster Theological Seminary.

He worked for InterVarsity.

He led a different chapter of a different Christian ministry.

He became a psychotherapist, but also founded, as I said, this organization called Evangelicals Concerned, which is explicitly focused on targeting the evangelical establishment in colleges and seminaries and periodicals.

Like, I'm already teaching Bible study, like, I'm going to be the one.

I'm gonna go to the Intervarsity campus.

I'm gonna be great in, in FCA.

I'm gonna be a, a Campus Crusade.

...

I stood up during the InterVarsity Beach Evangelism Project-

I love InterVarsity

... and, uh, oh, yeah, the InterVarsity is a great group, and began to preach.

And I found out real fast people did not wanna hear what I had to say, but they wanted to show me what a fool I was for believing in Christ.

Right, right.

My voice is shot." It was the surf on one side and the highway on the other, and so it was a challenge to project.

Yeah.