It's Every Student's Choice

Imagine yourself as a freshman on your way to your first class of the year. This is your entrance into adulthood and independence; you're intensely aware of your surroundings, eager to experience and absorb.

As you leave your dormitory you notice a bowl on a small table by the door; it's filled with condoms for the taking. This causes you to reflect on your days at freshman orientation when you were given a "safe-sex kit." You remember the seminars about sensitivity and how you were told that if you failed to invite a gay person to your party, it would constitute "hate language" and could result in discipline. You recall, too, how you were instructed to be sensitive to the preferences of your assigned dorm roommate, since any request to be removed from a homosexual roommate would be tantamount to sexual harassment.

As you walk down the sidewalk of the mall, you notice colorful posters stuck to walls and poles advertising the gay pride picnic to be held on the campus lawn the coming Saturday. As you turn into the student union for a look around, a student at the door hands you a flyer promoting a lecture entitled "Redefining Parents and the Family" by a prominent feminist professor.

As you pass by the Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Student Affairs office, you pick up a student newspaper and read a headline story about an effort to grant health care to partners of homosexual faculty members. A full page ad on the back of the paper displays a smiling, good-looking young man with the headline, "Your Gay and Lesbian Friends Welcome You Back to School."

Once you find your building and locate your first class, you stall going in by reading items on a bulletin board in the hallway. Tacked onto the board is an Autumn Calendar of Events from the Office of Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Student Services. A glance at the calendar tells you that there is an event scheduled almost every day of the fall semester.

Class begins, English Composition, and your professor assigns a reading for the next day from Racism and Sexism by Paula Rothenburg. In your next class, "Introduction to Religion," you're told to forget anything you've learned about Jesus Christ or the Bible as you will be taught the truth behind the "myth."

When you make it to bed that first night, your mind is filled with all the new concepts you were exposed to during the day. As sleep finally comes, you wonder what ideas the next day will bring ...

EVERY STUDENT EVERY DAY

The campus has changed since the 60's. Feminists now control thousands of courses in the U.S. and teach hundreds of thousands of students that dating is rape, marriage is prostitution, and lesbians make the best parents. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is committed to placing its programs on every major campus by the end of the decade.

It's easy to see, even by just taking a stroll across campus, that radical groups have succeeded in delivering their message to most students nearly every day of the school year.

To assess the extent that Christianity has permeated the campus, Christian Leadership Ministries (CLM) conducted a survey in the spring of 1994 of all the major Christian organizations working in the university. The survey revealed that all the organizations together were exposing at most 30 percent of the total number of university students in the U.S. to the gospel even once a year.

With this information in mind, CLM began to implement a new approach with a comprehensive goal: expose every student in America to the gospel multiple times a year. The resulting campaign has been named the Every Student Project, and it will eventually involve several Christian organizations working together.

CLM aims to accomplish the goals of the Every Student Project by using issues as a carrier for the gospel. This first year of the project, Christian workers, students and professors on over 35 major campuses will address four issues through a coordinated media campaign.

The first issue addressed, National Condom Week (formerly Valentines Day), is a good example of the philosophy and strategy of the campaign.

Until now, Christian groups tended to be reactionary when responding to issues: i.e. they talk about condoms and safe sex, and we talk about failure rates of condoms and the danger of pregnancy. Christian organizations also tend to use religious words and pictures to convey ideas-concepts alien to nonChristian students. Such campaigns conjure up the only images of Christians familiar to those on campus: personalities such as Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker and words like "fundamentalist."

In conceiving the Every Student Project, we took a different tact; we asked ourselves, "What does Christianity offer for which others can only offer a counterfeit?"

Condoms imply casual sex and protection from AIDS.

But what are condom users really after-deep in their heart? Isn't it a safe, secure, long-lasting relationship? And that's exactly what Christ offers through His plan. In other words, the Every Student Project tries to imitate Christ's speaking style of offering His view in comparison to the world's concepts, i.e. "You have heard that it is said . . ., but I say to you . . ."

So how can Christians make this comparison and speak to the campus?

This ad was one of six used in the campaign on over 35 campuses during National Condom Week (Valentines Day 1995).

The first step is to widely expose the campus to these twists on issues. The condom ad above is a good example. Other ads used during National Condom Week stated, "A Broken Heart is a Sexually Transmitted Disease," "Is it real LOVE, or is it just LATEX?" and, "What to wear when planning on Safe Sex" (with picture of couple just married).

Included with each ad is an 800 number students can call to receive a thought-provoking booklet on love, sex, and relationships. The booklets will be hand-delivered by Christian students and faculty.

During the week before Easter 1995, these two ads and several others were placed in school papers on more than 50 campuses. Christian students, professors and many Christian organizations participated. The theme of the campaign focused on belief in Christ as beyond blind faith.

This first year, four issues will be addressed. But eventually the ESP campaign will encompass monthly issues and weekly spin-off issues.

Another exciting aspect of the project is the plan for an electronic education strategy. The plan incorporates the use of the Internet in educating Christian students and addressing issues relevant to nonChristians.

Eventually, we plan to have 1,000 Christian faculty members online to answer questions from students around the country and dialogue with them. Also, 100,000 articles will be online, searchable by word or topic, as well as 10,000 annotated bibliographies. These resources will help Christian students to respond to current issues; answer questions from their nonChristian friends; respond to hostile professors; and research papers that can help make Christianity relevant in topics from the humanities to the sciences.

Radical groups have proven they can convey their message to every student every day. Isn't it time we, who have the message that changes lives, use the creative minds God gave us to do the same?