Campus Ministers Tackle Tough Questions of Faith

Seven Christian Reformed Church campus ministers in Canada have addressed a range of tough topics about matters of faith in a series of columns published in The Christian Courier.

Headquartered in St. Catharines, Ontario, the bi-weekly publication is an independent newspaper dedicated to reporting on current events from a Christian perspective. Last year it solicited questions from readers and then asked each of seven campus ministers to answer one of the questions in a series of columns that ran for seven months.

“The campus ministers wrote some incredibly thoughtful, even profound, answers. I was astonished each time by how loving and yet unswervingly biblical each response was,” says Angela Bick, editor of The Christian Courier.

Just recently, The Christian Courier placed all of the columns in a section called Redemptive Windows. Topics include a look at miracles, going to church on Sunday, why children get cancer, the existence of God, divorce, the truth of the Bible, and the connection between science and theology.

Bick says there is a new atheism spreading, especially among young people, that is forcing Christians to give evidence for what they believe.

Many young people are no longer satisfied with the “pat” answers to matters of faith given them by the previous generation, she says.

The series in the Courier, she says, is an attempt to answer some of those questions so that people can better understand the Christian faith and be able to speak to others about their faith. This process is called apologetics.

“We asked CRC campus pastors to answer these questions because, as one former campus pastor put it, they are ‘dealing with this stuff all the time’,” she says.

“University forces you to figure out what you believe and why. It’s full of people in shock that they can’t depend on their parents’ answers anymore.”

In the series, Brian Bork, the Courier’s Review Editor and a CRC campus minister at the University of Waterloo and Sir Wilfrid Laurier University, addresses the question “Do I need to be part of a church and go every Sunday?”

Bork answers that “yes’’ a Christian needs to be part of a church and go every Sunday. After all, it is in the church and at church that someone can develop an intimate relationship with Jesus.

But he also wonders whether a Protestant emphasis on people reading Scripture for themselves and phrases like “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ” have encouraged a less-than-enthusiastic approach to church life.

“Don’t get me wrong; there’s a lot to be said for individual conscience, a personal relationship with Jesus…” Bork writes.

“But those things can bring you to a really lonely place too. We’re all prone to doubt, prone to misunderstand, prone to stumble along the way. Faith is hard work, and it’s incredibly risky to think we can go it alone.”

Kelly Sibthorpe, a campus minister at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, addresses the question “Does God exist? How can you believe in something that can’t be proven by modern science?”

He writes of spending 10 years trying to invalidate God through modern science, only to discover without a doubt that God is real while looking at the night sky through his Newtonian reflector telescope.

One night, just after viewing the “Wild Duck,” a star cluster of about 2,900 stars that sits roughly six million light years from the sun, he observed, in the centre of this cluster, a single amber-coloured “red giant” star.

“I had observed this cluster many times over the last several years because of its ethereal beauty. This night, however, was different. With the Holy Spirit’s words … in my mind, God’s love once again flooded my heart in a profound way that science could never describe.”

Sibthorpe also writes that “science and theology are not at odds with each other; theology is the loftier of the two because it seeks to know and understand the creator, whereas science simply seeks to understand how the creator made things. Therefore the proper study of theology requires interpretation in the light of scientific advancement.”

Bick says she suggests youth  groups consider using the columns as material for discussions. If anyone has a reaction to the columns, she says they can email [email protected].