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“This is about Jesus.”
A week of outreach at Smith College

Sidebars to see:

Smith Imorality
Party Busted by
Prayer

Smith Outreach
Gets Support from
Strangest Places

by Hallie Cowan

Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, is proud of its 125 years as an elite college for women. Academic pressure and the workload are intense. Friday night is a time for studying, like all other nights. The small dormitories, or “houses” (originally private homes), foster tight communities. But Smith is a campus where the value of community is offset by a fierce, feminist independence. Women live in proximity and civility, sharing common values, but with no expectation of interdependence or accountability. Bright young women exercise leadership, freedom and independence, yet often bear deep emotional pain. It has been said that every Smith student has an “issue” shared by about five other people. It can seem like no one else cares about that issue because others have their own issues, and their little groups of five people. Despite attempts to become a more unified community, Smith is strongly marked by student autonomy. No one tells anyone else how to live.

Understanding this climate, how could Smith Christian Fellowship (IVCF) join with the other three Christian groups on campus to make a campus-wide impression for the Gospel? After many months of joint planning and prayer, “This is About Jesus” Week (TIAJ) took place last February in a united outreach to the campus.

The title, “This is About Jesus” Week, came from the College’s year-long 125th Anniversary Celebration called “This is About Smith”. The week was modeled after theme weeks or weekends sponsored by other campus groups. Committee members went to work to reserve rooms and raise funds. They recruited students to lead events and speakers for seminars. Under it all, a foundation of prayer was laid for the whole outreach. Even the college administration was quite supportive of the event. Various deans, the chapel and the president all provided funding, and the president encouraged our students to put fliers in faculty mailboxes as well as in the student boxes! This itself was a miracle because only five years ago all religious groups (including InterVarsity) were forbidden to do any all-campus mailings, since they were deemed “offensive”. We have come a long way, by prayer and God’s grace! (See also a side bar about receiving support form the strangest places.)

The SCF leaders had been committed to prayer for campus evangelism ever since the summer chapter camp, so we eagerly prayed for TIAJ week. We hosted daily prayer meetings, passed around e-mail prayer requests and held a prayer vigil at the chapel to kick off the week. We asked off-campus friends and alumni to pray for us. We began the year in September with a “Prayer Walk” around campus. Feeling brave, the students even rang the president’s doorbell, and asked her how we could be praying for her and for the campus. Clearly moved, she asked us to pray for unity and reconciliation, and for safety on campus, so we formed a circle on her front steps, and prayed with her right there. (See also an unusual answer to prayer.)

In addition to prayer and planning, we hosted several training events to learn skills in sharing our faith with friends. We studied the content of the gospel, as well as relational skills, and practiced some simulated conversations. These sessions were team-taught by Campus Crusade and I-V staff. We did not make extensive follow-up plans, since most contacts were made through existing friendships and follow-up happened through small groups.

Though we had never planned an all-campus week-long outreach event before, the TIAJ committee hit on a model that was suited to Smith’s unique culture. We designed a week chock full of small events mostly based in the houses, but with enough variety and creativity to catch the attention of a broad segment of the campus. The small events were publicized with all-campus mailings, posters and dining table tents, as well as personal invitations. Each kind of house event was designed to be repeated in any house that had a couple of Christian students to sponsor it. Some events were designed to simply demonstrate love and service to the campus community without much of a verbal witness. We felt this was important in a climate that tends to associate “born-again Christian” with being narrow-minded, ignorant, homophobic, mean, racist, or anti-woman, or at least always trying to convert people! Other events offered non-threatening formats for investigating the gospel or Christian values.

Here is a description of some of the events that we did during TIAJ week:

FOCUS GROUPS
A handful of students conducted Focus groups, using a Campus Crusade format in which a team of two Christians invited up to a dozen students from their house to come and answer questions about how they feel the Christian message is being communicated on campus. As in focus groups used for marketing research, the leaders did not respond, but just took notes. In each case, the students who came expressed genuine appreciation that they were listened to by the Christians. Each focus group led to further conversations with the women who came, and the leaders seemed quite pleasantly surprised to find authentic spiritual interest in their houses and among friends. One group asked the leader if they could do this weekly. She invited them to join her Bible study!

BEDTIME STORIES
Bedtime stories were a big hit on a campus where women under unrelenting pressure appreciate an opportunity to be little kids again! Christian students offered to provide milk and cookies and read Christian and secular children’s stories to those who came in PJs to the house’s living room at 10 p.m. In one house, eight out of 16 residents came and they begged to meet every week for more stories. Jenny, who loves storytelling, and loves sharing the Gospel, met with them every Wednesday night for the rest of the semester!

GIVE-AWAYS
Using a format that we’d worked with before, we set up a table in the all-campus mailroom. Students gave away carnations on Valentine’s Day and cups of hot chocolate the next day. A small sign identified the givers as part of TIAJ week, but no other Christian message was communicated apart from the free gift and a smile, unless the receiver initiated conversation. The give-away items were received well, for the most part, although some students expressed suspicion at the motives, or wondered if it was okay to receive a flower “in the name of Jesus” if they weren’t Christian! One Christian student reported that a friend came back to her dorm with a big grin, saying, “I just got a cup of hot chocolate from Jesus!”

LUNCHEON DISCUSSIONS
We planned a series of lunchtime seminars on topics we thought would serve the community. One was a self-defense seminar, led by a student, which came about in response to campus-wide fears after a series of attacks at neighboring schools. The best-attended talk was on stress management, with an alumna speaker who is a college professor.

I hosted a discussion called “Bring Your Tough Questions on Christianity.” Unfortunately, seekers and skeptics did not line up to “stump the staff”; only Christians showed up for the luncheon. However, I heard that there was some respect expressed on campus that we were willing to “go there,” and just making the offer had a positive effect. We ended up talking about what kinds of questions the Christian students and faculty hear from their friends. The major ones they raised related to the uniqueness of Christianity—”Aren’t all religions valid?” “How can you be so arrogant as to say you have the way to heaven and everyone else is going to hell?” It was a worthwhile discussion after all.

CONCERT
The concert by a Campus Crusade outreach band was held at the end of a full week, and the attendance was poor—almost exclusively Christians. We should have planned this event for a different time.

JOINT SERVICE PROJECT
A coordinator from the chapel arranged a visit to a nursing home in town on Saturday morning. This event also suffered poor attendance from being at the end of a long, full week. It had the potential, however, to be a significant outreach event in which we could have invited students to come along to do community service with us.

JOINT WORSHIP
We gathered all the groups together on Friday night, (despite a blizzard!) for a service of worship and celebration. The snow kept the speaker away, so I got to pinch-hit. I enjoyed reflecting on Luke 10 with our students, where Jesus sends out seventy disciples on a mission, and then receives them back. Though we haven’t yet seen a harvest, we still believe it is plentiful, and we’re actively praying for laborers to be sent out to serve the Lord in the fields at Smith College.