CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Straus Hall’s oak-paneled common room in Harvard Yard used to be empty on Thursday nights, but no more. It began filling up as nine male, first-year Harvard students arrived to discuss their homework: the New Testament’s Book of Acts.

Nick Nowalk discusses major themes in Acts during a Bible study with first-year students. From left: Mike Sun of Philadelphia, Pa.; James Yoon of Marietta, Ga.; Nick Stanford of Lima, Ohio; Nowalk; and Nathan Nakatsuka of Honolulu, Hawaii.

The students got no academic credit for being present, but most came prepared nonetheless. At the very least, they hoped the course will help them discuss their Christian faith intelligently on this campus where religion can be a hot and sometimes controversial topic.
 
“I want to talk about religion in daily conversation, but I’ve never really studied the Bible before,” said James Yoon, a South Korean immigrant who grew up in Marietta, Ga. “I should have a basic knowledge of the Bible.”
 

Ivy League evangelism classes

The semester-long course, taught by two seminary-trained evangelicals, marked the fruit of a growing initiative to strengthen Christianity in the Ivy League. Last fall, the six-year-old Christian Union began expanding its courses beyond Princeton University, where 185 undergraduates study the Bible in structured settings with trained instructors. The Union now offers three courses for first-year Harvard students – two for men, one for women. Yale could have similar courses taught on its campus as soon as 2010.
 
The initiative, which has doubled its staff from 10 to 20 since 2007 and costs $2.5 million per year to operate, aims to “influence the influencers.” Graduates of the Ivy League’s eight colleges hold about half of the top positions in industries from government to finance to media, according to Christian Union President Matthew Bennett. Yet with only about 7 percent of Ivy students involved in ministries of any kind, these schools rank among the nation’s lowest in terms of Christian activity on campus.
 
“We have a disproportionate secularization of our country because so many of those in influential positions are secular in their outlook,” Bennett says. “We want to see that a large number of these people know God, know Christian values and seek to live them out on campus here and then as they graduate.”
 
The Christian Union hopes to raise ministry participation levels on all Ivy campuses to 20 percent by 2020. To get there, the organization aims to plug what its leaders see as a critical weak spot among these colleges’ many campus ministries. The criticism: Students may get fellowship, worship and service opportunities through existing ministries, but they don’t get much of the rigorous Biblical education they need in order to claim a Christian faith in an intellectual, skeptical environment.
 
Accomplishing the organization’s goals will mean overcoming several hurdles. Among the challenges: acquiring a house in each of the campus communities to serve as a hub of operations. The Christian Union has three – at Princeton, Brown and Cornell – but acquiring real estate in New York City, where Columbia is located, or here near pricey Harvard Square presents an uphill task.
 
Cultural hurdles can flare up as well. The Union tried for three years to become a recognized organization at Princeton, Bennett says, but administrators stalled until the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, an advocacy group, intervened on its behalf.
 
“If we’re not willing to call in these [advocates] and to bring media attention to something,” Bennett says, “universities will get away with as much as they can in terms of suppressing Christian activity.”
 

A few successes

Despite challenges, the Union is claiming some successes. A Christian Union-sponsored debate at Princeton between theologian Dinesh D’Souza and ethicist Peter Singer recently drew 800 students to fill the school’s largest venue. In Providence, where the Union has a building but no staff, the organization helps fund Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC) outreach efforts, such as a mission trip last year to New Orleans. The Union-owned Adoniram Judson House building at Brown, named after a 19th century missionary to Burma, provides lodging, meeting space and guest accommodations for CCC.  
 
In the long term, organizers hope the Union’s academically oriented ministries – which include readings from scholars as well as Biblical material – will spark curiosity among non-believers. 
 
But in these early days at Harvard, the initiative is still building its foundation. Organizers are reaching out to students who already have strong Christian backgrounds and might crave a way to help their faith keep pace with their intellectual development.
 
To avoid competing with other campus ministries for students, Christian Union ministry fellows Don Weiss and Nick Nowalk began the 2008-09 academic year by contacting only incoming first-year students. 
 

Backgrounds, motives differ

 
On this night, the gathering represents a range of Christian backgrounds. The group includes a Nigerian Pentecostal, Catholics from Ohio and New Jersey, and a Chinese-American who had grown up among Christian Chinese immigrants in Philadelphia. Five are Asian, three are black, and one is white. Their motives for being there vary as much as their backgrounds.
 
“This is a way to stay involved, to stay close to Christian fellowship, because you do tend to drift when you try to do it alone,” said Mike Sun of Philadelphia. “And these guys [Weiss and Nowalk] know what they’re talking about. That’s a great source of confidence for being able to discuss religion in an intelligent way.”
 
“I find myself having lots of questions” about what Christians believe, says Glyvolner Gabriel, a Catholic from Newark, N.J. “I want to be more knowledgeable, not to be following [Christianity] blindly.”
 
With students seated on couches and stuffed chairs, Nowalk leads the discussion by urging students to identify Acts’ biggest themes, which turn out to include the kingdom of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. Students point out passages that “seem so crazy,” in their words. Nowalk doesn’t try to dissuade them of doubts, but instead urges them to notice what the text actually says and keep an open mind.
 
The meeting adjourns with a prayer: 

“Father, we pray that you would help us by faith, in a good critical way, to think through these issues,” Nowalk prays. “Help us come to an understanding of who you are, of what you’ve done in Christ … and of what it looks like to follow you in our world today.”