Chi Alpha @ Stanford

We (Paula and Glen) are out of town this week, and change is in the air!

This week’s Chi Alpha will start slightly ear­lier than usual because we are try­ing out a new sched­ule that includes half an hour of fel­low­ship with one another. The loca­tion will remain the same at Bldg 300–300.

Date: 22 April 2003, Tues­day
Time: 7:30pm to 9:30pm
Loca­tion: Room 300–300
Speaker: Steve Smallwood

Steve pas­tored Paula and Glen when they lived in Mis­souri, and now he’s in charge of stu­dent spir­i­tual devel­op­ment at Bethany Bible Col­lege (near Santa Cruz). Steve is an incred­i­bly authen­tic guy who pos­sesses much wisdom–I think you’ll really like him.

I’ll update the rest of the web­site to reflect the new time as soon as I can. I have spo­radic net access while I’m here in Missouri.

We just got back from Spring Retreat–it was awesome!

The pho­tos we took are now online.

We also have an MP3 of Scott’s clos­ing ses­sion. Owing to some tech­ni­cal chal­lenges we weren’t able to get the first two ses­sions at all, and the third is of extremely poor qual­ity. The fourth one (this one) came out pretty well, though.

In clos­ing, here’s one tes­ti­mony of what God did: Shaowei had been tor­mented by vivid night­mares. At retreat, he men­tioned it to his friends over sup­per and they all told him that he should ask the retreat speaker, Scott, to pray that the night­mares would cease.

So Shaowei and his friends went to the wor­ship ses­sion, and Scott preached about the power of the Holy Spirit. At the end of his ser­mon he invited peo­ple for­ward to be prayed for. As he was invit­ing peo­ple up, Scott paused and told the audi­ence that God had informed him that some­one in the room was plagued by night­mares and that the per­son should come for­ward to receive prayer (in the Bible, this is referred to as a ‘word/utterance/message of knowl­edge’ and is men­tioned in 1 Corinthi­ans 12:8 and demon­strated in pas­sages such as Acts 9:10–19).

Need­less to say, Shaowei’s eyes were about to pop out of his head! In his words, “I walked towards the pas­tor, ready to tell him what I need prayers for, but when I approached him I started cry­ing for no rea­son, and I broke down before him. He laid hands on me, and I lost con­trol of myself. I saw the images of all the night­mares I ever had flash before me… I felt fear from the night­mares come, and then dis­solve away one by one as the Lord told me, ‘Be peace­ful, be healed.’ Last night, I had one of the most peace­ful sleeps in my life. I am deeply indebted to the Lord for his deliverance.”

Praise God!

Note to guests: these are the notes from a mes­sage I shared at one of our Chi Alpha meet­ings. My goal in this mes­sage was not to estab­lish Chris­tian­ity as true, but rather to demon­strate that God’s exis­tence is a rea­son­able belief. Most every­thing I said applies to any the­ist, whether Chris­t­ian, Mus­lim, or Deist.

But Smart Peo­ple Don�t Believe in God!
There’s a wide­spread assump­tion that faith isn’t a viable option for smart and well-educated peo­ple: [Carl] Sagan was fas­ci­nated by the phe­nom­e­non that edu­cated adults, with the won­ders of sci­ence man­i­fest all around them, could cling to beliefs based on the unver­i­fi­able tes­ti­mony of observers dead for 2000 years. “You’re so smart, why do you believe in God?” he once exclaimed to [cleric Joan Brown] Camp­bell. Newsweek, 3/31/1997

Like­wise, Anne Lam­ott in her book Trav­el­ing Mer­cies notes that “None of the adults in our cir­cle believed. Believ­ing meant that you were stu­pid. Igno­rant peo­ple believed, uncouth peo­ple believed, and we were heav­ily couth.”

Is it true that smart, well-educated peo­ple don’t believe in God? Not at all!
Read the rest of this
entry »

I’ve just added a photo gallery. I’m still refin­ing it, but you can see a few pho­tos here. Most of them are in the ‘Fea­tured’ folder (which is where the ran­dom images on every page get pulled from).

UPDATE: I’ve also changed the Flash navbar. If your browser has it cached it will look abnor­mally large until your browser re-downloads it (but after that I think you’ll be very pleas­antly surprised).

These are a con­densed ver­sion of the notes from Glen’s Chi Alpha mes­sage on 4/1/2003.

* What should we think about war?
* What should do in a time of war?

First, what should we think?

You can divide peo­ple into four camps:
1. Prag­ma­tists: We gotta do what we gotta do. Us or them. No rules in love or war.
2. Prin­ci­pal­ists: War is always regret­table but not always evil. It must be waged accord­ing to cer­tain rules.
3. Paci­fists: War is always evil, killing is tan­ta­mount to mur­der, so to die help­less is prefer­able to tak­ing up arms in defense of one’s life, fam­ily, coun­try, or val­ues.
4. Pas­sivists: Not my prob­lem. I’m not a sol­dier nor a gov­ern­men­tal leader. I’m sorry that peo­ple are dying, but it’s no skin off my nose.

Read the rest of this
entry »

The Call is com­ing to San Fran­cisco this Sat­ur­day from 7am to 7pm.

Admis­sion is free, but park­ing will cost $10 a car. The orga­niz­ers strongly encour­age you to arrive early and to take pub­lic transportation–many peo­ple will be turned away due to lack of space and of parking.

Please be aware that there will be no food avail­able at the Call. Water will be for sale, but there is a vol­un­tary fast for from 7am to 7pm. Bring food if you need it.