Chi Alpha @ Stanford

Hi, my name is Shaowei, and I am an inter­na­tional stu­dent from Sin­ga­pore. Know­ing the Lord has been the best thing that has ever hap­pened in my whole life. My encounter with the Lord has been one that is full of excite­ment and joy, but it has not been an easy one.

It began when I gave my life over to Christ in July 2000. As a young Chris­t­ian, I was often unsure of my faith, but I always had spir­i­tual broth­ers and sis­ters encour­ag­ing me and giv­ing me advice in my walk with Him. When I first came to Stan­ford in Sep­tem­ber 2002, I was wor­ried because I heard rumors about how col­lege life can be a stum­bling block to one’s spir­i­tual life, because of the heavy work­load and because of the intel­lec­tu­al­ism that shakes one’s faith.

So I sought out sev­eral Chris­t­ian fel­low­ship groups, and the one that caught my atten­tion was Chi Alpha. On our first day, the stu­dents and staff were extremely friendly to the new­com­ers. We had a won­der­ful time of wor­ship, and Glen, the pas­tor, gave a very hilar­i­ous talk (I still remem­ber he had his doctor’s gear on) that was also very deep and prac­ti­cal to col­lege life. I fell in love with Chi Alpha because I saw how all the stu­dents truly loved God and truly loved each other.

Since then, all of us at Chi Alpha have been through thick and thin together. We shared our feel­ings, prayed for one another, lead wor­ship, ate and had fun together, went for excit­ing retreats, and shared our faith with oth­ers. One way in which Chi Alpha really changed my life was when one of the pas­tors prayed for me at the Spring Retreat and I was deliv­ered from the fre­quent night­mares which I had since I was five. Since then, I was able to sleep well and peace­fully! Most impor­tantly, Chi Alpha has taught me, both directly and indi­rectly, how much the Lord loves me, and how to love the Lord.

Col­lege life may be busy or intel­lec­tu­ally intim­i­dat­ing, but we need to con­tinue to put our trust and hope in the Lord so that He can show us how to live it pur­pose­fully. For Jesus said, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do noth­ing” (John 15:5). I pray that you will find the fel­low­ship group that the Lord has called you to soon. Take care and God Bless : )

I just upgraded the photo gallery software–the new pack­age is awesome!

One of the neat­est fea­tures is that I can cre­ate user accounts for oth­ers to upload their dig­i­tal snaps. If you want an account so you can upload your Stan­ford Chi Alpha pho­tos, let me know!

Check the photo gallery. I’m still upload­ing photos.

Thrive Spir­i­tu­ally At Stan­ford
Will your faith grow stronger or weaker over the next four years? The choice is yours, and the time to make it is now. Gen­er­a­tions of stu­dents tes­tify that you can thrive spir­i­tu­ally at Stan­ford, and the key is to inten­tion­ally cul­ti­vate your faith.

A brief greet­ing from Glen Davis, the cam­pus pas­tor of Chi Alpha:

• Read tips for new stu­dents from a sopho­more who’s been there and a reflec­tion on one student’s first year on cam­pus!
• Check out our rec­om­mended read­ing list for new stu­dents to pre­pare for the intel­lec­tual chal­lenges you’ll find here at the Farm.
• Scope out the Chris­t­ian groups at Stan­ford. You can find the offi­cial list on the Stan­ford Asso­ci­ated Reli­gions web­site. Scroll down a lit­tle to see it. You can see another list at the Stu­dent Groups direc­tory. It’s pretty much the same, just for­mat­ted differently.
• Pray. Specif­i­cally, pray that God would do a few things:
  1. Ask God to pre­pare you for the chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties you’ll face at Stanford.
  2. Ask God to give you favor with your room­mate, and that also request that He per­form a pow­er­ful work in their life this summer.
  3. Ask God to help you quickly find a com­mu­nity of Chris­tians on cam­pus that you can be strength­ened by and have fun with. by the way–we hope that’s us!
• Be encouraged–we’re pray­ing for you all sum­mer long.

Chi Alpha Is Here to Help You
We’ve men­tioned plug­ging into a Chris­t­ian com­mu­nity of stu­dents here at Stan­ford. In case you haven’t fig­ured it out, we’d love to be the group you check out first!

We hope to help you thrive spir­i­tu­ally at Stan­ford by pro­vid­ing you with resources, encour­age­ment, and a group of friends who will be there for you. If that sounds like the sort of thing you’re look­ing for, learn more about us!

To Learn More About Chi Alpha

• Read Chi Alpha in a nut­shell.
• IM our fear­less leader:
  
• Sign up for Chi Alpha’s group dis­cus­sion list. Just send an email to majordomo@lists.stanford.edu with the fol­low­ing in the body: sub­scribe chialpha-fellowship
• Also sign up to receive Chi Alpha’s email announce­ments (the form is on the side­bar of every page). These are dif­fer­ent from the dis­cus­sion group mes­sages. Those are student-to-student ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion. This is a weekly update on ‘the haps’ that we send out. The two lists don’t really over­lap in con­tent, so we urge you to sign up for both.
• Just poke around the site for a while! We update it reg­u­larly, so if you use an RSS reader sub­scribe to our feed (.92, 2.00, atom)!

Bart Simp­son loves Chi Alpha!

Don’t believe me? Click here.

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).

I’ve cre­ated a sim­ple tool to help you invite your friends to Chi Alpha.
It’s a small Flash file (<100k) you can email to your friends.

Right click on this link to down­load it: check_out_xa.swf

1) Email it to one per­son at a time–if you send it to every­one you know
they’ll assume it’s junk mail (and they’ll be right).

2) Talk to the per­son about Chi Alpha first. Some­thing like this is much
bet­ter as a reminder than as an ini­tial exposure.

3) Use some­thing like this for the body of the mes­sage (but be sure to put it in your own words):

Hey–how’s it going? Keep­ing on top of all your classes?

Come as my guest this Tues­day at 8–it would be the high­light of my week!

Please give me some feedback–I want to make this use­ful for you! I
tried to make it cool yet keep it small, so there’s no jazzy ani­ma­tion or
any­thing. If you think it should be a lit­tle larger and have some whiz-bang
stuff, let me know. If it’s already too big, let me know. What­ever you
think–let me know!

When Do We Meet?
Our meet­ings run from 8:00 to 9:30 p.m. Wednes­day nights dur­ing the Fall, Win­ter, and Spring quar­ters when­ever school is in ses­sion (in other words, don’t come look­ing for us over Christ­mas break).

It’s easy to remem­ber: W8: Wednes­day at 8. So don’t W8–mark your cal­en­dar now!

Where Do We Meet?
We meet in Room 300–300 (inter­ac­tive map).

If you hap­pen to live off-campus, we rec­om­mend that you park at the Stu­dent Union or in the Oval. Park­ing is free in pay spots after 4 p.m., and you can also park in zones labeled A, C, and Z after 4 p.m.

What Will Hap­pen?
Here’s a typ­i­cal meeting:

• Begin with multimedia-driven con­tem­pla­tion about God and His char­ac­ter, includ­ing singing songs to and about God.
• Segue to a teach­ing based on the Bible (you can lis­ten to our past mes­sages to get a feel for what this is like)
• Ques­tion and answer time
• Pray for people’s needs
• Hang out for a while eat­ing snacks and swap­ping stories

There are two easy things you can do to get involved:

1. Drop by one of our weekly meet­ings.
2. Sign up for our email announce­ments list. That way you’ll be in the loop about every­thing we do! The signup box should be on the right-hand side of this page.
3. Con­sider lis­ten­ing to some of our past mes­sages to get a feel for the group.

Don’t worry: we NEVER share your email address with any­one else and you can always tell us you don’t want any more email announce­ments and we’ll stop right away.

Chi Alpha (XA) is a com­mu­nity of stu­dents earnestly fol­low­ing Jesus. Our gath­er­ings are infor­mal, charged with music, given to humor and deal with every­thing from rela­tion­ships to the nature of truth. We are affil­i­ated with Chi Alpha Cam­pus Min­istries, which is spon­sored by the Assem­blies of God, and we wel­come stu­dents from all eth­nic­i­ties, nation­al­i­ties, and reli­gious heritages.

If you’re still con­fused, try this: we’re like a Chris­t­ian club at Stan­ford who meets once a week to learn more about fol­low­ing Jesus.

There’s a higher-resolution ver­sion avail­able in Win­dows Media for­mat: left-click to play, right click to down­load, 7 MB.

For more infor­ma­tion on Chi Alpha, you might also want to check out these links:

• What Are The Meet­ings Like?
• What Does Chi Alpha Believe?
• What’s Impor­tant to Chi Alpha?
• What Does The Name Chi Alpha Mean?

We exist to pro­vide a sup­port­ive envi­ron­ment for fol­low­ing Jesus. That means that we try to help one another emu­late Jesus.

Based on a study of the Bible, we believe that there are five key things we should do cor­po­rately to facil­i­ate our indi­vid­ual spir­i­tual growth:
* We ask God to trans­form us and the cam­pus, and to mirac­u­lously inter­vene on our behalf. We call this prayer.
* We talk about what the Bible teaches and how it applies to our lives, and we seek to under­stand our aca­d­e­mic stud­ies and our faith in a com­ple­men­tary way. We call this dis­ci­ple­ship.
* We hang out together and help each other. We call this fel­low­ship.
* We tell God thanks and express our admi­ra­tion for who He is and what He has done. We call this wor­ship.
* We help other peo­ple under­stand God’s love. We call this wit­ness.