Phillip A. Bishop
Kinesiology, University of Alabama
It is a Thursday evening in April about 8:30 PM. A couple of colleagues of mine and about 18 college students are crowded into my living room. My wife has filled us all up past good judgment with salad, pizza, nuts, brownies, and some kind of gooey, creamy peanut butter-flavored dessert.
We start out with some soft-pitch questions. What is a favorite place to visit, or that you would like to visit? What’s a favorite food? Then we go a bit deeper. What has surprised you about school? Then we go deeper still. Who is a favorite teacher from your past? What makes a good teacher? The questions are getting a bit more intimate now.
My Early Motivations And Plans
When all the questions are answered and comments made, I take the opportunity to share with them some of my early motivations and plans for college teaching and how they have changed. Then I give them my one-page written testimony.
Because I had taught all these students at least one course, they had heard that I was a Christian. The written version I hand them is more sophisticated and designed particularly for students and faculty. Some begin to read it immediately. But as we stand up to move back toward the food, a student says something that stops me cold.
I Learned You Were A Christian
“That is the first thing I learned about you,” said Yang, a Chinese student. “I learned you were a Christian when I ‘Googled’ your name before I applied to the university.”
“What?” is my clever rejoinder.
“Yes, I Googled your name and the first thing I learned about you was that you were a Christian.”
I guess I have had more gratifying moments, but I can’t remember any. Here is a non-Christian foreign student from a country not exactly open to Christianity telling me that the first thing he knew about me was my faith. And he got my story off of the web!
If Jesus Could Lower Himself….
There should be little doubt that the web has become one of the most important sources of information for students—they average almost two hours a day online. I realized that if Jesus could lower Himself to come to earth and dwell among us, I could “lower myself” to share my story on the web where students dwell.
This past year I created a profile on www.meettheprof.com. At this site students can learn about my faith—as well as my quirks. It’s free to any Christian professor, courtesy of Faculty Commons, and it took me less than an hour to create a page without any knowledge of web programming.
You and I are already on the web. What do we want students to know about us?
This MMM may be copied or forwarded for personal ministry purposes by including:
© 2008 Phillip A. Bishop Used by permission of Faculty Commons