Steve Long
Electrical and Computer Engineering
U C Santa Barbara
[Sept 28,2009]–
Sometimes students’ questions about God don’t arise very often in particular academic disciplines — like mine, for example. So how do I reflect Christ to others?
I don’t believe that you can be overt about preaching in the classroom. I have found that evangelism is like fishing – going to where the fish are, and seeing whether they are biting. For me, that meant going to where students are: they are online.
I created a website for students to learn about me and interact with me. I make it clear that this is my personal website, and not an official UCSB one.
The site includes:
• My Christian worldview – the nature of God, man, and truth
• My perspective on work and career – from a talk I presented at our Christian Faculty/Staff Fellowship
• Pictures from my vacations, and my grandchildren.
I think these things help give the site a certain universal appeal (or cause a lack of any appeal, depending on your feeling about my website.) The url is: http://mysite.verizon.net/res8nngj.
A few years ago I received an email from a Japanese man who was a research scientist for his company. He was going on sabbatical for a year and wanted to work in my research group (RF/Microwave Integrated Circuits) at UCSB.
After looking over his information I felt that he would be a good fit for our group, and offered him a position. He and his family came for a year.
Soon after they were settled in we invited them over for dinner. At the end of the evening he asked my wife and me if we attended church. We responded, “Yes – would you like to come visit it sometime?”
He said yes, so they came to our church and began to attend weekly. Because they continued to show an interest in Christianity, we invited them to attend the small group that met at our house. Over time, a fairly close relationship developed between his family and ours.
I found out later from one of his golfing buddies that one of the reasons he had picked UCSB, and had contacted me in particular, was his interest in meeting a Christian professor in the sciences. He had never met one before.
We have kept in touch with them since they returned to Japan and they have come back to visit us twice since then. They are now attending a church back in Japan. Our time with them seems to have catalyzed some life-changing thinking in them.
Occasionally, students will email me or come to my office with personal problems or questions about faith. I think that the website has helped them feel that it is ok to talk with me about such things.
On-line is easy these days. While I am not very proficient in building websites, it does not have to be pretty to be effective. If you don’t have time to build a complete website, in 30 minutes you can create a page about yourself and your faith at: www.meettheprof.com.
I hope you give this a try. It has worked well for me, and I even get emails from people I have never met all over the world who have found this website and make favorable comments on it. With the little bit of effort I put in to building this, it has paid back very well.
© 2009 Steve Long