Each time I leave with faith enough to take a step out onto the water.

I’d like to send every friend of Jesus here for a week…or two…or for a life.

Roger Parrish-Siggelkow
Minneosta USA

As a place of ideas, where teaching and scholarship are part of the daily diet, a Christian university can play a role in responding to pressing social issues. Yet there is a big difference between embracing the surrounding culture, and engaging it. To engage the culture is to do what Jesus did. He was engaged fully in the world of his day.

He understood the prevailing values of his time, but they did not own him. Instead he went about living and teaching to transform his world. He called this new transformed life the “Kingdom.” Many were attracted to this way of thinking and living. SSU exists to help its students think their way through the maze of narratives and motifs that dot the cultural landscape.

Here I am reminded of Roger Palms statement in Decision magazine,

“One problem we have in our society is not that we know how to think and do not include God in our thinking, but rather that because we do not include God in our thinking, we don’t know how to think.”

In essence, the SSU-quest is to create a setting where community members’ commitment to each other is unconditional and full of grace, as in Acts 4:33. When a group of people decide to follow Jesus genuinely, they are called to become a distinctive, bold, compelling expression of His teachings.

This happens as the members of the group give priority to their life together and begin to experience more and more of God’s fullness–individually and corporately.

As they live together in freedom and vulnerability, blessing and brokenness, the quality of their life-in-community becomes like a light on a hill, a striking witness to the Gospel-Message, and a prophetic response to the endemic social and cultural problems of our day.

This is because the bricks and stones in the walls of community are real, thinking, feeling humans, not abstract concepts.

Why is community important? Norman Lea (1923-2004), past chairman of the SSU Board of Trustees, used to say that the early church took over the Roman Empire because it found the brilliant solution to the glaring social problem of its day: widows and orphans.

Spurred on by the signs and wonders of the Holy Spirit, the early church cared for the disenfranchised and gradually won the hearts of almost all. Norman thought the principle was transferable: today’s Church needs to find the brilliant solution to the glaring social problem of our day.

He was convinced that this was loneliness and alienation, caused by urbanization, the breakdown of the family, and by reliance upon technology. The answer is simple: community.

And yet, this is they very thing that some of our social institutions, including the church, make it difficult to experience. Programs and meetings often seem to insulate against community. People play their cards close to their chests, speaking in platitudes instead of growing toward vulnerability and deepening relationships.

At SSU, we’ve begun to imagine what a different approach might look like. And though it is difficult, it is rich.