Hi everyone! Carrie and I are both doing very well and we’re working on our January newsletter that will be out to you soon.

In the meantime we wanted to pass on some information about how you can join Campus Crusade’s response to the ongoing disaster in Haiti.

Even as the search to rescue people in the rubble turns into a recovery effort there are still hundreds of thousands of people now homeless, hungry, sick and possibly injured. Regardless of the reason WHY God allowed this to happen, our response needs to be filtered through the words of our Lord:

Matthew 25:40
And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’

You may or may not know about the Global Aid Network (GAiN), but it is the humanitarian aid arm of Campus Crusade. Currently there is already a group of GAiN staff in the suffering island nation as well as the campus ministry team that is there to reach their own college students (the last I heard, the national director still had not located one of his parents).

The need from this disaster creates a need that surpasses political and ideological barriers. Please join us in giving by going to http://GAiNusa.org and share as the Lord would lead you.

Thank you for reading and, we’ll be sharing with you again soon!

(I typed this up on my phone, so I apologised for any typos.)

This summer at our US Staff Conference Tim Keller spoke a few times, and encouraged us to remember the Gospel. He even quipped, “I’m going to talk about the Gospel. What kind of idiot would talk about something else at a Campus Crusade for Christ conference?”

Here’s a clip from his talk the first evening.

We do not merit any part of our salvation! This is the Good News!!

Tim Keller is the pastor at Tenth Presbyterian Church in New York City and the author of one of the best books about explaining the Gospel to our friends and neighbors today – The Reason for God. I’d recommend anything with his name on it.

This first point of the actual statement of faith concerns the question of “Who is God?

1. “There is one true God, eternally existing in three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – each of whom possesses equally all the attributes of Deity and the characteristics of personality.

Three Persons

In this first point it’s important to notice a couple of things. We are Trinitarian we believe in God as one deity in three persons. I’ve heard it said that God is one What and three Whos. Each member of the Trinity is fully God; the Holy Spirit, when looked at separately, is fully God, the Father, when looked at separately, is fully God, and the Son, when looked at separately, is fully God. The word “equally” is also important; the Son is not inferior to the Father and the Father is not inherently superior to the Son and the Spirit. Each member of the Godhead has the same ontological value, that is they have the same power and glory and majesty as each other member. The relationship, though, is one of voluntary subordination – the Son, from eternity past has chosen to submit to the Father not because Jesus is lesser than the Father or that the Father is, in some sense really God where the Son is not, but because He chooses to defer to Him and give the Father glory.

The first point separates us from the non-orthodox “Christian” religions such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Latter-Day Saints, and from heretical Christian sects such as the non-trinitarian United Pentecostal Church or the Jesus Only Churches.

The Trinity

This also clarifies the orthodox position in relation to misconceptions of the Trinity. It does not allow for modalism (where each member of the Trinity is actually just one God wearing different masks depending on the situation), Tritheism (three gods) or Arianism (where Jesus is a lesser god to God the Father and the Spirit is either a lesser god as well or the Father’s active force).

Why?

Who God is is extremely important and the basis for all other points of our faith. When you get off track here the rest of your faith will be off all the more. It’s similar to firing a gun and aiming just 1 degree off; when you are aiming 10 feet away you’ll only be about an inch off, but when you’re aiming a mile away you’ll be nearly 50 feet off. Since our faith aims at eternity it’s incredibly important to get our beliefs about who God is very precise and faithful to the breadth of scripture.

Next time we’ll look at who the Son is and His life on earth.

I forgot one relatively major thing in the last post that is vital to understanding pretty much any Statement of Faith, and important to understanding the things that Campus Crusade for Christ has included in ours.

In a healthy representation of a person or groups faith there are three relatively distinct levels of belief or strength at which they hold a belief. Not everything is the same as far as importance, not everything is something that we should hold close to our heart.

Convictions

These are central beliefs which are crucial to salvation. These beliefs are the ones over which we break fellowship (if there is no repentance) and if it was a spiritual leader who held errant views we would be willing to publicly denounce. Also, these are the beliefs that it would be most necessary to choose death over denying them.

Examples of Conviction-Level beliefs: the Trinity, Jesus’ divinity and humanity, Christ’s death and the resurrection, salvation by grace through faith.

Persuasions

These are beliefs about which we are personally certain, but can still fellowship with other Christians who disagree since they are not matters central to the Gospel and/or the historic Christian faith. These may be issues over which local churches might amicably divide while still recognizing the other body as friends, co-workers and brothers & sisters in the faith.

Examples of Persuasion-Level beliefs: speaking in tongues, Calvinism/Arminianism, mode or method of Baptism, how the Trinity interacts within itself, model of Church government.

Opinions

These are beliefs, desires or even wishes which may not be clearly taught in Scripture or which may legitimately differ for various believers. These are beliefs that we should be able to discuss with an air of complete trust and light-heartedness.

Examples of Opinion-Level beliefs: the best Bible translation, musical worship style, age of the Earth or the method of creation, home schooling.

Why is this Important?

Holding beliefs too lightly can lead to a slippery slope where we don’t believe anything strongly. Our faith becomes a matter of convenience and something that we’re willing to give up at the first sign of resistance; it becomes a faith that is, at its core, false and dead.

Just as destructively, we can hold beliefs too tightly. This is the defining element of what would be called fundamentalists; the irony is that they are not actually focused on the fundamentals! When you are as a group or a person more focused on verbally excommunicating people because they believe that God created everything via a different method than you think or espousing your pet Bible translation above or more often than glorifying Christ those good things (the Bible and pondering the creation) become idols that draw us away from the God who created them.

It’s important to remember that these categories are not about how strongly you feel about them; they are categories of how central they are to our faith.

The Statement of Faith

You’ll notice as you look at the CCC Statement of Faith that it only covers conviction and persuasion level issues. The number of contentious issues that it does not address is pretty large: Church government, women’s ordination, modes of Baptism, the Lord’s supper, miraculous gifts, Christians & war, the creation model, age of the universe, end times prophecy, how will Christ return, Bible translations, etc. This is because staff, students and volunteers have the freedom to hold views that are not in the Statement of Faith as long as they are based on Scripture and not a distraction to our mission. This also allows us to accomplish the mission of bringing the Gospel to the heart of every student on every campus by partnering widely with anyone and everyone who agrees with the statement of faith – even if we disagree on other things which are not on it.

It’s all about bringing the Gospel to people. We lead them to join a church that also agrees with us on these 17 points, but we know that these churches will teach beyond this as well and we welcome that because we’re just a piece of the puzzle; Christ is the whole picture.

The CCC statement of faith begins:

The sole basis of our beliefs is the Bible, God’s infallible written Word, the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments. We believe that it was uniquely, verbally and fully inspired by the Holy Spirit and that it was written without error (inerrant) in the original manuscripts. It is the supreme and final authority in all matters on which it speaks.

We accept those areas of doctrinal teaching on which, historically, there has been general agreement among all true Christians. Because of the specialized calling on our movement, we desire to allow for freedom of conviction on other doctrinal matters, provided that any interpretation is based upon the Bible alone, and that no such interpretation shall become an issue which hinders the ministry to which God has called us.

These two paragraphs provide a solid groundwork for understanding the why and the what that we believe and live out.

Let’s start with the second paragraph. “We accept those areas of doctrinal teaching on which, historically, there has been general agreement among all true Christians.” What this means is that we fall into the category of orthodox (small O, as in more general than the Eastern Orthodox churches), we are committed to the doctrines that are central to what it means to be a faithful follower of Christ and to what God has called us to as a ministry.

There are some controversial issues that the statement of faith will not cover – predistination, the sign gifts, what version of the Bible is the best, church government, modes of baptism, or the age of the earth and specifics on the methods of creation. The reasons that Campus Crusade for Christ does not take stands on these is because they do not affect at a basic level the ability to be a part of the mission of reaching the world for Christ. Also, there has not been a consensus over the course of history on these issues and God has not called us to take stands on these issues – He is using others to speak to those issues.

Also, it does take on issues that may not be in a church’s statement of faith because it also sets down some guidelines that are important and are central to the mission of Campus Crusade for Christ, you’ll see these toward the end of the list particularly dealing with our belief in the unversal call for all believers to “do the work of evangelism” regardless of their vocational call.

On the Bible

We do agree with the historically Protestant view on the the canon of the Bible, the Apocraphal books and sectionsof books that some Christan traditions view as scripture are seen as at best good history and insight into beliefs that some of the Jewish people had at certain times. For example the books of Maccabes are a good historical account of the Jewish rebellion agains the Greeks, also the canonical New Testament book of James quotes the book of Enoch which is not viewed itself as canonical but that James chose to quote something that is eternally true. I actually would encourage all Christians who have the free time to talk to one of your Catholic friends or a library and borrow a Bible that has the 6 or 7 apocraphal books and read them with very large grains of salt. Just as you would with any “Christian” literature or books you need to remember that only the 66 books of the Bible can be trusted 100% – everything else very probably contains errors.

The next half of the first paragraph contains some densely-packed statements. To clarify my statement of what can be trusted, only the original manuscripts can be trusted 100%. The hard part of that is that we do not have any of the original manuscripts that were physically written by the apostles or prophets. What we do have is a huge number copies of them so that we are able to be sure about every important passage. We’re able to compare them all and know where someone had merely made a mistake because the overwhelming evidence

“Uniquely, verbally and fully inspired”

These three words are very, very important in understanding what we we believe. The Bible is the only (uniquely) book that’s content can be considered to be God’s Word (fully) and God’s words (verbally). There is no other book, magazine, preacher, newsletter or any thing else that we read that can successfully contradict the Bible, if it does it is not God’s word and it is not to be fully trusted (without the aformentioned large or small “grains of salt”). This also means that we believe that no other religious text is inspired by God or to be trusted as vital for our spiritual growth. Also, all of the Bible is God’s word (it must be read in the right literary and historical context) and each individual word in the original manuscript is the word (in Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic) that God chose for it. All of this together indicates that, while other books may be good for our growth in our walk with Christ, only and all of the Bible is vital to our growth.

While Carrie and I have been in Colorado these past few weeks we have been talking about a lot of things that deal with leadership of teams and being reminded about the things that identify Campus Crusade for Christ as different and distinct from other ministries that cover similar areas. Last week we talked about the Campus Crusade for Christ statement of faith that identifies the beliefs that we’re willing to take a stand on. As we talked about it I thought it would be fun to think through the 17 points of it and share the reasons why we choose these hills to metaphorically die on – we are not willing to give them up.

When Carrie and I came on staff in 2003 we both had signed a copy of this committing to uphold these beliefs and to say that wa can agree to them without any hesitation. These are not things that we hold our financial partners to, and they’re not things that we require of non-leader students in our movements; if someone is thinking about leading in an official way – volunteer, student leader, intern, staff, etc. it would be necessary for them to agree to these points in a way that at least they would committ to not teach anything that disagrees with these points.

So, as I go into this series I want to let you all know that I actually am excited about thinking through this because as missionaries it empowers what we do, it defines who we are as a staff team and it defines what we teach students.

This series may take a while to get through, but I want to make sure that you continue to understand and get even deeper what we do and the ways we do it.

One of the things that I look forward to as I take the DC Metro System (buses and subway) to get to campus is the time to learn, both from reading and by listening to “podcasts”. For those who don’t know, podcasts are syndicated shows that you can download and listen to on an MP3 player… they’re like radio shows that you can listen to any time. There are a lot of them that I like to listen to from news and politics to sermons and Christian radio shows… even talks from conferences!

Today, as I was listening to a podcast that Campus Crusade for Christ puts out to encourage and empower people to share their faith with their friends and neighbors, I decided that I would share how to take advantage of this with all of you!

First off, you’re going to need a music player on your computer that can download podcasts… my suggestion is a program from Apple called iTunes (don’t worry, it works with a Windows computer). You can get it from iTunes.com.

After you download it and install it, open up iTunes and click on the “iTunes Store” link.

After the page loads you’ll have a lot of options in front of you, let’s start by searching for Cru’s podcast on reaching out to your friends, called the “Overflow Show”. To do that, go to the top right and type in “Campus Crusade for Christ” in the Search iTunes Store box and hit Enter.

It should bring up a page with a number of different options, including “Campus Crusade Today” as well as the “Overflow Show”, click the subscribe button next to the Overflow Show (or you can click on the logo for more information).

When you click the button it may or may not take you to your “Podcast” screen, if it does not click on Podcasts on the main menu underneath Music. It should now look something like this:

If it’s just showing the title Overflow Show click the gray arrow next to it to show all of the episodes. If you want to download all of them, click the Get All button. Notice the orange circling arrow, that means that it’s already downloading the newest episode! It should be ready listen to pretty soon (depending on your internet connection speed)! If you notice, there’s now also something on the menu to the right that says Downloads and has a similar spinning arrow from now on when you start iTunes up it will check to see if there are new episodes of your podcast and try to download them, this will let you know how many new episodes of podcasts it is currently downloading.

Now, if you want to try other podcasts that are listed in the iTunes program click on the iTunes Store button again and it will take you back to the last page you were at. You have a few options…

You can click the See All button and see other podcasts that were found under the “Campus Crusade for Christ” category (or you could look at the list on the bottom – for those of you in Central PA area, there are even some of the talks from Penn State’s Cru movement).

You could go back to the main page and browse through the podcasts and look for other ones you might like.

Sometimes you might run across a link for a podcast on a webpage, often when you click on it your iTunes will start up automatically and it will subscribe you to the podcast. Such is the case with the talks from our recent RADIATE07 (formerly known as Christmas Conference), I took the audio from the talks and uploaded them as a podcast and you can subscribe to them using this link:

RADIATE07 Podcast

If you have an iPod or another MP3 player you can now load them onto it (follow the instructions that came with your MP3 player) and listen to them wherever you go. You can also listen to them on your computer or burn them onto CDs to take with you in the car. Have fun with your new podcasts, and let me suggest some of the ones that encourage me (just for the record, I don’t necessarily agree with everything in the podcasts, but I find myself encouraged to seek God’s face because of them often); search for them in iTunes:

Campus Crusade Today
Grove City Alliance Church
Mars Hill Bible Church
McLane Church – Edinboro
National Community Church Audio Podcast
Overflow Show
SermonIndex.net Classics Podcast
Veritas Media

I hope this encourages you and gives you a new way to learn and grow in your walk with Christ!

Grace & Peace,
Jayson

As I’ve been on staff longer and longer, I’ve started to realize the thing that I am most passionate about – seeing guys’ lives change; seeing them grow into men after God’s own heart.

In this month’s prayer letter, I share about working toward that – I share a little bit of my heart and it’s fighting to see young men pursue God with all of theirs.

Make sure to check out this month’s extras in to get a glimpse of some of these studs.

(Links: Prayer Letter, Extras)

This year, like the past two, Carrie and I designed our own cards to send to family, friends and ministry partners (that’s you) for the celebration of the birth of our Savior. Unlike past years, we used computer technology to design our cards.

There were three different designs – you only got one of them. So, we wanted to share what you may have missed out on.

The red and green one were Carrie’s design. She manipulated a photo she took of some branches and sticks that we have around our home as decoration and created design with them. Mine, the blue one, was purely digital – I used Adobe Photoshop and created the design of the roots and the shoot. Click the thumbnails to see the full post-card…

All of them are based off of a verse from the prophet Isaiah wrote about the coming Messiah:

Then a Shoot will spring from the stem of Jesse, and a Branch from his roots will bear fruit. – Isaiah 11:1

This verse sums up much of the anticipation that the Jewish people have had for Messiah. At the time of Christ’s birth, there was a only a ‘stump’ of the (Jesse’s son) David’s dynasty remained… it is from there that the new shoot, Messiah, would spring forth!

Some of the translations that the early church fathers used had the word “star” in place of shoot – giving light in the darnkess of this fallen world. How those who witnessed the new-born King wondered at the hope that was shining forth through His birth that night!

As we find our fit withing Campus Crusade, we’re starting to find other things that we’re good at that can help the ministry as well as our work on campus. I wanted to share some things that I’ve had the opportunity to have a hand in that might be a little different than you would expect:

What you see above are thumbnails of things that I’ve had the opportunity to do that I have had a lot of fun doing; in order: running a television camera for the giant screens at Christmas Conference, designing the WesternPACru.com website, redesigning the Ocean City Summer Project website (still under construction), and designing posters to advertize the ministry that we’re partnering with in Erie – The Gathering.

A little about each one… My degree is in Speech and Communications which included a few electronic communication classes and a good working knowledge of running video cameras and I’ve had the opportunity to use my knowledge at both the National Staff Conference in Colorado in the summer of 2005 as well as Christmas Conference last year. As a matter of fact, the image there is from a promo video they’re using for this year’s Conference, you can see it here. I’m excited to be running the “steady-cam” this year, that’s the guy who walks around with the camera and gets the angled shots of the band, speaker, crowd, etc. Woot! My major actually taught me something!

Before I was a communications major I had aimed at getting a degree in computer science, specifically web-design. I still get to use that learning now! Carrie will tell you, I have a lot of fun doing these – sometimes it will eat up whole days. As a matter of fact, I should shut my computer down as soon as I am done writing this update for all of you. I’ve learned even more as I did these sites – CSS, a little Java, some PhP. And when I can program a site and keep the code as simple and clean, it’s like poetry to me!

Also, the flier. We shared in a prayer letter not long ago about our partnership with the Gathering (the college ministry of McLane Church, in Edinboro) to reach some of the Erie schools that we’re not able to get to due to red-tape. It launched a few weeks ago and we’re starting to do some advertising for it… this is something I put together with Photoshop and some extra time this past weekend. I love this just like I love doing the web-design stuff. Let me know what you think.

I love what the Lord has me doing with the best hours of my day and I love that He puts things into my ministry that give me life and energy – from the students to designing websites and getting to use all of my nerd powers.

Thank you for your continued prayers for us!