Evangelicals at MIT

A major part of my college experience was my involvement with Campus Crusade for Christ, an evangelical interdenominational outreach to college students. The Sunday's Boston Globe has a story on the growth of evangelical groups at Harvard, MIT, and other Boston campuses.

There are 15 evangelical Christian fellowship groups at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology alone. This is a pretty stunning development for a university where science has always been god, where efficiency and rationality are embedded in the DNA of the cold granite campus. Hundreds of MIT students are involved in these fellowships -- blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians, especially Asians. Some of the groups are associated with powerhouse national evangelical organizations, like Campus Crusade for Christ and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Others are more home-grown. Either way, the ranks are multiplying. ...

And somewhere along the way, evangelical Christianity -- which a generation earlier had been a mark of embarrassment, a sign that you had checked your brain at the gate -- became not just tolerated but cool.

You can see this in the throngs of students from around Boston who cram into Harvard's Science Center on Friday nights to sing, "We are hungry for more of You/We are thirsty, oh Jesus." The event is called RealLife Boston, which is Campus Crusade's name for its 500-student Boston-area ministry, and the SRO crowd is made up of well-built athletes, attractive faces, even artsy types with chin hair and trendy black glasses. The emcee is Aaron Byrd, an easygoing junior from Abilene, Texas, who plays safety on the Harvard football team.

Sounds like the evangelical groups are approaching or surpassing the level of 20 years ago, when I was on campus.

It's an interesting profile, from the Globe's left-wing, secular perspective, but fairly balanced nonetheless.

(Link via Instapundit.)

UPDATE 6/2/2005: I'm sure the article is long-gone from the Globe's website, but you can still read it here, on the website of Brian Ellis, a CCC staffer based in Cambridge.