When Liz & I were doing campus ministry in the 1990’s, we started to notice some things that nobody else seemed to be talking about. Standard methods of talking to students about Jesus, & faith, were becoming less and less helpful. All they seemed to do was cause people to put up their defenses.
As we talked to others about what we were seeing, it seemed the common response was people simply looking at us like we were speaking a foreign language. When we started planting the Vineyard in Ithaca, we started to hear some of the other guys who were planting vineyards around the same time talking about the same type of experiences. (Thankfully many of them were much further along in the thought process than we were.)
This past week I got to come up to Cambridge, MA for the inaugural Center City Summit & hang out with some of the people who’ve been leading the way in this new way of talking about Jesus with the secular culture we find ourselves swimming in. It was an encouraging couple of days and I’m excited about where the conversation goes from here…& I’m looking forward to talking about this more back in Ithaca.