Jeff Ruetty, a sophomore business major involved with Campus Crusade for Christ’s student ministry at Ohio Uni- versity, had just started to walk closely with the Lord and began to notice the spiritual needs of his fellow business school students.

The problem-solving entrepreneur in Ruetty kicked in. Soon Ruetty and a few of his Christian friends in the Busi- ness School approached some Christian professors in the department to form a new faculty-student organization, Christian Business Leaders.

Last Spring they sponsored a major outreach called “What They Can’t Say in the Classroom.” The largest lecture hall in the College of Business at Ohio University had never hosted an event like this before. Every seat and aisle was filled with business students who had come to hear four of their professors share their faith stories. Several students came to Christ and many others expressed interest in learning more about Christ from their professors.

“Professors and students make great partners in ministry,” Ruetty explains. “Profs have the wisdom, speaking ability, and experience to provide leadership, but don’t have time to do the actual ‘legwork’ of running the ministry.” Christian Business Leaders at Ohio University has proven that when professors and students work together in ministry, the sky is the limit.

The tragic shootings at Virginia Tech in April 2007 exposed a giant contradiction in today’s university culture. The secular, materialist worldview that governs academia does not believe in God or the supernatural. It teaches that there is no absolute standard of right or wrong, or of good and evil.

Yet, when confronted with blatant evil and the awful reality of death, academics find their materialist worldview grossly inadequate. As one professor wrote the day after the tragedy, “We have seen what evil does.”

The Christian professor groups at Virginia Tech had been meeting to pray for the campus long before the tragedy. When the shootings occurred, this heightened awareness of evil among academics proved to be an opportunity for these professors to demonstrate the reality of God, and his love, to their grieving colleagues.

In October 2007, six months after the massacre, these professors and many other Christian groups at Virginia Tech brought Ravi Zacharias to campus to present two evening messages on the topic “Finding Answers Amid Life’s Greatest Losses.”

They also sponsored a luncheon outreach to 180 faculty and grad students and launched another of their regularly held book discussion groups on the book Deliver Us from Evil: Restoring the Soul in a Disintegrating Culture, by Ravi Zacharias.
One of the most redemptive moments occurred a few months after the tragedy when one of the slain students’ parents, who were devoted Christians, returned to the campus where their child crossed into eternity. Some of the Christian professors met with the grieving parents and together they walked through each of the rooms where students died, praying for the campus and calling upon God together.

Believers at the University of Alabama decided that showing an act of kindness could be a great way to express their faith.

I’m a musician. I write songs. I just hope that when the day is done, I’ll have torn a little corner off of the darkness.-Bono

Bono captures the heart of any concerned artist, the desire to make a difference.  We’re pretty confident that the same desire undergirds your call to academie, your love for your discipline.  You want to make a difference.

Certainly as a faculty member, you’re committed to tearing a hole in your own intellectual darkness and in the intellectual “unknowing” of your students.  Certainly, as a faculty member, you also want to contribute  to the marketplace of ideas.

In addition, for those of you who are Christ-followers, you’ve probably wrestled with ways to help fellow faculty and the students at your campus see what you’ve found in the person of Jesus Christ.  To see, as Paul of Tarsus wrote, the “light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6).”

We’d like to help.  The institutions of learning (colleges, universities, schools) should be places that make the world a better place.  As a faculty member, you shape those institutions in unique and powerful ways.  You also shape, not only your discipline, but also the fellow faculty with whom you work and the students you teach.  As a Christ-follower, you sense as well God’s calling on you to be salt and light for His loving rule and reign.

Faculty Commons, as a movement of professors and faculty, recognizes that “integration of faith and work” takes place in the person, the whole person.  Everything matters—your whole life including your faith, your family, your academic discipline, your position on campus, your health, your hobbies–all of you.  As Jesus once said, all of the Scriptures are summarized in loving God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength and your neighbor as your self.

Take some time to review our mission, vision and values here.  If you’d like to explore ways of integrating “all of you”, we’d like to help you in that journey.  We also need your help as well.

After you’ve reviewed where we’re headed, we’d love to have you take the next steps.  See next steps here.