John Heron Project

It’s Monday, and it’s raining, and I’m walking onto the campus of Swansea University. Every pillar on the front of the James Callaghan Building has a poster proclaiming “Life” in big lower-case letters, superimposed over a swirly pattern. As I approach the library, I see two guys in hoodies with the same design, holding a video camera and interviewing a random passer-by about God.

It’s Christian Union mission week, and this last term, it’s been happening all over the country.

Every three years, UCCF (the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship) encourages each of its affiliated CUs to hold a mission. UCCF recently rebranded itself as the “Christian Union Movement”. It’s not a vain claim - the majority of the Christian Unions in the country fall under UCCF’s aegis. For any given mission, UCCF will supply staff workers and volunteers from other parts of the country as designated missioners, along with thousands of copies of one of the Gospels (it’s John this year), presented in an attractive booklet with explanatory notes, which they’ll deliver to as many students as they can. This time round, the brand of missions across the country is “Life”, and UCCF are marketing it more thoroughly than ever before. There’s a website with downloadable copies of the Life Gospel and notes, tracts, postcards and posters. There’s even a CD-ROM containing graphics and resources designed for any Christian Union (CU) across the country to bring the look of their mission in line with the brand. If you are a student in one of over 200 universities in the UK, you will probably have been in contact with the brand this term.

I wanted to know what difference UCCF’s mission efforts actually make. As a student some 10 years ago, I was a member of the CU, and I participated in one of these missions. All we got out of that mission in our first year was a lot of hostility from the rest of the university. No one was converted. Is this still the way of things? Is the CU still a hated minority? What I found surprised me.

“If it makes them happy”
The very first student I talk to on campus, I meet completely by chance. I’m passing the library, and I pass this guy giving out leaflets for a club night.

“It’s OK,” he says to the people passing him by, “you can take my leaflets. I’m not a Christian.”

I stop and turn. He sees me looking at him. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” he adds. He’s had a lot of competition in the leaflet game today.

I ask him what he thinks of what the CU is doing this week. “Well, they’re pushing it on people, but religion is in such a total decline these days, they need to push it. If that makes them happy, I’m OK with that. But no one cares about religion these days.”

If it makes them happy, I’m OK with that. Throughout the course of the week, nearly all of the dozens of people I talk to include some variation of that phrase. Ten years ago, you’d try and hand a copy of a Gospel to someone and they’d likely snarl at you for pushing your beliefs onto them. Now, everyone’s fine with it - if it makes you happy.

The CU have a stall in the foyer of Fulton House, the main university building. It’s kind of difficult to miss. There’s a little group of students in mission hoodies (on the front: the Life logo; on the back: “Jesus said: I am the way, the truth and the light”) stopping people and asking them if they want to fill in a questionnaire, and then maybe take a Gospel booklet or a tract. I spend quite a bit of time hanging around near the stall, asking people what they think about this.

Even though the huge stall is in a very prominent place indeed, many people have - to my amazement - simply not noticed anything going on. One student from Warwick University told me she hadn’t seen anything. So I checked out Warwick CU’s website and found that they’d done it the previous week. It turned out that she had seen some of the posters, but had had no idea what it was about.

Out of the people who did notice (and this includes many of those who answered the questionnaire), few even realised it was the CU. It’s not surprising. Hardly anywhere on the publicity (i.e. only in really small letters on some of the posters) did it actually say “Christian Union”.

Some of the people I ask think they’re Jehovah’s Witnesses, or in a cult. Why should they know? To expect that people are going to immediately assume you’re a Christian if you start talking about Jesus, God, the afterlife and stuff has become increasingly unrealistic. Faith has fallen so far off the radar that UCCF’s attempts to market it - which still assume a baseline of knowledge as to what Christianity is - are simply met either with mild interest or complete bafflement.

With added lunch
What Christian Unions actually do in Mission Week is usually up to the individual CU and runs the gamut of proselytising activity, from standing around handing out leaflets through to people wandering around the student village knocking on doors and offering to do people’s washing up for them. There will always, however, be
evangelistic talks, usually dealing with some sort of “issue”.

Swansea’s week is pretty typical in this respect. The centrepiece of each day of the mission is a lunchtime talk, with added lunch. Variations of these subjects are being presented all over the country: God - Why doesn’t he make himself obvious? Evil: does it exist? Harold Shipman: did he escape justice? Jesus: Is he the only way? Suffering: does God care?

I go to all of them: the scene’s pretty much the same each day. A long table laden with food stretches along the back of the room. Behind the table, a portable stereo plays tasteful music at a polite volume. People mill around with food before the talk starts. The atmosphere’s friendly.

The format stays the same throughout the week. Someone gives a talk - one of the missioners or one of the local UCCF staffworkers (and on Wednesday, the minister of a local church) - and then he’s joined by another staffworker or missioner, who take questions from the floor. Each day I ask one of the hoodies how many people here they don’t know. It ranges from about 25 per cent of the people on Monday, and peaks at just under half on Wednesday. I find this stunning. Ten years ago there was an implicit expectation that sometimes you wouldn’t get anyone outside the CU coming at all. Consequently, I’m expecting some sort of reaction. There isn’t. Not really.

This isn’t to say that nothing happens at all. On Monday, one studentasks a wildly tangential question which goes something like “If Jesus knew everything, how come he didn’t know about Muhammad?” This one confuses the people up front. The missioner’s final answer - “all we need for life and eternity is in the Bible, and if there’s anything else, we really don’t need to know that” - doesn’t impress the guy.

On Wednesday, things do at least get a bit heated. The firebrand local minister, having given a talk on “Harold Shipman - did he escape justice?” (actually a talk about hell) has to answer a question presented rather forcefully by a bearded student wearing a Yasser Arafat scarf. If the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust could conceivably come to faith after the war and be saved, the boy asks, what about their six million innocent Jewish victims? Did they go to hell, after all they had suffered? Eventually, the increasingly wary minister, after some pressing, gives the guy in the scarf the answer he was looking for: No, they only go to heaven if they’ve accepted Jesus and become Christians.

I’d spoken to Yasser Arafat Scarf and his mate, a boy wearing an Alice band in his hair, before the talk had begun, and had asked them if they’d tell me what they thought after the talk had finished. After the talk, Yasser Arafat Scarf gets collared by the minister, and they’re engaged in heated debate, so I can’t really talk to him. I find Alice Band, though.

“It was good,” he says. “I thought it was really interesting. Yeah. I enjoyed that.”

I’m dumbfounded. The minister has more or less yelled at the people here for 20 solid minutes, has tried to drum into every single soul here using the most provocative language he can bring to bear that if you do not follow Jesus, YOU ARE GOING TO HELL!

And the most reaction it gets is that it was “interesting.”

Getting them to pay attention
Throughout the week, I try to get reactions from the people who came along to the talks. It’s not easy. By Friday, it’s become apparent to me that despite the quality of the speakers - and they’re all pretty personable and engaging - the reaction they get from the non-Christians on the floor can be boiled down to “so?”

The turnout for these lunchtime talks has been phenomenal. Students are interested in hearing new ideas more than ever. They’ll come to your meetings, they’ll eat your food and they’ll hear you out. But getting them to pay attention - now there’s the trick.

Over the course of this week, of all the students I’ve spoken to, hardly anyone has expressed an opinion other than, “It’s all right by me. If it makes them happy, it’s cool.” And those few that did express an opinion all turned out to have some religious or political ideology of their own, making them part of the same minority as the CU - people with a cause.

Take Fran, for example. She’s the president of the Conservation Society, and she came to the Friday meeting because she did a deal with a CU friend - she’d come to this, and he’d join the Conservation Society.

During the talk, the Mission Guy says, “I work in universities, and always the one society that is universally despised is the Christian Union.” Fran, who’s sitting in the middle of the room, starts laughing loudly at this. “OK,” concedes Mission Guy to the floor. “Maybe it’s not so true around here.”

Afterwards I ask her what she thinks about the meeting. “It’s a bit vague, you know? This Life thing. No one really knows what it is. No one knows why they’re doing it.”

Do you think it’s making any difference? “Well, people might know the CU’s out and about.” She’s not really impressed with the way they’re going about it. “I think people would have more time for their messageif the CU actually got out there and got involved in stuff, rather than just standing around and telling people how great Jesus is.”

Also critical is Ben Lockwood. Ben is the student who asked that confusing question about Muhammad on Monday. Ben is a Bahá’i. I ask him what he thought of the answer he got on Monday. “Nothing more than expected. It wasn’t a particularly good answer,” he says. “The essential message they’re giving - and I know it’s not the way all Christians are - is a very exclusive, particular message.”

So what effect do you think the mission is having? “Same effect it’s had for the last three or four years. I haven’t seen the CU change its tactics. I debate whether they’re effective.”

I mention to Ben how hard it’s been to get opinions from people.

“That’s what I’d expect.”

Why? “They’re not being open. And they’re expecting others to be open. That’s almost the definition of hypocrisy. They’ll say as a platitude, “we know where you’re coming from,’ and they’ll say, “but you have to be here’ and they’ll say “you should be looking at these Bible verses, and not those.’”

Does the mission make a difference? “Not the difference they’d like it to make. They want to bring Christ to the university. They want people to be come Christian. It makes people like me who’d like a positive, open dialogue disillusioned with Christians and Christian institutions.”

Maybe it does, but the more I talk to students, the more convinced I am that a “positive, open dialogue” (whatever Ben means by that) isn’t actually something most people are bothered about. Ben, Fran, and the boy with the Yasser Arafat scarf are glaring exceptions to the vast majority of the students I talk to, both here and in other universities across the country. I think the simple fact of the matter is, they don’t care.

Ben blames the students’ apathy on UCCF’s mission style. I think he’s halfway there. But I’m starting to get the impression that the problem is less that UCCF’s missions alienate people. It’s more that they’re simply out of touch. The university scene has changed. They’re still pursuing mission in exactly the same way they were when I was a student, only with better graphics and nicer t-shirts.

One non-Christian student in an English university observed to me: “They seem to think that selling “jcuk’ t-shirts is the answer. I’d suggest that people should be bringing their attitudes up to 21st century standards rather than their wardrobes.”

While I don’t think he means quite what I’m talking about, I do think he has a point. The way they’re saying the message hasn’t changed, no matter how nice the marketing graphics are.

Like being accosted by Coldplay
The university chaplaincy has a coffee lounge where people tend to hang around during the day when they should be going to lectures and stuff. It’s here that I witness a brief frisson of excitement when someone in a hoodie reports that some of the CU posters have been taken down. Then it gets pointed out that they’ve been put in places where they break university rules and it’s the porters who have been taking them down. It’s almost disappointing.

It’s also in the chaplaincy, on Thursday, that I get the chance to talk to one of UCCF’s missioners, a Scottish guy who, like two others, has come down from his own neck of the woods to do this. During the question and answer sessions in the lunchtime talks, he acquitted himself well, and in person he comes across as an intelligent, levelheaded sort of a bloke. I really like him.

Scottish Guy tells me some of his story. Christianity had been part of his background, and he had been thinking about it for a long time when he converted in his second year at university, during a mission week. “I used to be quite sceptical of missions,” he says. “I’d been to some bad events which presented a side of Christianity as reluctant to do discourse, and where Christians were presented as arrogant and bigoted, and are in actuality arrogant and bigoted. But since I’ve been with UCCF, I’ve found them gracious and open. They listen to people and relate to it.”

Do they? More on that later.

Later on in the week, I ask Scottish Guy if the week met his expectations. “I was expecting to see some opposition,” he says. “I was also expecting to see the CU grow. And they have. They’ve learnt a lot.”

Opposition? Have you actually seen any opposition? “No. No, I haven’t. There was only one guy all week who was really up for a scrap. It was a bit disappointing, really.”

He describes the One Guy - Yasser Arafat Scarf, long hair, goatee. Yes, him. In fact, since Wednesday, most of the CU members have told me how they’ve had everybody being nice to them except This One Guy. Who turns out to be the same guy, every single time. One student doesn’t really constitute persecution.

I can understand his disappointment. A reaction - any reaction, even a negative one - would have been so much better than people simply nodding politely and saying, “Well, that’s interesting. If it makes you happy, that’s cool.” The fact is that even if people get mildly annoyed at the Christians, they’re simply too polite to say so these days. What we have in our universities is a student body that doesn’t even assert its right to be apathetic.

It’s not even that the CU are sad. Despite the hoodies, the CU are these days a fairly hip-looking group of young people. They’re likeable, attractive and on the whole, well, they’re hardly the marginalised weirdoes they used to be. If they appear earnest, that’s only because earnestness is the only unfashionable trait they affect. To be honest, they’re only earnest by comparison. This seems to be the way things are going across the country. One student from a college in England told me that being approached by Christian Union members was “strangely like being accosted by Coldplay”.

Once you’ve unpacked that statement, it’s easy to see what it means. They’ve got that “trendy but nice” thing going for them. But it says something about the scene today when the only byword for earnestness is a po-faced rock-band from my generation. Saying something and really meaning it has gone out of fashion.

A beleaguered minority
I ask Nick Bradley, this year’s Student Union (SU) president, if he’s aware of the Life brand. “The Life brand. Yeah. It’s visible. They’ve been more proactive this week than they have for years. They’ve been out there - they’ve spoken to me, asked me what I think is the perfect life. They filmed me. They’ve been good, though. They’ve been really willing to listen to what people have to say. They’re getting out there and putting forward their own view in a way that isn’t preachy - if you’ll pardon the word. It’s been good.”

Has it had an impact? “Yeah. Will it make a difference? I’m the wrong person to ask. But I’ve heard about it.”

Swansea’s Union is something of an rarity in the British university scene. Often, SUs and CUs exist in open hostility to each other. UCCF pointed out to me that there are about a half-dozen CUs this year alone who have been (or are in real danger of being) expelled from their SUs, including University College London, Warwick and Hull.

But if you look at the proportion of students who take part in student politics, the number is minimal. For example, in Swansea’s sabbatical elections this year, the winner got in with 650 votes. Out of a constituency of nearly 10,000, only about 1,000 students voted. The result is that those who actually take part are in the same minority as the CU - the minority of people who actually give a flying one.

However, when I approached UCCF on this point, they seemed unwilling to offer dialogue: “Apathy is always going to be a major obstacle in a post-modern, relativistic society. However, the flip side of apathetic relativism is a growing intolerance to truth claims. UCCF students and staff are more than aware that the majority on campus are too apathetic about the claims of Christianity. But any who have known the national CU scene well for the past 10 years will confirm that there has never been so much vocal opposition as in the past few years.”

True, it’s telling that the most vocal opposition is at the top. But then, it’s only the most earnest who have the force of personality to get to the top. It’s a dangerous situation in some ways, but still, it simply underlines the fact that Student Unions are only slightly more representative of student opinion than UCCF is. The silent majority, meanwhile, are increasingly silent.

A few CUs are only just beginning to wake up to this - low attendance at Student Union general business meetings across the UK makes a lobby group like the CU potentially very powerful, if only they received any encouragement to get involved, beyond using it as a platform to make converts (a rationale offered, for example, in a recent issue of UCCF’s new magazine, The Blurb).

Ironically, in a climate where no one turns up for student politics, the potential power CUs could wield is vast. UCCF is the largest and most active student-based lobby group in the country, after the National Union of Students itself. And yet, paradoxically, UCCF doesn’t register on most people’s radar. Most students just don’t care. And while Student Unions may have people hostile to CUs in their executives, many are unaware of UCCF’s existence. University College London, for example, had voted not to expel their CU in a meeting; they only rescinded the decision and expelled them anyway when it was pointed out to them that the CU was affiliated with an external organisation (UCCF) which held standards in violation of the SU constitution.

But UCCF’s culture seems to promote the belief in many of its members that CUs constitute a beleaguered, persecuted minority.

Some even seem to believe that there is some sort of liberal conspiracy out to get Christians. Although the idea of getting a bunch of liberals to agree on anything long enough to form a conspiracy is frankly absurd, somehow I think the idea that UCCF may be an irrelevance is somehow worse. If they persecute your organisation, it means they care about you. But if they just shrug and say, “If it makes you happy,” that’s worse than death. Ironically, the recent crackdown by the minority groups that run SUs has given UCCF’s work meaning and direction.

“Now I’m a believer”
I’m heading to Friday evening’s end-of-the-mission meeting, and I run into a group of people, including the main missioner, hanging around the ground floor of Fulton house. It seems that the venue the CU has booked for tonight’s meeting has been double booked, and they have to find somewhere else. In the end, they’re given a room next door to the student bar.

While we’re waiting, I talk with the missioner. A plain-talking, decent chap, I warm to him very quickly.

“I need some sleep now,” he says. “It hit me last night. I haven’t been home for three weeks.” He’s been doing missions for CUs most of the term so far, and he’ll probably do more this year. I ask him how he thinks it went. “Mostly good. Most of the CU have been involved. But not all of them. I’m a bit disappointed with that. When I started doing missions about 10 years ago, they’d all turn up, to all the talks. Now a lot of them only decide to come to some of it.”

I mention to him how apathetic most of the students seem to be.

“Even the Christians are apathetic,” he says.

It depends on what he means by “apathetic”. By comparison, the CU are about the most committed people in the university.

The final meeting is another talk, given by the missioner. About halfway through, he says that one of the ways being a Christian in university is hard is that people shake their fists at you and say, “How dare you!” when you try and evangelise them. Hang on. That’s not what he said to me a minute ago. It dawns on me that he’s given this talk before, on a number of occasions. Not that there’s anything wrong with that - most preachers have their repertoire. But if the talk’s going to stay relevant, I think it should go through some edits soon.

When he’s done, I’m introduced to the CU’s one convert of mission week. He’s happy to tell me about his week. It’s the best week of his life, he says. He’s happier now, he says, than he has ever been. He looks it. He tells me that he had been thinking about Christianity for a long time, had been surrounded by Christians for years. He went to the first evening meeting of the mission, but it was through talking with his Christian friends late into the night that he came to the point where he made his decision. Talking to him, I can’t help inferring that sooner or later he would have made that decision anyway, mission or no mission.

So, what do you want?
What do students want out of life? Expectations seem low. Take the answers to the CU’s questionnaires. Although quite a lot of people signed up for the Christianity Explored (a kind of alternative Alpha) courses the CU will be running later in the term, the results of the questionnaires show little variation.

To the question, “What do you want most out of life?” most people said: “to be happy”. To the question, “If God asked you, “Why should I let you into my heaven?’ what would you say?” the usual answer was something like: “I’m a good person. I’m all right.”

The Evangelical Alliance’s 2002 report, God and the Generations reports that, “the new set of rising adults [are] more apolitical, selfsufficient, materialistic and hedonistic in their attitudes than any generation observed before.” These “millennials” (Britons who came of age since roughly 1999) just want to be happy. These people are the new silent majority in our universities.

Yes, they’re curious of new ideas - especially those which claim to hold the key to happiness - hence, the number of people who attend evangelistic meetings and sign up for Christianity Explored courses.

And being a Christian is nowhere near the social stigma it was in universities even 10 years ago. The only people who hate Christians are pretty much in the same boat.

But hardly anyone is being converted through missions, and getting converts is, in the end, the measure by which the success of an evangelistic endeavour is gauged. Why? You’ve got a crop of people who are not hostile to you, who will come to your meetings, and who have no preconceptions about what you’re saying. It’s what the leaders of UCCF would consider a prime opportunity. And yet, somehow, they still manage to blow it.

The old tactics - the shock of suffering, graphically explained, the horrors of the crucifixion, the fear of hell - these things no longer have any effect. Virtually no one under the age of about 22 gives a monkey’s about these things. Old-style missions don’t wash any more. A fundamentally new way of relating to the young adults of now needs to be found by UCCF if they want to see people join them. No amount of surface-level image manipulation is going to change that.

Published by shipoffools.com 2004