Western Kentucky University - Talisman Yearbook (Bowling Green, KY)

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Kid EXDOSGCI PFHV DI' DFEV 20 Kid Exposed Like the missionaries who entered the jungles of Africa, campus religious groups see Western as fertile ground for reaching students with the word about Christianity. To Melvin Poe, administrative assistant of the Glendale Baptist Church, Western Kentucky University is a mission field all on its own. Poe said members of Glendale, located at 1000 Roselawn Way, have reached many stu- dents at Western since the late 19605, and a lot of missionaries come out of Western. Churches and other religious groups have a number of strategies to reach the new students at Western who are looking to fill a spiritual void in their lives. Glendale has an especially aggressive program for contacting students about the religious activities it offers. i'We get the names of new students on a computer print-out and send them information in the mail, Poe said. lf a student decides to attend Glendale and become involved in some of the programs, he might find himself quite busy. Poe said Glen- dale has a regular visitation program for stu- dents on campus every Thursday, as well as suppers, retreats or 'iadvancesf' and Inter- national Day for foreign students and regular Saturday meetings - all in addition to the church's traditional Sunday and Wednesday worships We try to reach those students who live away from home for the first time, Poe said. They're trying to find friends. Poe said that sometimes students can get into the wrong crowd when they go away from home to attend college. lf they can get in- volved in church we can stop them from becoming involved in the sex movement, the dope movement or the alcohol movement. He said those things provide only temporary satisfaction. Poe said about 55 Western students regularly attend services at Glendale. A campus religious group that also has an aggressive approach to filling the spiritual needs of students is Campus Crusade for Christ, which has about 200 participants in its Bible study groups. Campus Crusade has Bible studies in dorm rooms and at different fratemities and sororities on an irregular basis, according to Maureen Burns, a senior secretarial science major from Louisville, who is a member of the group. On Tuesdays there is His Time, a group meeting with an emcee, singing and a speaker who lectures on things a Christian can apply to daily living, Burns said. Also at that meeting is Sharing Time. We leave the floor open for people to tell what the Lord has done for them, she said. Then there are prayer meetings three times a week, a training course for people who want to teach Bible studies and a leadership-training class every Thursday. That course teaches basics of Christian life and the basic principles of application, Burns said. As for the aim of Campus Crusade, Burns said, The basic premise is just to get to know God better. The second is to get God better known to people. We share our faith with peo- ple through evangelism. This evangelism is also known as witnessing - the act of telling about one's Christian faith to someone who has not been born again or saved. Burns said the leadership training course teaches the proper way to witness. We stress being sensitive with people, not being pushy. Many of Glendale's student members are also involved in evangelism. We believe that was the main mission of Jesus, Poe said. The main purpose is to go out and win others. We encourage students on campus to go and witness, to be a soul winner. Not all campus religious groups and area churches are as aggressive in witnessing. Julie Laffoon, an English graduate student from Madisonville, said her group, Western Christian Student Fellowship, doesn't do mass witness- Ing!! Instead, we believe you first have to have love for a person before you can talk with a per- son and win that person for Christ, Laffoon said. The kind of witnessing we do is on a per' sonal basis with friends, she said. Just by the things we do and the things that we say, people know we are Christians. The fellowship, which operates His House on 14th Street, is smaller than many of the other groups that work on campus, having about 14 members, Laffoon said. She said the advantage of a group like the fellowship is that it teaches people to apply Bi- ble knowledge. She said that her Sunday school classes taught only the basics when she was a child. lt was a good thing l got those basics when I was at home, but we never got away from it. One of the practical subjects her group has studied is Christian apologetics, or defenses of Christian dogma. The students learned how to defend their beliefs in such areas as, 'iHow do you know Jesus exists? and so on. Besides His House, there are several other Christian centers in town where students can go to have fellowship, pray, or just play ping-pong or chess or even watch television. Walter McGee, director of the Wesley Foundation, 1355 College St., said between 250 and 350 students use the center during a semester. The Newman Center for Catholics and the Baptist Student Center are also open to all stu- dents. Most services of these places are free but some provide lunch, also, for a nominal S31 fee to help cover expenses. The Rev. Clay Mulford of the 50-member Baptist Student Union said his group gives stu- dents i'an opportunity to work together and to grow spiritually together and to use one's gifts and talents in service to fellow students and to the community at large. Mulford began laughing. Boy, does that sound philosophical, he said. Another active religious organization is Maranatha Christian Center on Chestnut Street, which has about 55 members. Co- director Mark Massa said he believes people are more concerned now about religion. They are talking God and religion more in general. He added, But a lot of students have tumed away from regular religions. They're looking for something. Massa said his group doesn't have anything against traditional churches and denominations like Baptists or Methodists. Massa said all the religious groups on campus attempt to do the same thing. We want people to know the Lord better. Like the Baptist Student Union or the Church of Christ, I think we all do the same thing .... There's enough to go around. Tom Beshear El Illustration by Roger Sommer

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X' 'T' as YY YY PRESIDENT Richard Nixon had a tearful wave for the country as he prepared to leave Washington in 1974 after his resignation. Commentary by Tom McCord Long before the champagne was uncorked on New Year's Eve 1979, it was somehow, somewhere decided that the previous 10 years - the 19705 - should be summed up in one taut, timely label. Pundits began their reviews with a long, languid yawn. Thank God, they said with benign amusement, the '70s were going. The preceding 10 years were, the critics said, little more than years of preoccupation with Self, with Fulfillment, with Identity. They called it the Decade of Me. Well, yes, you could say that was, at times, true about the '70s. The Adidas-decked jogger, the beaming Nest convert, the sequined disco dancer: each was saying, sometimes unwittingly, Look out for me, l'm Number One. But it would be wrong to argue that the 1970s were simply the years of Narcissis. There was just so much more. Think of some of the images and you'll see why: -Locked arm-in-arm, demonstration style, women marched in the '70s and they politicked and they made more headway in gaining their rights than at any time since the push for the vote in the early years of the century. But their biggest goal remained the most elusive - passage of an equal rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution. -The photograph of a teen-ager named Mary Ann Vecchio, weeping over the body of a 20-year-old Kent State University stu- dent, cuts more deeply and illustrates most strongly the degree to which Americans were involved in Southeast Asia throughout the early 1970s. -Looking faintly menacing, the bedouined head of Saudi oil minister Sheik Decade In review Yamani popped up on Americans' television screens throughout the latter half of the decade as oil and energy in general became an increasing obsession for Americans. -A sweaty, shadowy Richard Nixon cried in the East Room of the White House and told of his mother's love, then climbed aboard a Presidential helicopter to leave Washington in 1974 and become the first U.S. president to resign. -The lovable bigot, Archie Bunker, became a regular visitor to millions of American homes each week via CBS. As star of the TV situation comedy All in the Family, Bunker, played by Carroll O'Con- nor, and the rest of the cast explored, with humor, prickly areas of social relations previously taboo. -When C-3PO and R2D2 hobbled across movie screens in 1977 as part of the movie Star Wars, their popularity said less about acting and more about the growing af- fection for the computer-machine-friend. The computer, in the hands of Americans, became in the '70s, no longer a gadget, but a part of life. As life, for Western students and everybody else, seemed to grow more com- plicated, more confusing in the '70s, we tried - usually in haphazard ways - to absorb the creeping changes while retaining some sem- blance of balance. With so much conflict, the tendency was to look back, to view what-had already occurred with a kind of nostalgia. In- deed, nostalgia became big business in the 1970s. Revivals of hit shows were hot on Broadway. Politicians cultivated their relationships with the nation's conservative voters who longed for simple answers and simpler times. And, on a deeper level, there was a fascination with, and even an embrac- ing of, fundamentalist religion and its reassuring tones. Nothing better symbolized the increasing visibility of conservative religion in American life than the election in 1976 of a Southern Baptist from Georgia to the White House. Fundamentalist faith was no longer the property of small-town, small-time churches, and Jimmy Carter knew that when he launched his bid for the presidency. So- called Christian broadcasting became a multi-million dollar operation, with television shows such as The PTL Club pulled in fantastic sums for their producers and, presumably, soothed the souls of their viewers. But some reached for other, less orthodox types of faith. Witness the 914 members of the Rev. Jim Jones, Peoples Temple community in Guyana who commit- ted one of the largest mass suicides in history in 1978. Many of them poor and ignorant, they followed Jones to South America to found a community of brotherhood, but died in pain after their corrupt leader instructed them to do so. The Unification Church, under Sun Myung Moon, attracted thousands of other followers who saw their founder as Gocl. Then there were the children of Hare Krishna, continuing a fascination with Eastern religion that blossomed in the '6Os. ln the '70s no major airport was without its Krishna followers, heads shorn, selling trinkets for donations At the other extreme, at decade's close, was John Paul Il. He was different. He was Polish and the first pope chosen from a Communist country. He was dynamic and a