Abbie Smith - Can You Keep Your Faith in College?. Students from 50 Campuses Tell You How--and Why

THE JESUS -COLLEGE QUESTION

Y our new life on campus.

Many call it the best years of your life. No parents, no curfew, no authoritybasically no rules. College is four years of football games, fraternity parties, late nights leading to hangovers, and maybe some calculus homework (in case the parents ask). Pretty much everythingwho you are, who you will be, the truthis up for grabs. And for the first time, you're in charge.

But what many say are the best years, the church often calls the worst. Research says anywhere from 75 to 90 percent of high school seniors who call themselves Christians will abandon their faith by college graduation. That's devastating, but it also makes sense. One invites you to Communion, the other to communal kegs. Jesus says, I am the Truth, while college says truth is personal and subjective, if anything at all.

I remember a guy in freshman lit saying, You can't know God until you've had sex. I think what he meant was, Do you wanna hook up? but didn't press the issue. Another said Jesus was a father, but then I got confused when a professor said Jesus was gay and partnered with Buddha. Transitioning to university life is overwhelming as is. Add faith to the mix, and it can be pure chaos.

What's unusual about Can You Keep Your Faith in College? is that it introduces other students who are walking into that chaos with you. These voices aren't your youth pastor or parent. They're simply students like you, wanting to join in your conversations, assignments, coffee dates and late-night study sessions, where the spoken or unspoken question is: Can Jesus and college go together?

None of the contributors in Can You Keep Your Faith in College? pretend to have all the answers, and most still have huge unanswered questions. But at the core of these pages, there's a streamlined realization they don't want you to miss. In short, it's that God is alive and well across every campus of this country.

This book began with a chocolate Easter bunny. The bunny was me.

I was raised in a nonreligious home, and aside from an eating disorder and breaking an ankle in eighth grade, my life was perfect. I had loving parents and a great group of friends, and I seemed to do well in whatever I put my mind to. How could life get better?

Well, it did when I was asked to play tennis at Emory University, the college of my dreams. In simple terms, I left high school as the chocolate bunny you get at Easter. I was perfect, put together, and whole. But I was also hollow.

My journal called it a void. I didn't even know if I believed in God at the time, but I started asking questions and realizing maybe this life wasn't it. Maybe there was something beyond life that I was missing? I'd grown up in the South and attended a Catholic high school, so I'd heard the Jesus bit, but never quite connected. One fall semester, three words changed that.

1. A crush. Yeah, I fell hard for a guy. I would go where he went and do what he did. But it became quickly apparent that it was Jesus in the guy who I'd actually fallen for.

2. Community. I'd been on a lot of teams and in a lot of close relationships, but had never known community quite like the group of Christians I was being drawn toward. Sure, the original crush got me there, but then Jesus started getting through to me. And the love I felt among His followers, for exactly who and where I was, caught me totally off guard.

3. Commitment. What I heard that semester wasn't churchy. It didn't preach at, condemn, or ritualize me. It was about a relationship. It was about a pursuit of God, on the basis of His pursuit of me. Christ had gone to every extreme to defeat a death I couldn't escape and offer a life I could never attain on my own.