From BeliefNet:
Campus Crusade for Christ has decided to make a major change — its name.
In early 2012, reports the Internet website The Blaze, the multi-faceted para-church group will officially drop the name it has held for 60 years, replacing it with a three-letter word — “Cru.”
Wayne Besen is the Founding Executive Director of Truth Wins Out and author of “Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth” (Haworth, 2003). In 2010, Besen was awarded the “Visionary Award” at the Out Music Awards for organizing the American Prayer Hour, an event which shined a spotlight on the role American evangelicals played in the introduction of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
When I was in college, being gay, I knew all too well who they were, and at the beginning of every semester they would be stationed like spiders at each walkway into the classroom buildings trying to hand out little green New Testament books. At first I would refuse them, but then I thought, why let them give it to some other hapless student. So, after that, I took all the ones that I could get from them and then tossed them into the nearest dumpster. I’m only sorry that it was such a waste of paper.
One of the many things that I found offensive about this (besides the fact that this was a state college and I considered it a violation of the separation of church and state), was that the guys handing them out were usually not even college kids; mostly they just looked like ‘grumpy old men’ who had no business proselytizing on a college campus.
Gary-so your understanding of “separation of church and state” is that religious views should not be allowed to be expressed at a state university? wow that is really an amazing and scary position
I think they believe “Cru” sounds cooler.
“I’m wit’ the Cru, yo!”
Will, there’s a big difference between expressing religious views, and proselytizing on the state’s dime and endorsement.
I admitted my homosexuality at a Campus Crusade for Christ confession meeting in the mid-1990s. After my awkward confession, they clearly had no idea what to do with me. Eventually, a leader found a pamphlet which led me to an ex-gay ministry.
A few years later, I heard an Exodus leader tout that a huge partnership with Campus Crusade and other ministries would be announced that would include major financial backing for Exodus. However, beyond the Exodus’s 1998 newspaper ad campaign, I’m not aware that anything ever materialized.
The overly coiffed name “Cru” sounds appropriate to me. Like many evangelical organizations, Campus Crusade was great at having events and selling salvation as an easy seven-step transaction. However, their crusade never seemed deeper than organizing whatever the next event was.
In my mis-guided younger years, I worked for Young Life, yet another Christian campus outreach ministry. They weren’t as bad as Campus Crusade, but they were bad enough, proselytizing high school kids on public high school campuses. We should never have been allowed to be there, I can see now. Campus Crusade is the worst!
No Will, as usual a wingnut only hears what they want to hear. There were organizations for all the major religions on campus, but none of them PUSHED their propaganda in your face while walking to class, and as I already said,the pushers were not even college students, they were older men who I knew represented a rabidly homophobic sick twisted version of ‘Christianity’. A hate group has no place on a college campus. That was 30 years ago and lgbt kids are still killing themselves because of groups like campus crusade (but definitely not for Christ).
In reading these comments, it appears that there is a line of thinking that Christians should not have a voice in the public square and that Christians may believe what they wish privately as long as they, unlike anyone else, do not act on the truth they have found through reason.
Well, America is still a great place to be so no one has to pack their suitcases yet.
Oh boo-hoo. Jerry. This is an anti-gay blog. It is the constant shoving of their intolerant crap on everyone else that grates. And no students should not have to run a gauntlet of bible thumpers to get to class.
This is an anti- “ex gay” blog. If these people really are no longer gay (HA!), the would be heterosexual. Glad to see fewer and fewer people buying the b******t of the the fundies.
Jeremiah, christians are welcome to act on their “truth”, they’re just not welcome to insist anyone else follow their “truth”. No one’s forcing christians to be gay or to enter a same sex marriage, they’re free to live as they choose which is more than they want to allow LGBTs to do.
Uh, Jeremiah, try saying some of that crap in most of America…you CAN say it, but, expect to be 1) laughed at 2) seen correctly as a bigot (note; bosses don’t like those) 3) mocked hilariously 4) told by even most religious people that you need to get right with God and move past your fundamentalism and bigotry.
You can stay in America, but, don’t expect to be settng the agenda for the rest of us. That day has passed.
Norm said: “Like many evangelical organizations, Campus Crusade was great at having events and selling salvation as an easy seven-step transaction. However, their crusade never seemed deeper than organizing whatever the next event was.”
That reflects my experience, also.
When I was in high school in the 1980s, I read the youth magazine Campus Life, which was a spinoff of Christianity Today that worked closely with Campus Crusade and other missionary groups and colleges. In a cultural era that was dominated by Eddie Murphy, Prince, and Michael Jackson, Campus Life was still warning teenagers not to date people of different races because — they said — while there’s nothing wrong with those black people, the Bible doesn’t want Christian youths to cause scandal for their parents.
A few years later, Campus Crusade was determined to evangelize my already-Christian (albeit Catholic) college campus. While the official Catholic campus ministry taught a faith rooted in charitable and humanitarian action and self-sacrifice, Campus Crusade preached an alternate view that students could be free from such spiritual baggage. Specifically, we were told that we didn’t need to rethink evangelical support for apartheid in South Africa, evangelical support for death squads in Central America, Pat Robertson’s support for African diamond mines and slave camps, a suicidal nuclear-arms race, or how best to promote life and social progress AFTER birth. It was implied that true faith was found via blind trust in evangelical self-pride. The more we loved ourselves and the “in” crowd, the more God loved us, because, well, God is love.
The result was a crowd of happy but spiritually immature, isolated, and naive people who voted for equally self-satisfied politicians… and who paved a road of good intentions to a place quite distant from Heaven.
Far from welcoming and serving outcasts as God created them, Campus Crusade merely assimilates and consumes outcasts, producing ideological and spiritual Borg.
ps. separation of church and state is *not* in the constitution, may The LORD Reign True, Christianity True. as in Scripture, Gospel, etc. Love, even when tough. PLGB praise God
also i believe though cru some places on campus may have school funding (which praise God they have a right to most likely, provided they share Way Truth And Life and are open for all/any to join), private or state depending on the campus. however, they do receive donations and have their own private funding i think, though Lord Forgive be i wrong or offbase PLGB
Stop lying joan. The first amendment forbids the government from establishing a religion, something the founding fathers included with the stated purpose of creating a seperation of church and state.
Besides, Thomas Jefferson thought your magic book was kind of weird. He cut all the magicky bits out of it too. The founding fathers also didn’t like the idea of military chaplains.
Actually Joan, you should be in favor of the constitutional seperation of church and state because it protects religious kooks from the state as much as it protects the non-religious from your religious kookery.