Sharing My Story

The church's college/career group did present one opportunity
for leadership. Casting around for program ideas I suggested
having representatives from the various Christian campus ministries
appear before the group and share what they do and discuss
opportunities for involvement. I contacted the various local
reps from Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, the Navigators,
the Baptist Student Union and Campus Crusade for Christ (all
who were active on Western's campus at that time) and they
came and gave talks and answered questions about their
respective ministries. Campus Crusade was the easiest to
get in touch with as one staff member Lloyd Hawkins was
the college Sunday School teacher at Immanuel.

This lead to Lloyd asking me to accompany him on a personal
witnessing trip one day on Western's campus. He used the
Four Spiritual Laws booklet as a tool in a "random" witnessing
situations. While we didn't see any results from that time this
method of sharing Christian faith interested me. This happened
as I was winding up my senior year and looking forward to my
graduation in the summer of 1970. Campus Crusade offered
one week evangelism and discipleship training seminars in
Southern California during that time to train their student
volunteers. Lloyd "challenged" me to consider going to one
of those seminars and after some consideration decided to
accepted the invitation. I thought at the time it would be good
chance to find out more about Campus Crusade and have a
nice time in Southern California (beaches and Disneyland).

Shortly after graduating that Summer I drove down to San
Bernardino with several other local students and participated
in the seminar at CCC headquarters at Arrowhead Springs.
This seminar proved to be life changing. Campus Crusade
had a worldwide vision that fit those turbulent times. This
seminar spelled out Campus Crusade's strategy for evangelism
and discipleship and the seminar participants had several
times during the week to practice evangelism. They took us
by the busload to Southern California beaches (Huntington
and Manhattan) and we conducted religious surveys with the
offer of optional sharing of the gospel through the Four
Spiritual Laws. This was an easy though somewhat scary
way to share the basics of the Christian gospel with total
strangers. Overall I found this seminar to be very positive
experience and was predisposed to continue my association
with Campus Crusade. There was a real sense that Campus
Crusade could be a real change agent (certainly not the
only one) for good in a world erupting with revolution.

I decided upon returning to Washington to take some
post-graduate courses and become heavily involved in
the Campus Crusade outreach ministry on Western's Campus.