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“The University had no responsibility for the discrimination against Christians, and that the CU was wrong to require that those leading the CU should be Christians…” 

What’s the difference between a devout muslim or one of Dawkins’ meatheads being the president of a university Christian Union, and a university’s ‘Welsh Society being open to Scottish members; the wine society open to teetotal members, the choral society open to non-singing members, and the cheerleading society being open to male members…’?

None apparently.

Or at least that’s the decision of Martin Shaw, the QC leading the informal adjudication process involving Exeter Christian Union and Exeter University’s Student guild. He goes on to say that ‘the Guild were ‘laudable’ in their aims, the University had no responsibility for the discrimination against Christians, and that the CU was wrong to require that those leading the CU should be Christians. That position, he said, could be held by anyone of any faith or none, provided they agree to the objectives of the CU.’ 

Three weeks ago I sat in the middle of five hundred men at the EMA conference at St. Helen’s. Though the conference’s title was ‘Defining the times: what is an evangelical?’ there was a subtext to nearly every message during the week - ‘prepare your young men - persecution will come’. As one of only a couple of dozen men under 25 there I shuffled my bum. When we heard that ‘young men are scared to suffer they’ve never seen you have to do it’, mine, along with the other young men’s bum, almost did something else. 

Whoever it was that said it (either Tim Keller or Dick Lucas - I’ve searched my notes, and can’t find the quote…) hit the nail on the head. What does it look like? When will it come? I am scared to suffer - I don’t don’t have a clue what it’s going to be like.  

The news coming out of Exeter gives me an idea.

Exeter, we stand with you, and pray for you. You walk a path we’ll inevitably follow you down. Stand strong - you will bask in all that Christ has won for you soon.

Week in, week out, I remember plugging from the front the fact that CU was not a church. Oh we had all sorts of reasons why not, most pretty weak, but I was positive that it was not, nor should it be. My opinion hasn’t changed.

You see while I was at university my mission field was the university. I spoke with passion at large CU meetings about how we were a missionary group, that even though we weren’t in China or Montinegro (the vogue places to go do mission in Warwick) we were still missionaries, ’sent’ from our home churches to impact on the campus. It was brilliant, I had CU for witnessing to students and my University church for doing church things.

The greatest thing about CU was its focus on the gospel. By its very nature (multi-denominational) we were obsessed with focusing on Christ, the cross and His ressurection. Possibly our motive was to avoid any disagreement amongst us rather than a St.Paul realisation that that was all that mattered, but still, that was our obsession and is the obsession of CU’s all over Britain. Focusing on the cross made us extremely missionally minded. We used the tag line, “Mission and Maturity” but with our focus on evangelisinig the lost and getting them into local churches (as CU was most definitely not a church) we were actually more realisticly about, “Mission & maturity”.

So, why the title? Well as I’ve returned ‘from the mission field’ to the day by day slog of the local church, one thing has struck me more than anything. That is the need for people to realise that they are missionaries, that they’re place of work, friends, family, these are their mission fields and if they are truely maturing, then they would be witnessing all the more. Unfortunately we have this idea that doing ‘maturity’ is seperate from doing mission. How wrong could we be! The greatest source of maturing is sharing the gospel and anyone who is truely being matured will be driven more to mission and sharing Jesus. That’s a fact. Our churches are far to inward looking, thinking that if we ’send’ some students out, ’send’ some people abroad, then we fill our missional quota and the rest of us can get on with worshiping God and getting to know Jesus better.

If our Churches could steal just a small amount of that passion from our CU’s, well the kingdom of God would be in much better shape here in Wales. A church that is more interested in the style of songs we play, or why there isn’t an evening service any more, or why Mrs. Smith has started coming to our Bible study when we were quite happy as we were, a church that is more interested in this, I’m not sure is a church any more. At the very heart of a church must be the urgency to let people know about Jesus. If that is lost (if it is not over emphasised to the extreme) then we are nothing more than a social club and a very odd one at that.

Hats off to CU’s across the nation, they are more of a church than most of the churches that we’ll ever visit.