Fall Conference Recap

Knotted | Fall Con 2013 Recap from David Luoh on Vimeo.

Where We've Been

A year and a half ago, the staff and students of Cal Christian Fellowship found themselves asking questions like:

What is our purpose on this campus? 

Is our only goal to get a piece of the Christian pie (i.e., find as many Christian freshmen to join our club as possible)? 

Is there more that God wants to do in and through our community?

What would it look like if we believed and pursued the "more" that God has for us?

God gave them scripture verses that guided the discernment process: the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, and the call of Abram in Genesis 12. Students saw themselves as the people building the tower of Babel, laboring to have something to show for themselves, something that can protect them and serve as a sign of their significance. They want to "make a name for themselves."

In the competitive environment of Cal, students are under pressure to perform well academically, score prestigious internships and jobs, and pursue extracurricular activities that will look good on resumes. But the very things that seem to promise joy and peace and fulfillment in the future bring much anxiety, guilt, and sadness in the present. The promise of a tower to protect their lives actually binds them to the smallness of what they can see and build with their own hands. It becomes a prison.

In Genesis 12, we see God promising to make Abram's name great. Abram sets out, journeying in stages, in pursuit of this promise. Along the way, he builds altars. We've been asking what it could look like to build altars testifying to God's faithfulness in different campus communities instead of towers that testify to our own fear and pride.

This sounds awesome, but it's a lot harder to put it into practice. How much has the mentality of "perform according to external standards" influenced the ways staff and students alike have approached their ministries? It goes pretty deep, we discovered during a session in which we asked students to brainstorm a document of communal commitments that they could sign.

This conversation turned into a tense discussion about how we wanted to enforce attendance/timeliness at meetings. A minor issue suddenly seemed very important, with strong opinions on both sides. We realized that we had come into the conversation with a few assumptions:

-This group is subject to rules that are placed on individuals from "the outside".
-These rules define what is allowed and what is not.
-In other words, membership is contingent on meeting these expectations.

Then we reframed the conversation to be an answer to the question, "What kind of community would we like to be part of? What values would that community live out, and how might that look? What kind of meeting would we want to go to?"

This is an example of how we are learning how to approach our endeavors differently. It's a process that requires us not just to be thoughtful, but also to be willing to ask questions when we get uncomfortable--and willing to hear the answers.

Terminology

Because one of the things about a new place is ... they have different words for stuff!

• CCF (Cal Christian Fellowship) | ivccf.org
• Oldest Christian fellowship at UC Berkeley
• One of six InterVarsity groups at Cal: CCF is the multi-ethnic chapter
• The others are for International Students, Greek (Sorority and Fraternity) students, Black students, Latino students, and Filipino students. These sister fellowships have a covenant together outlining the ways they commit to be family for one another.
• Experience, Embody, and Share the Unconditional Love of God | our CCF vision
• Focus Group
• Biblestudy/community groups on campus, usually with a particular focus (engineering, women's identity and sexuality, social justice, etc.)
• Discipleship Cohort (DC)
• The 22 students who lead focus groups and dorm biblestudies
• Meets weekly with staff to receive training and form a leadership community
• Core
• Students helping organize, vision for, and lead focus groups
• Being discipled by Discipleship Cohort leaders
• Large group
• Fellowship-wide gathering with worship, announcements, activities, and Bible exposition
• Every two weeks

the longest distance between two points

I'm two and a half months into my transition, and I confess, it has already cut straight through my defenses to deep places, the places of calling, identity, trust, hope, and love. The first week I was here, I thought my feelings of vulnerability stemmed from the fact that I didn't know my way around the city--a geographical disorientation. The second week, I realized there were layers of loneliness--people here didn't yet know me, so I felt as though I had to be on my best behavior when meeting them. The third week, I began to suspect something along the lines of a second depressive episode and resumed an antidepressant I'd been taking before. The fourth week, I only had space in my mind for sharp, unrelenting fears that convinced me of my own helplessness and inadequacy because I could not longer do my job--meeting and interacting with people, planning events, and implementing ministry structures.

It's been a harrowing road from that time to this. On the way, there have been many falls and many tears. The map that I had coming into this experience--expectations about how it would look to live here, what it would feel like to be on a new campus, and how long it would take to settle in--this map has been erased and redrawn many times. What I've seen is that I tend to draw straight lines because I'm looking for the shortest distance between two points. God's lines seldom follow my patterns. His lines weave in and out, up and down, back and forth all across the page, and halfway in, I despair that they will ever arrive at a destination. Yet how many great works of art have been created using only straight lines?

I've had to wrestle with the oversimplified view I have of how God works. Part of this has been challenging the polarities I use to decode the world: that is good, that is bad, this is easy, this is hard, this is a time when I should be mourning, and this is a time when I should be rejoicing. It is so, so difficult not to choose one side over the other. Sometimes I get in mourning mood and everything is so hard, so sad, so heavy. Then when God brings me an opportunity to rejoice, I reject it, and become even more lopsided in my lifestyle.

Yet in moments of deep joy, or even in moments of relative calm, anxious thoughts and feelings can still make their presence known. I tend to push these sensations away, distracting myself to avoid feeling them. I again lose touch with the living God who is in tune with this aspect of me and all humans.

I'm beginning to see that all of this complexity, as frustrating and confusing as it's been, is exactly the place God meets me. Because I can't hold the different pieces together on my own, I need someone with a way bigger perspective to get involved (see Colossians 1:17). The journey has involved steeping in the ways I already know how to relate to God--prayer, musical worship, Bible reading--as well as new discoveries--cognitive behavioral therapy, self-compassion, and mindfulness.

God is blazing a new path in my soul, and it is equally exciting and unnerving. It's what I signed up for when I decided to move, but it has looked SO different than I expected.

Loving the Campus

I want to love this campus as God loves it, and in order to do that, I need to get to know it better! Here are some of the things I'm discovering about Cal:

 

source: oep.berkeley.edu



According to the UC Berkeley website,

"The University of California was chartered in 1868 and its flagship campus — envisioned as a 'City of Learning' — was established at Berkeley, on San Francisco Bay. Today the world's premier public university and a wellspring of innovation, UC Berkeley occupies a 1,232 acre campus with a sylvan 178-acre central core. From this home its academic community makes key contributions to the economic and social well-being of the Bay Area, California, and the nation."

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Student body

Number of students: 36,142 students as of Fall 2011 including 25,885 undergraduates and 10,257 pursuing graduate degrees. (Source)
Undergraduate gender: 53% female and 47% male (Fall 2011).
Degrees granted in 2010-11: Bachelor's, 7,466; Master's and professional degrees, 2,480; Doctoral, 905

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Profile of admitted freshmen

Number of applicants: 50,312 (Fall 2010) (Source)
4,109 students enrolled (Fall 2010) (Source)
25.6% of applicants admitted (Fall 2010 and Spring 2011) (Source)
4.19 (on a 4.0 scale) median high-school grade point for admitted freshmen (Fall 2010). (Source)
SAT scores: Average SAT Composite score of 2031 for admitted freshmen (Fall 2010).
73% from California (Fall 2010) (Source)
63% from California public high schools (2010) (Source)
25.1% are first generation college student with neither parent having a four-year college degree (Fall 2010) (Source)
66% have at least one parent born outside the U.S. (2009) (Source)

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Fields of study

Motto: Fiat Lux  ("Let there be light")

130 academic departments and more than 80 interdisciplinary research units.
Colleges and schools: UC Berkeley is divided into 14 colleges and schools, most of which are subdivided into departments.
Most popular majors (as of Fall 2009): Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1500 students; Political Science, 916 students; Molecular and Cell Biology, 1020 students; Environmental Science, Policy and Management, 886 students; Economics 828 students. (Source)
Courses offered: More than 7,000 courses in some 350 degree programs; the campus produces more Ph.D.s annually than any other U.S. university. (Cal Facts 2009)




As interesting as all this data is, it is also not necessarily the experience of the people who live, study, and work here. Checking out the Golden Bears blog, I compiled the one-word descriptions these Cal bloggers use to describe their school:

Vibrant

                                                                                                   Exploratorium
                                                           Golden!
                                                                                 Super-CAL-ifragilisticexpialidocious
                                                 Balanced
                                                                                                                        Community
                                                                                  Opportunity-filled
                                                                Unique
                                                                                             Microcosm


I'm interested to hear how the students in Cal Christian Fellowship (the InterVarsity chapter I'll be working with) describe their experiences at Berkeley.

Why?

I've been getting this question a lot lately. Seems that inquiring minds want to know ...

Estelle, why are you going to Berkeley?

Why you?
                Why Cal?
                                Why now?

I'm sure I'll be asking myself these questions in a few weeks when I'm finally there and it fully dawns on me that I'm not on the Farm anymore. Before I attempt to give an answer, I have to start with the truth that I don't totally know why and probably won't until way later. So this is a first draft, to be revised as I live more years and figure out a few other things.

False reasons that you might be tempted to believe:
       I'm going because I've always wanted to live in Berkeley.
       I'm going because I don't like Stanford, Palo Alto, or the people there enough to stay.
       I'm going because I look better in blue and yellow and I am betraying my alma mater.

The real reason I'm going is that God said, "Come, follow me at Berkeley" in March 2013 when I was discerning what my next three years on staff would be. I knew that I wanted to be in InterVarsity for the next phase of my life while God continued to speak into my future. I had assumed that Stanford would be the place I would continue on staff. God opened a process of dialogue with supervisors about potentially relocating to a different campus--specifically Cal--and from the beginning, the possibility had an eerie sense of "rightness" about it. I visited Berkeley and found it to be my ideal Sabbath spot--a place I would go to unwind, connect with God, and enjoy activities and settings that give me joy (museums! libraries! parks!). It scared me more than a little because it felt like it actually fit. That's another way I could tell this was probably God's doing.

As a final push, God presented me with a challenge at the Asian American Ministries Staff Conference in Long Beach, CA. It was the challenge not to keep sitting at the kids' table--an exhortation to develop and use the gifts God has given me, even when those gifts feel like they require courage to accept and to act on (like the gift of prophecy, which is about speaking God's words and shedding light on a murky situation). God was clear that he wanted to start a new chapter in my life using gifts I hadn't fully seen in myself, and he invited me to trust him by stepping out of the comfortable space I'd been in for the past 7 years (aka the "nest") and trying my wings in an unfamiliar setting.

I'm taking with me the lessons God has taught me as well as the relationships that have seen me through these growing years, but I still feel exposed and self-conscious as I anticipate my new context. I'm pretty sure that's exactly where God wants me to be. It was easy enough to love others when I was inviting them into my world--into my school that I'm familiar with, and into my fellowship, where I know what my role is. How much more difficult (and more amazing) will it be to learn to love others when I myself don't quite know how I fit or where I belong?

It's an exciting challenge, and one that I hope you'll be blessed by as you read my blog, LovingCal, over the next three years.