 Media Credit: Joanna Allerhand/The Daily Northwestern Weinberg senior Chase Woodward is the president of MEIV, a Christian student group that seeks to relieve social and economic problems. [Click to enlarge]
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By Francesca Jarosz The Daily Northwestern
Chase Woodward never thought he'd harbor a passion for AIDS relief, immigrant rights and urban poverty eradication because of his evangelical Christian faith.
Growing up in a 5,000-member Omaha, Neb., "megachurch," he was taught to focus on values like prayer and preaching the Gospel. If Woodward discussed political issues, they were gay marriage and abortion, which he opposes.
The Weinberg senior said he still embraces those causes. But he's also broadened his scope of concern by looking critically at other social matters and taking a stance on them. "If you look at Jesus' life, he heals the sick, he eats with the poor," said Woodward, president of Northwestern's MultiEthnic InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (MEIV), which has dedicated this academic year to focusing on justice issues. "He's going around with the low people, and he tells his disciples to do the same. It's not all about me - it's about the broken world we live in."
Woodward's statement echoes the mantra of evangelical college students nationwide who are discovering that - along with prayer and preaching - religion also means pushing for social change. In the past few years, experts say the call to faith-based activism that mobilized in the 1940s through a group called the "neo-evangelicals" has seen a revival with the church's increase of racial diversity and political seasoning. And young believers are not only embracing this movement; they're leading it.
"Evangelicals' view of the Bible and God's will extends to care of the environment, social justice and foreign policy issues - those concerns have not traditionally been concerns of the evangelical church," said John Green, a political science professor at the University of Akron and senior research fellow at Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "It's a generational change. Younger evangelicals are more open to this broader agenda."
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