Gracepoint Berkeley's Worldview Camp & SummerFest

For you guys thinking about what to do with your summer, check out Worldview Camp, an annual tradition for college students to take a couple days to train and equip their minds with some of the most relevant current topics:

• Abortion
• Euthanasia
• Intelligent Design, Evolution, Science and Faith
• Sexual Ethics, and more...

Special Guest Speaker is Sean McDowell, son of famous Christian apologist, Josh McDowell. Sean joined us about a month ago and gave a riveting 15-minute presentation on having a reason to believe. I'm looking forward to him leading this year's Worldview Camp! Signups are online. If you've never gone to one, I encourage you to do this! We spend 4 years getting smart at Cal. Take a couple days and get smart about Christ and our culture.

This summer, we're putting on SummerFest for ImpACT (Impaction Asian Communities for Tomorrow), a non-profit organization aimed at academically and personally enriching underprivileged kids from Oakland elementary schools. SummerFest is going to be awesome, but we're going to need plenty of help from volunteers, everything from drivers to lunch prep to team leads to teachers, and much more. If you're interested, check out SummerFest Info and Signups page online.

If anyone in H.1 or H.8 have participated in either, comment away!

Billy Graham's 90th Birthday

I'm not into writing about extraneous stuff on this blog apart from Koinonia and H.1 happenings, but here's something a friend sent to me which deeply moved me. Billy Graham is turning 90 years old today (Friday, Nov. 7). He's been America's great pastor and preacher, and arguably, for the world, throughout the 20th century and into this new millennia. Despite his old age, he had this to say about his life:

"I have discovered that just because we grow weaker physically as we age, it doesn't mean that we must grow weaker spiritually," said Graham in a statement this week.

"In fact, we ought to be growing stronger spiritually, because our eyes ought to be on eternity and Heaven -- on the things that really matter."

What a radically different approach to growing older. We might think people degenerate and diminish in their engagement with the world as they get older; and subsequently, that their significance and impact likewise also diminishes. But Billy Graham insists this isn't the case, and his insistence is so strong because he's convinced that these 70-odd years on earth really do precede real life: eternity.

I was immensely moved by this CNN piece observing Graham's 90th birthday and would commend it to you as a different, more biblical, vision of living our lives.

Worldview Camp 2008

Worldview Camp

A couple weeks ago, a whole bunch of us headed over to CSU Monterey to participate in the second annual Gracepoint Worldview Camp. While we lived in dorms and ate DC food, we were studying very earnestly and listening to some good lectures--some from our very own Gracepoint Berkeley people, and others from the very distinguished Dr. John Bloom, holder of multiple PhDs in Physics and Near Eastern Archaeology. Irene, Jenny, Emily and I attended. It was an opportunity to study how Christian truths and principles apply to areas of our everyday life: abortion, eugenics, sexual ethics, the study of science, cosmology, authenticity and veracity of the biblical account, and more. The sheer amount of stuff was dizzying.

Worldview Camp

The days were packed with lectures, discussions with one another, (decent) food from the DC, games and sports at night, and even a bonfire on the beach on the last night. Add to this that we got a chance to hang out with Koinonia Davis who sent about 50 people, and it was a pretty great, community-building, intellectually-stimulating experience. Come next year!