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Are you also reacting to a change in the religious landscape, especially among college students?

I've been in college ministry for 13 years now—16 years if you count my student days. And college students today seem really different from when I was in college.

In the early 1990s, most of us were marked by a high level of distrust. So campus ministry meant building trust. It was not easy. I had to beg people to hang out with me even to start a mentoring relationship. And evangelistic approaches back then focused on authenticity and community. The overriding spiritual question of the day was: What is real?

But the so-called Millennials (Generation Y) on campuses today seem much more trusting. Freshmen come in looking for mentors. And they're a civic generation. They're ready to volunteer, because they really think they can change the world. They're far more optimistic. And our evangelistic approaches that have worked are far more civic as well, such as dealing with the AIDS pandemic or sex trafficking. Our best approaches mix global concerns with spirituality, and many people come out for it.

The overriding spiritual question today is: What is good? What will really help the planet be a better place? And our faith better have an answer for it to be relevant today.

At the same time, the environment on campus can shift quite quickly. Just in the last five years, my sense is that campus culture has turned against Christians. People seem more negative about Christians than at any time I can remember since the scandals of many Christian television personalities in the 1980s. We are perceived by many as intolerant, overpolitical, and homophobic. We have to work hard to overcome that.

Wheaton College evangelism professor Rick Richardson has observed that the best evangelistic strategies challenge contemporary idolatries—for example, Campus Crusade's Four Spiritual Laws challenged the idol of the autonomous self. What idolatries does the Big Story take aim at most directly?

The heart of the real challenge is in the parallel lines that prevent going straight from Circle 2 (damaged by evil) to Circle 4 (sent together to heal). In our field-tests we found that many people want to jump right to the mission of healing and restoring the world. They say, "We want to be about healing the world, but why does it have to be with Jesus?"

But our diagram says, "No, you can't do this without Jesus. We need Jesus to help us become the kind of good we want to see in the world. Only he can fully help us put to death our self-centered ways so that we can truly live. So if you really want to be a part of healing the world in a way that lasts, you have to go through Jesus." You have to go through Circle 3. It's at this point that we may bring up Christian history that many have forgotten—that Christians have been at the forefront of lasting social change, such as the abolitionist movement and women's suffrage and the civil rights movement.

But it's here that people will walk away from us and say, "I like everything you've said, but I still don't see why Jesus needs to be a part of it." The postmodern idolatry is that all spiritual ways of life lead to the same place. Any local truth is a valid truth. In the postmodern mind, they're all paths to being good and doing good.

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July 2008, Vol. 52, No. 7