Georgetown Kicks Off Campus Ministry Organizations

Here is an interesting story to keep an eye on. From Georgetown University’s newspaper, The Hoya: “Citing a desire to centralize the administration of Protestant campus ministry groups, Georgetown abruptly severed its ties with all of its affiliated ministry organizations last week, barring several long-established religious groups from campus. The move will not affect organizations composed solely of students, but it will prevent many ministry groups run or directed by outsider groups, like local churches, from conducting any activities on campus. Such groups include InterVarsity, the Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship and Crossroad Campus Christian Fellowship.” (Read more here.)

There is a good summary of the issue from Christianity Today here.

And, you can read more from the following news sources:

Georgetown U. ejects private ministry groups (The Washington Post)

Georgetown bars ministries from campus (The Washington Times)

Georgetown rejects evangelical groups (Inside Higher Ed)

The best, short, commentary I have read comes from First Things here. The author does a good job of focusing in on the "real" central issue:

“The problem, of course, finally boils down to this: The evangelical groups represent only a few hundred students, but they are strongly pro-life and opposed to homosexual marriage. The mainline Protestant employees of Campus Ministry find such things embarrassing, and so they kick the evangelicals off campus, employing the power of the officially Catholic chaplain’s office and the rhetoric of the school’s Catholic identity.

There’s an obvious irony here—employed too often to be surprising—in which people begin by protesting in the name of diversity against centralized authority, and later discover, once they’re in charge, how useful those old forms of authority can be in controlling diversity.”