| TNF IN THE NEWS Nine years later, NU fellowship By Beth Kormanik The students start to arrive around 9 p.m. and will
keep coming for the next 15-20 minutes. What starts on time these
days, anyway? They enter from the rear of Coon Forum in Leverone Hall
and walk down, row by row, to the front of the auditorium. Most of
the students that come to Northwestern University's Tuesday Night
Fellowship fit sitting on the floor in front of the blackboard, with
the latecomers spilling out into the the first row of seats. Although
Coon Forum can hold hundreds of people, about 40 students attend the
Christian fellowship's weekly meeting. The many red-cushioned chairs
wait, empty, challenging the group to one day draw enough people to
fill them. Maybe one day there will be enough people. After all, Tuesday
Night Fellowship began with only two. A prayer for Northwestern Nine years ago Lisa Rushing was a freshman at Northwestern and David Drake was a senior. The two, both Christians, decided to get together one Tuesday night to pray for their friends and the campus in general. They met at one of Drake’s favorite study spots: the top floor Arthur Anderson Hall, home of the Kellogg Graduate School of Management. It was the highest point on campus, and the closest to the heavens. As Drake and Rushing invited more friends to come and pray, the hallway they met in became too small for the group. Andrea Raes, then a sophomore, was in that crowd. Raes said the students mixed songs with their prayers, and sometimes someone would share a message. By the end of the year, about 30 students met for the weekly prayer meeting. It wasn't an official ministry; it didn't even have a name, and many of the students were involved in other campus ministries. The following year, the group outgrew its hallway and moved to the adjoining Leverone Hall, where by Raes’ senior year, Tuesday Night Fellowship was a university-recognized student ministry with a membership of more than 80 students. TNF grew beyond to include non-Christians, said Raes, who now lives in Indianapolis. “People thought this was a cool thing to come to,” she said. “We didn’t sit around and talk about salvation and the blood of the lamb. We were just real people talking about what it was like to be Christians on this campus.” It’s a legacy that continues in TNF today. ‘We’re all in this together' As Northwestern’s only student-led Christian fellowship, TNF tries to reach the same students as fellowships with full-time adult staff and national headquarters, like InterVarsity and Campus Crusade for Christ, said junior Bonjwing Lee, a member of TNF’s leadership team. Being student-led can be a tool for evangelism because it gives TNF a unique identity, he said. “When you come (to IV or Crusade), their band is set up, and they put on a nice production,” Lee said. “It may turn people off that we don’t seem so established. But what makes TNF great is that when we say that TNF is student-led, it says, we’re all in this together. It gives the new people a sense of ownership, like they’re a part of it already.” But it’s not always easy for a team of about 10 students to lead a fellowship group, said sophomore Lindsay Monahan, also a member of the leadership team. When academic stress and other extracurricular activities vie for students’ time, Monahan said a full-time staff member would help with the work. But she said TNF values its independence too much to become an arm of another fellowship group with full-time adult staff. “It’s a real challenge to keep up Christianity on campus because a lot of us are busy,” she said. “You don’t have the time you would like to spend on Christianity. But a lot of other groups feel like they have to answer to some adult. With TNF, there’s no central authority or one person who’s the leader.” Maintaining their independence Organization was a challenge that TNF faced from the beginning. When TNF began to grow, Raes said, its leaders realized it needed a formal structure. “You reach this level when you’ve got all these people coming and you’ve got to start feeding them a little more,” she said. “We wanted to keep the momentum going.” In 1991, Rushing was co-leader of TNF, and a core group of leaders, the “servant board,” met Sunday nights. They structured the Tuesday night program to include a song, a get-to-know-you question and a talk by one of the leaders. Other activities during the year included camping trips to Devil's Lake, Wisc., and a spring break ski trip to Steamboat, Colo. Rushing said she began to feel the stress of running a fellowship group. “I was 19 or 20, and there were all these people that we were talking to, up to 80 people,” said Rushing, who now lives in Austin, Texas. “I was a full-time student, and it was turning into a full-time job.” The leaders looked into combining with established groups such as IV, Vineyard Christian Fellowship, and First Presbyterian Church, Rushing said, but decided that they wanted to preserve the niche that TNF filled. “At TNF there were people you could relate to,” Rushing said. “We wanted the dynamic of that rather than having someone older, someone who’s more experienced but who is not your friend. There were a million places running Bible studies, but not a lot of places that were talking about real life issues and bringing faith into them. “We never put a single sign up or put an announcement in the paper for TNF. You didn’t come to TNF on your own. You came if a friend invited you, a friend who was part of your life and who wanted to share their faith.” Global missionaries TNF still draws its members largely by word of mouth, Lee said, but it has some outreach such as participating in the activities fair during New Student Week. Other logistics have stayed the same. TNF has a leadership team that meets once a week before TNF. Members are responsible for different aspects of the fellowship, such as scheduling Tuesday night speakers and coming up with skits. But instead of going on a spring break ski trip, the fellowship goes on an annual mission trip through STEM Ministries. During spring break 1999, TNF went to El Triunfo, Honduras, and will travel to Jamaica for spring break 2000. In Honduras, the group of 30 students helped rebuild a town left devastated from Hurricane Mitch, and used their work to evangelize to the people there, especially to the children. As part of their ministry to the children, Lee said, TNF members dressed as clowns to perform an evangelical skit, which they translated into Spanish. A lasting ministry As leaders graduated and moved on with their lives, many have lost touch with TNF, Rushing said. But the ministry that started as a couple of friends praying for their campus continues its mission: to spread Christianity at Northwestern. “At one point,” Rushing said, “Dave and I asked each other, what if we come back in five years and people were still here praying?” It’s been nine years so far, and they’re still counting
|