Turning 70, I look back to the call I received in Aggieland 50 years ago

This month I turn 70. I have one birthday wish.

But first let me tell you a story.

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I remember when 70 was old. I was only 21, starting grad school at Baylor University. To help with living expenses and as an outlet from the books, I picked up a side gig that turned into a lifelong passion. The gig was doing campus ministry in the heart of Texas.

I knew as much about campus ministry as I did Texas, which wasn’t much. And yet, my assignment included some of the largest universities in the nation, including the University of Texas in Austin and Texas A&M in Bryan/College Station.

The year was 1976.

The ministry was called Chi Alpha (XA). Whereas today XA is one of the largest campus ministries in the US, back then it was young and struggling, just like me.

The following year, Dave Gable, the national director for XA, pulled together a group of campus leaders to shape the ministry’s philosophy. He trusted their collective efforts would propel the ministry into a national movement.

That group became known as the San Antonio Seven. They met, well, in San Antonio, to pray, reflect, and shape. These Seven eventually became good friends of mine, but I was not in San Antonio with them. I was a couple hundred miles up I-35 working on my master’s at Baylor University and still trying to understand how you go about ministering to university students.

The group Dave brought together included Dennis Gaylor, who followed in Dave’s footsteps in serving as national XA leader for more than 30 years. I’d eventually work with Dennis as a self-funded field representative and stay with him and Barb when I was in town. We became good friends, but back then we barely knew each other.

Also in San Antonio was Brady Bobbink. Brady, too, became a dear friend, performing Kim’s and my wedding a decade later. Together Dave, Dennis, Brady, and the other 4 fashioned what became known as the Chi Alpha Fourfold Philosophy based on Acts 2:42-47.

They boiled the philosophy down to four words: worship, fellowship, discipleship, and witness. Prayer was added later as a fifth component. Gradually the philosophy this group formulated along the San Antonio riverwalk shaped and grew the national ministry and local campus groups scattered across the country.

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All that was still in the future when I graduated in May 1976 from Florida Southern College just an hour from a new amusement park called the Walt Disney World Resort. In my final semester I applied to several graduate programs. While most were on the East Coast, one was in far-flung Texas.

My Aunt Sis (Evelyn Kenyon-Wise) was a music teacher and had heard that Baylor had a great music program. I said I wasn’t interested in studying music. Maybe they offer something else, she said. Lo and behold, Baylor offered a master’s and doctorate in ethics, one of only a handful of universities in the country to do so.

By that summer, I’d narrowed my selection down to two schools, but I didn’t want to make my decision until I’d had a chance to visit the far more distant Baylor University. The visit finally came just weeks before fall classes were set to start.

The deadline for responding to the other school was August 1, before I’d be home and able to access my manual typewriter. So, I typed up two letters to Drew University – one accepting, the other declining their offer – and carried them with me to drop one of them in the mail after I visited Baylor.

My grandparents, Nelson & Eleanor Kenyon, were headed to Missouri to visit family and attend a national event for the Royal Rangers boys program my grandfather volunteered in. They offered to take me with them and then drop down to Texas so I could check out Baylor.

Besides those two letters, I packed some things in an old trunk my mother had used growing up in China and took it with me, just in case. I also made an appointment to meet the ethics professor at Baylor on Monday, July 27. After that meeting with Dr. Daniel B. McGee, I knew my future lay with Baylor.

But we still needed a place to store the trunk.

We’d arrived in Waco Saturday night. Sunday morning, we set out to visit a local church and wound up going to one on the opposite side of town. Pastor Paul Palser invited us out to lunch after service. He asked me if I had ever been involved in Chi Alpha and I explained to him that I’d led a little group at Florida Southern as an undergrad.

Palser explained he’d just met earlier that week with a couple of regional youth leaders. Darrell Logue was the XA director for all of North Texas. He and his boss, Garry Smith, the district youth director, shared with Palser that they were looking for someone to head up XA in Central Texas.

That was interesting, I said, but could I leave my trunk at his church for a month?

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Not long after I started grad school, Darrell offered me that XA position. When I called my dad, he asked me if I would get paid. When I said I didn’t know, he said they should at least pay for my mileage. I didn’t even have a car.

The position did pay, though not much. And it did cover mileage. So, I bought a used Pinto – its two doors painted a different shade from the body – and drove that thing into its grave.

First step was to find a place to hold Chi Alpha meetings at Baylor. Sure, it was a Baptist school, but it had a lot of non-Baptist students. Wandering around campus, I found the Methodist Student Center. Billy Mack Patteson, the liberal-as-Paul-Tillich director of the center, warmly welcomed me to set up shop. Not only did we hold XA meetings there, I typed my research papers on the state-of-the-art IBM Selectric in Billy’s office and hung out with his family next door.

The San Antonio Seven hadn’t yet convened, so resources for knowing how to do XA were limited. But even without any training, my job was to oversee XA in the Central Texas region and that included those two behemoth campuses. UT at Austin already had a campus ministry, so I drove down to meet Ron Parrish, the living-on-a-shoestring campus pastor and his wife, Janine, and learn what I could from them. Nothing like overseeing your mentor.

I also drove to Aggieland. Texas A&M had an XA group on campus, but the local pastor who ran it wasn’t all that friendly. That’s when I discovered that Texans can even be skeptical of other Texans. I wasn’t a Texan, but he didn’t trust my Texan boss, let alone me.

A few months later that local ministry died a quiet death. But I kept traveling down Highway 6, launching ministry the way I’d learned from David Wilkerson. When you don’t know what to do, walk the city and pray. I did exactly that on the vast A&M campus.

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I thought Baylor was huge compared with Florida Southern. A&M dwarfed Baylor. I have never heard a place so loud as a basketball game in the Aggies tightly packed indoor arena. A&M – and its arena – were built to instill awe. All the grassy areas were sacred, dedicated to Aggies fallen in military service. Unlike UT, everyone stayed on the sidewalks, no matter how inconveniently they were laid out.

But one day walking the campus when classes were in session, I noticed how quiet the campus was. With classes on, the sidewalks were empty. It was eerie.

Suddenly classes let out. The campus was a sea of people, an orderly sea, but a sea nonetheless, unlike anything I’d seen before. I was walking down some steps from an academic building. I stopped and took it all in – students on the move in every direction and as far as I could see.

A verse came to mind. “When he (Jesus) saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” (Matthew 9:36 NIV)

Another verse followed immediately. “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” It was from Isaiah 6:8 and Isaiah said that question came from God himself. So as with Isaiah, I answered, right then and there, “Here am I. Send me!”

Over the next dozen years, I got all the training and mentoring in campus ministry I could, took Darrell’s place as North Texas XA Director, then moved on to run something called Campus 80s out of Dennis Gaylor’s national office. Eventually I settled down to lead the XA ministry at Southwest Missouri State University (now MSU) and train future ministers and missionaries through an internship program.

Meanwhile, Brady held that wedding for Kim and me and I finally completed my doctorate at Baylor.

My life’s work has gone in various directions. But the passion for university student ministry has never really left me. I married a campus pastor – Kim had interned under Brady at Western Washington University and was on staff with him when she and I met. Together we went on to lead student ministry in Asia.

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Fast forward to the next generation. Dennis has retired and written a detailed tome – as only Dennis can do – on the history of XA. Today some 20 thousand students gather regularly on more than 300 campuses across the nation to worship, fellowship, disciple, witness, and pray. And similar ministries are thriving around the world.

Brady Bobbink has also now retired after leading the ministry at Western after 50 years. But before he stepped away, my daughter, Hope, interned under him and then joined a team restarting the XA ministry at Oregon State University and pioneering one at nearby Linn-Benton Community College. Three years ago, Hope was ordained as a minister.

More recently, Hope married Michael Gonzalez from Sacramento, California. They live in Corvallis, Oregon, not far from us. Michael serves as a pastor on staff at a local church, while Hope follows her own calling in ministry, now in her 7th year as a campus missionary.

Hope’s calling came uniquely. Just as my calling did. Just as her mother’s did.

God calls each of us as individuals, meaning there are no cookie-cutter calls. Even if Hope is our daughter, we can say the passion for ministry is strong in her. What was birthed in me in Aggieland and in her mother at Western also runs deep in Hope.

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So, here’s my birthday wish. Hope, who has to raise her own support, has been at it for a while. She still needs another 20 monthly supporters or about $800 a month in funding. It’s tough raising ministry funds these days, especially with the price of eggs so high. I don’t need any eggs but Hope & Michael do. More important than eggs even, I want to see Hope fully focused on ministering to students at those two campuses. She has so much to offer.

So, if you are looking for a ministry to bless – or you just want a reason to celebrate me turning 70 – consider becoming a member of Hope’s support team. Committing monthly or making a one-time gift. And you’re certainly welcome to pray for her and her ministry.

You can commit your support by going to https://giving.ag.org/donate/700001-298172. If you have questions or want to talk with Hope first, just write me at Contact Us!

Dennis Gaylor’s book, Growing a Student Movement: The Development of Chi Alpha Campus Ministries 1940-2020 (2021), is available online. It’s a great resource for seeing how a ministry grows. I didn’t need it to write what I wrote here, but I must confess I checked it to confirm a couple of details. After all, some of these things happened nearly 50 years ago!

Photos: Dennis’ book, Hope, Texas A&M today