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Our Board is explicitly an oversight Board, with each member having a particular role. We have 10 members of the Board (down from 12 a couple years ago): Chair, Secretary, Treasurer, 2 students, 2 staff support persons, a representative from the Classis, and our 2 (non-voting) staff. To be a member, we have 3 categories: representative from London (the city where the campuses are), 2 from Classis, and 2 at large (usually non-CRC members and usually faculty from the campuses). Terms are 3 years, 2 terms max. The main tasks of the Board, besides oversight/support of the staff and the campus ministry vision, are maintaining the Budget and completing reports for Classis and CRHM.

I didn't hear the talk but the title of this post caught my attention. Kinda thought the hope of the church was Jesus. But, then again, I might be mistaken.

I'm struggling to know how your comment is any different from what you accuse my comment of being. Are you thinking the best about what I wrote, even if it came wrapped in a bit of satire? In fact, I was not looking to criticize. My intention was not to be flippant. I take this question very seriously. But I also find that a bit of irony might help us recognize the unconscious beliefs we have adopted from our scientific culture and have deployed within the church that are actually contrary to what faith is all about. I am attempting to offer the observation that in much of what I hear around the CRCNA lately, this post only being one concrete example of it, we seem to have forgotten that Jesus Christ is our and/or the church's only hope. Period. Full stop. If our Christian hope rests in our ministry gameplans, goals, gimmicks, tactics, metrics, marketing, or anything else like that, we're not putting our hope in Christ but in some humanistic effort that can so easily become manipulative and abusive. Young adults today do not need the added burden (with its guilt and shame) of guaranteeing the future viability of the church. They're having a hard enough time negotiating our rapidly changing culture while still following Jesus. I believe we actually push youth and young adults away from the church and from the Christian faith by placing these kinds of (theologically inappropriate) expectations on them. So, yes, I am joining the discussion precisely by pointing these things out.

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