Written by Aerial Whiting
The White House announced in March that it is launching the “President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge,” an initiative to encourage students from varying religious backgrounds to engage in community service projects together for the 2011- 2012 school year.According to The New York Times, President Barack Obama will send a letter to college campuses across the nation, inviting them to participate in the interfaith service challenge; Harding University has not yet been contacted.In a video announcement, Obama said the initiative is supposed to contribute to the “common good” while bringing people of different faiths together.”I know that an act of service can unite people of all faiths, or even no faith, around a common purpose of helping those in need,” Obama said. “In doing so we can not only better our communities; we can build bridges of understanding between ourselves and our neighbors.”Colleges that decide to take part in the campus challenge will develop their own plans for yearlong interfaith community service projects, such as building houses for Habitat for Humanity or working to protect the environment. Schools that wish to participate are to state their intent by April 22 and submit their service plans by June 1, and in summer 2012, the White House will honor the projects that best accomplish the goals of the challenge as outlined at www. whitehouse.gov/interfaithservice.Dean of the College of Bible and Religion Monte Cox said although he believes it is important for Christians to serve and to interact with people of other faiths, he does not want to send the message that all religions are alike.”There is a push in pluralistic America to ignore the differences in faith com- munities, water them down, and set all that aside and go serve together,” Cox said. “Obviously, serving together with other people is something Jesus did; he came to earth and served, and certainly not everyone who was the recipient of his service was on the same page with him. But we don’t want to communicate that it doesn’t really matter what you believe, everybody’s basically the same and all we all care about is service. That would be false.”Harding may not participate in the president’s interfaith service challenge, but many of its students volunteer around the Searcy community. More than 2,300 Harding students undertook 160 or more service projects Wednesday, April 6, for Bisons for Christ.Bisons for Christ is itself an opportunity for people of various faith backgrounds to serve together, said Todd Gentry, college outreach minister at College Church of Christ.”One of the ideas behind Bisons for Christ was even while most of the students have a Church of Christ back- ground, not all of them do, so we try to find one thing … where anybody can participate if they want to, and so we have students here that even will have other backgrounds, other faiths, that also participate in that,” Gentry said.
