Oxford Christianity

One of my favorite aspects of living as an expat in Shanghai is that you experience not only Chinese culture, but also the full spectrum of cultures from around the world.

One of my new friends that I met through SCF, the expat church we’ve been going to, is an awesome British dude (Chinese word: Ying-guo-ren) in his mid-twenties who works at the British Consulate here in Shanghai. He is quite the stereotypical Englishman in speech, mannerisms, and also in his level of intelligence (This was confirmed a few weeks after meeting him when I learned from someone else that he studied Politics, Economics, and Philosophy at Oxford.)

We had the chance to grab some coffee not too long ago, and during the course of the conversation I learned that while at Oxford, he had the opportunity to lead the Christian fellowship there for some time. I was curious about the Christian presence at elite universities in Britain, so I asked how many students typically participated in this fellowship. He told me that it was probably quite a small amount by American standards: for the 15,000 strong university there were approximately 200 students participating in the fellowship’s activities at any given time.

This number was much larger than I was expecting, especially considering the somewhat bleak state of the Church in Europe as a whole; also as far as I know, the Christian presence at elite universities in the States are not nearly this size. For example, one of my buddies at Stanford was involved in a Christian fellowship there for a bit, and it couldn’t have had much more than twenty or thirty students.

My British friend explained that back home the more elite the university you find yourself in, the larger the Christian influence tends to be (In jest, he said something along the lines of, “we figure that if you’re smart enough, you just tend to work it out somehow!”). I wondered why this was, and why this doesn’t seem at all to be the pattern back in the US.  I suppose it may just come down to the apparent fact that God works in different people in different ways; when this point-of-view is broadened, it makes sense that he would also work within different cultures in unique ways. But I recognize that's a very general statement ... what do you think about this?