Influencing the influencers

Charity: Hoping for cultural transformation at Ivy League schools | Rusty Leonard and Warren Cole Smith

Handout

Matt Bennett is founder and president of the Christian Union, an organization attempting to recover a vital Christian expression on the eight Ivy League campuses—seven of which began as explicitly Christian colleges. (Cornell is the exception.)

Bennett is unapologetic in proclaiming that as the Ivies go, so goes America. After all, those colleges have produced a disproportionate number of U.S. political and legal leaders, including President George W. Bush and eight of the nine current members of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bennett says only about 7 percent of Ivy League students are involved with Christian ministries on their campuses, and his goal is to be part of a movement to increase that number to 20 percent by the year 2020. Christian Union's strategy is to create ministry centers, brick-and-mortar facilities that can be epicenters for CU's ministry but also available to other like-minded campus ministries as well.