The Best President Ever
Because I served as a trustee on the InterVarsity board for eight years and as its first woman chair for two years, I am regularly invited to return. This year a personal invitation from the staff director who heads the InterVarsity Arts division (and the fact that I was in town) encouraged me to attend.
During my years on the board, we established a multi-cultural ad-hoc committee, browned the board, made sure that vocal women, not hesitant to speak at a table surrounded by powerful men, were invited to serve, sent out regular documents between each of the three yearly board meetings on issues relating to ethnicity, then slotted regular times for reaction and discussion in each agenda. It was estimated that by the year 2012, American secular universities would no longer have white majorities.
You can imagine my surprise and delight, when I entered the Edward Jones Dome at the convention center in St. Louis, to discover that of the 16,000 attendees, some 55% were people of color. There were as many women plenary speakers as men and only two of them were right; the rest were internationals.
OK, I thought. What has happened here? What had happened was a constant, intentional, some thirty-year attempt to create student and staff racial ratios that would reflect the demographic on secular university campuses. In discussion with several missiologists present at Urbana, we pretty much agreed that to the best of our knowledge there was no similar conference on this scale that reflected so succinctly the globalization of our world.
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