New Website Helps Christian Students Address Issues
Focus on the Family launched a new website on Wednesday aimed at helping Christian college students address issues arising from ideological diversity in the dorms and classrooms.
Focus on the Family launched a new website on Wednesday aimed at helping Christian college students address issues arising from ideological diversity in the dorms and classrooms.
"The site is rooted in the awareness that the college experience can be really confusing and overwhelming due to diversity ideas of different students," TrueU.org's online editor Blake Roeber told the Christian Post.
Roeber pointed to possible situations where a Christian student would be confronted with lifestyle and ideological issues. For example, a student raised in a conservative Christian home may not know how to interact with an atheist student roommate or a Christian student may not know how to react or respond when a professor tells him that the Bible isn't historically accurate.
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To make the transition to college life smoother, the site will attempt to communicate ideas taught at the Focus on the Family Institute to online visitors.
“TrueU.org is a Christian worldview Web site that offers students a place to discover the truth,” said Dr. Chris Leland, Director of College and University Outreach for Focus on the Family. “Christian kids need to realize that they are not alone in their beliefs, especially when they leave home. Our desire is to give them that place of community and at the same time equip them to defend their faith.”
According to Focus on the Family, statistics show that over 75 percent of Christian students will leave college with their faith either absent or severely damaged because they do not understand or cannot defend their beliefs.
However, Leland hopes TrueU.org can help reduce that statistic.
"With today’s launch, we are dedicating ourselves to journeying alongside students and giving them a place where they can increase their faith and learn to love God with all their minds,” he said.
All writers who will contribute articles to the site are recent college graduates, college students, or college professors who will base their viewpoints from their personal experiences on campus.
But directly giving students the answer to their questions and concerns – like most other websites geared toward Christians in college – is not the intention of TrueU.org, according to Roeber, who is a recent college graduate.
"We are trying to create conversation and a community," he said. "Students don't want just a ‘pat answer’ to a complicated issue."
By having each article linked to a discussion thread, Focus on the Family is "hoping to generate a long-threaded conversation" where students "can be honest about [the issue] through the website and talk to other" to arrive to their own conclusion, explained Roeber.
While each post will be approved before appearing on the site, moderators will let students freely express themselves as long as they stay on topic.
Eventually, Focus on the Family is to take the site a level above just online text to multi-media presentations, such as featuring actual lectures and radio-style recordings that students can listen to using their iPods. Another future goal is to build up the online community enough where big group conferences can be arranged.
"This is just the first step to reaching a much broader group of college students," said Roeber.
