Pray That We Slow Down

There is a particular kind of Friday that only exists on a college campus in the fall.

You know it if you’ve lived it. The air turns crisp enough for a sweater but not a coat. The maples go gold at the edges. The week’s exams and papers are behind you, the weekend is ahead, and the semester is still half full of optimism. Nobody has failed anything yet. Everybody still believes they’ll finally start going to the gym.

I drove down from Toronto last Friday into exactly that kind of day. By the time I reached Ann Arbor, the town was humming with pre-tailgate energy. Michigan had a home game the next afternoon, and you could feel a hundred thousand people getting ready to care deeply about something. Strangers wore maize and blue like a family crest. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood, which in my experience is its own kind of rarity.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed that Friday feeling on a campus until I was standing in the middle of it.

A House Built for the Life of the Mind and Heart of the Soul

I came to visit the Michigan Christian Study Center. If you’ve never heard of a Christian study center, you’re not alone, and you’re about to be glad you have.

Here is the simplest way I can put it. The Center is a Christian academic community set inside one of the great research universities in the world. It is not a church, and it is not a college. It is something in between, and that in-between space turns out to be exactly where a lot of students need someone to meet them.

They practice hospitality, which is an old Christian word that means you are welcome here before you have earned it. They host book clubs, faculty forums, social gatherings, and public lectures on the questions the culture is actually asking. They even offer a four-semester program in Christian studies, taught by trained scholars, covering the Bible, theology, Christian history, and vocation. Through a partnership with a local Christian university, students can take some of those courses for credit that transfers back to Michigan.

That last detail matters more than it sounds. Most of us learned to love God with our hearts long before anyone taught us to love Him with our minds. The Center refuses to let those two loves live in separate houses. It treats a nineteen-year-old engineering student as a whole person, one whose faith deserves the same rigor as her thermodynamics.

A Mensch, Pure and Simple

The Center is the work of Rick Ostrander, its founder and executive director.

Four years ago this ministry did not exist. Today it is a going concern, a hub that draws together Christian groups across campus that might otherwise pass each other in the hallway without a nod. Anyone who has tried to start anything knows what four years of that kind of building costs. It costs early mornings, unglamorous fundraising, and a thousand conversations nobody writes down.

Rick doesn’t carry himself like a man who has built something. He carries himself like a man who is still building it and enjoying the company. He is warm, curious, quick to laugh, and quicker to hand the credit to someone else. There’s a Yiddish word for a person like that, and it’s the highest compliment I know how to pay: he’s a mensch. Pure and simple.

He has also gathered a remarkable team around him: Heidi Lemmerhirt, Julie Magro, Lonnie Ostrander, Kristin Wong, and Cynthia Adebayo. And then there are the student leaders, who are, without exaggeration, the coolest group of young people you will ever have the privilege to meet. I say “without exaggeration” knowing Strunk and White would scold me for it. I’m keeping it anyway. It’s true.

Lunch with a Professor Who Teaches Machines to Learn

The centerpiece of my visit was the Friday Lunch Series, a weekly conversation between Rick and a member of the Michigan faculty. This week’s guest was Maggie Makar, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering whose work focuses on machine learning and artificial intelligence in health care.

I expected a technical talk. What I got was wisdom.

Rick asked her the question everyone is asking: can we regulate this thing? She reached for the obvious comparison, nuclear weapons, and then explained why it breaks down. To build a bomb, you need enriched uranium, and enriched uranium is scarce and hard to hide. To build a powerful AI model, you need computing power, and a clever person with a few good graphics cards can do real work in a basement. How do you police a basement?

Then she named the catch. If you restrict access to the hardware, you don’t eliminate the risk. You simply hand the whole field to the few companies rich enough to afford lawyers and loopholes. The independent researchers, the small startups, and the academics whose job is to keep those companies honest get squeezed out. Regulate too little and anyone can build anything. Regulate the wrong way and only the powerful can build at all.

An Honest Theological Confession of A Computer Engineer

Then she said something I have not stopped thinking about as it relates to AI - and well — everything.

Speaking as a Christian, she said she believes we are all fallen, herself included. Nothing she makes is free of that. Sin runs like a thread through everything she creates. She knows the technical methods for making a model “unlearn” a dangerous concept, and she still doesn’t believe you can scrub the darkness out entirely. Squash it one way, and it finds another way back in.

She gave a sobering example. A model that learns enough biology and chemistry to help cure disease also learns enough to combine that knowledge in ways no human has tried before. The same capacity that could help design a treatment could help design a harm. With nuclear power, there’s a line: enrich uranium past a certain point and you’ve crossed into weapons. With AI, she said, there is no such line. The knowledge that heals and the knowledge that hurts are the same knowledge.

I have heard a great many sermons on original sin. I am not sure I’ve heard one as clear as a computer scientist explaining why she can’t build a machine without it.

The students’ questions were sharp, and so were her answers.

Asked what career a student should pursue that AI won’t swallow, she said nursing, without hesitation. She’d been through labor and delivery, and the nurses there were extraordinary. She could not imagine a world where the work of caring for a human body, in skilled nursing or geriatric care or a delivery room, stops mattering. Then she added the part every anxious undergraduate needed to hear: don’t panic. Your education is more than the label on your degree. You’re learning to think, and that doesn’t expire.

Asked how she personally uses AI, she was refreshingly specific. She uses it to tighten her own writing. She will not use it to generate her proofs or answer problem sets, and she will not feed it her original research. The reason she gave was the wisest thing I heard all day. She decided where her lines were in a clear state of mind, so that at two in the morning, tired and frustrated, she wouldn’t have to decide again. The decision was already made.

She mentioned a physician who wrote about AI tools that take notes during patient visits. They save time. They also leave her knowing less about her patients, because the struggle of writing the note was how she came to know them. The struggle is how things stick, Professor Makar said. Outsource the struggle and you outsource the knowing.

She recommended Andy Crouch’s books, especially The Tech-Wise Family, which her own household is working through. And when a young woman asked how to pursue academia and still raise a family, she pointed to her young son sitting in the back of the room. Family first, she said. Work second. She set those priorities when she was thinking clearly, and she keeps them when she’s tempted to cancel a Saturday with her boy to finish one more thing. She may never be the most famous name in machine learning. She said she’s at peace with that, because she gets to know everything about her son.

The room went quiet in the good way. Sometimes the most countercultural sermon on a research campus is a brilliant professor saying, I chose to be less famous so I could be more present.

What The Students Asked Me To Pray For

At the end of the week, Rick invited me to join his team’s meeting. It began with prayer, and I asked the students what I could pray for.

I expected requests about exams, internships, maybe the football game. Instead they asked me to pray that they could slow down. That they could manage the busyness and the anxiety that come with being young and ambitious at a place like Michigan. That they could find unhurried time with God.

They asked me to pray for unity with other Christians and other Christian organizations on campus. And they asked me to pray for the freshmen, that the new students would find connection and make friends.

It was tender. It was honest. Nobody was performing.

I have been a pastor long enough to know that what people ask you to pray for tells you what they love. These students did not ask for success. They asked for rest, for each other, and for the lonely kid down the hall. If that is what the next generation of the church wants, I think we’re going to be all right.

A Movement, Not A Moment

Here is the part that should encourage you even if you’ll never set foot in Ann Arbor. The Michigan Center is not a lone experiment. It belongs to a growing movement.

The Consortium of Christian Study Centers began in 2008 with four member centers. It now serves more than thirty, at universities across the United States and the United Kingdom, offering training, consulting, and resources to people like Rick who are building these communities from the ground up.

For generations, many Christians treated the secular university as a place to survive, a four-year gauntlet to get your kids through with their faith intact. The study center movement makes a different wager. It says the university is a place to be present, to think hard, to love your neighbor, and to take both faith and learning seriously in the same breath. Wendell Berry wrote about the importance of belonging to a place and staying there. These centers are the church deciding to stay on campus.

What I Want For My Kids

While I was there, I ran into the daughters of dear friends. One of them is a student leader at the Center. I watched her move around that room with confidence and kindness, and I thought about my own children, who will head off to college sooner than I’m prepared to admit.

This is what I want for them. Not a bubble. Not a fortress. A place like this one, where someone smart and faithful will set a lunch in front of them, ask them a hard question, and take their answer seriously. Where someone will pray for them to slow down.

I drove home across the border in the late afternoon light, still feeling that Friday feeling, and I found myself thanking God for Rick and his team. They are unsung heroes, working on the front lines with little recognition, and they deserve far more of it than they’ll ever ask for.

Be Encouraged

If you want to be encouraged about young adults and the future of the Christian faith, go to Ann Arbor and visit the Michigan Christian Study Center. If you’re a Michigan fan and a Christian, consider supporting their work. Rick and his team are the real deal - and worthy of investment and support! Pray for the students, the team, and the work of the gospel in the life of woman and men seeking to love God and the world God loves. And, while you’re at it, look up the Consortium to see if there’s a study center near a campus you care about - and support and encourage them!

And here is the question I’ve been carrying home: where do you need to draw your lines in a clear state of mind, so you don’t have to fight for them at two in the morning? And who, in your own life, is asking you to help them slow down and find time with God? Maybe the most faithful thing you do this week is answer that prayer yourself.

This conversation was originally published on Trygve Johnson’s Substack, Kingfisher Study, and is republished here by the PreachFor Foundation. Read the original conversation and subscribe to the Kingfisher Study.