GroshLink

Just received this from IVCF at Harvard. Please keep this in your prayers, take action, and pass along to others. Note to GCF-ers, get in touch w/me about this. I'll bring info. to our activies.

Dear Tom,

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are members of the InterVarsity chapters at Harvard University and we are writing to you as fellow Christians to ask for some help in something that we believe is extremely important. As a staff worker of Carnegie Mellon University Graduate Christian Fellowship, we believe you are in the perfect position to help respond to a tragedy occurring on the other side of the world.

As you may know, there is a genocide happening in the Darfur region of
Sudan. Over 200,000 men, women and children have been killed, countless innocent women have been raped, and another 2 million Darfurians have been driven from their homes. President Bush and Secretary of State Rice have officially called it a genocide.

Unfortunately, the church is woefully uninformed about the Darfur genocide. Still, many Christian students have faith that Christ's body will witness to God's love and grace through this crisis (as described in a recent InterVarsity article, link below). Moreover, many verses in scripture command us to respond to tragedies like this, and Proverbs 24:11-12 has particularly caught our attention (full quote below).

To help inform churches of this issue, we have compiled a packet of
information about the genocide that students can send or bring home to their pastors. The packet includes a letter to the church leader and several pages of suggestions on how to PRAY, SPEAK OUT, and ACT. It also references an article from Christianity Today about the need for Christian response to the Darfur genocide.

We encourage you to ask members of your fellowship to send or bring the packet to their home church leaders. We have found that including a
personal hand-written letter is effective in eliciting a response. The InterVarsity article and packet can be found at:

article: http://www.intervarsity.org/news/news.php?item_id=1710
packet: http://hcs.harvard.edu/~hcdag/take_action.html

We are asking for your help in informing all the members of Carnegie Mellon University Graduate Christian Fellowship about the genocide. More importantly, we hope that all of you will get the word out to the church that this is a bi-partisan issue on which we, as followers of Christ, cannot remain silent. Join InterVarsity chapters and Christian students across the country in rallying the church to respond! Admittedly, informing others takes a lot of effort; please be encouraged by the witness and trials of Jesus and of the saints, and know that the Holy Spirit will always be with you.

We understand that most students have left for the summer, but for those
that have returned home, this proves to be quite convenient for this
particular project. We hope that with your help, members of your fellowship will directly approach their home pastors with this packet, and then help take part in the church's response to the genocide.

Finally, we will be posting occasional updates to our list-serv, 'Jesus In
Darfur'. Please sign onto it if you are interested in receiving these
updates:

http://lists.hcs.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/jesusindarfur

Thanks so much for your time, energy and prayer. Please feel free to
contact either Adrian (atam@fas.harvard.edu) or Kristin(ktlee@fas.harvard.edu) if you have any questions, comments or thoughts!


In Christ,

Adrian Tam, Alex Lee, Jordan Baehr, Kristin Lee, Matt Mulder, Molly Lin, Susan Lee and Yi-An Huang

InterVarsity Christian Fellowships at Harvard University
----------------------------
"Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, 'But we knew nothing about this,' does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who guards your life know it? Will he not r epay each person according to what he has done?" (Proverbs 24:11-12)