The year was 1996. We had gained some momentum on the campus of the University of Dortmund through starting a student fellowship and bible study. It was growing, and we thought it was time to make a splash and have an impact across the whole university.

So, we put together a four week lecture series on the subject of creation vs. evolution. We invited four speakers to each give a lecture in the series, which we called “rEVOLUTIONäres Denken” (rEVOLUTIONary Thinking).

We reserved the largest auditorium on campus we could, and set about to advertise widely to make this the talk of the campus. There were even short-term mission teams which came from the States to help us adverstize and reach out on campus.

Besides designing a logo for the lecture series and postering all over the place, we also employed a tried and true advertising method we developed way back in Urbana-Champaign at the University of Illinois. We call them table tents. Most student groups just lay out their flyers and invitations on the cafeteria tables. We discovered that if you fold them and use the right thickness of paper, they will stand, like a tent. Then you can’t miss seeing them, and the adverstising effect is multiplied.

But for this special lecture series, we decided to get really special with our table tents. We came up with three additional designs and not just the tent. In addition to the tents, they were: a cone, a moebius curve, and finally a cube! As you can imagine, it was quite an undertaking and took a lot of manpower (not just to make them, but to put them out before the lunch time in the cafeteria and them pick them back up at the end). We were so thankful for the short-term team from Kansas City!

On the far left is an example of a table tent. On the right you see a cube. In front is a moebius curve. In the back is a (somewhat ink-stained) cone. And since it was nearing Christmas, some of the students’ creativity took over and somebody made a Christmas tree out of one of them. I thought it was so well done, that I kept it.

And it all seemed to work. The lecture hall was filled for every lecture, and we created quite a stir on campus. In fact we know we rattled their cage a week later. The student government wields quite a bit of power on German universities and in general is very liberal and VERY anti-Christian. They are called AStA which stands for Allgemeiner Studierendenausschuss (Student Council Executive Committee). The chair, advisors, and representatives of the AStA are elected by the student council, a university-wide body consisting of representatives from each of the colleges and schools. They were not pleased as you might imagine. But beyond just displeased, they were agitated enough to make up their own campaign to try to defuse what we had done.

They literally stole our logo from our posters, made their own posters in the same color, and put them all over campus as a follow up. Their poster essentially asserted that the entire four part lecture series was really just a project to test how gullible students might be, and that it was never seriously intended! Wow. We knew at that point that we had struck a nerve!

Since the poster is, of course, in German, here is the English translation:

“It Was an Experiment

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

Over the past weeks, an experiment was conducted at your university by the Institute for Applied Didactics (IAD). It involved a series of lectures titled "rEVOLUTIONary Thinking". We've observed that our experiment's events were more attended than serious guest lectures and university ring lectures themselves. Compared to similar studies in the past decades, there's been an increase in the population's susceptibility to demagogic manipulation attempts (DM) when they:

(a) are advertised with sufficient creative material and

(b) promise to offer people points of connection, especially of a spiritual nature.

We explicitly point out that inviting demagogues to public events supports the goal of DM: giving demagogues a platform for self-presentation on the other side.

Choosing a title for a counter-event that’s as provocative as the texts of D doesn't only confirm public outrage by DM; it's above all the pursuit of negative attention ("negative publicity") that the demagogues are after with their calls to action. People who have already fallen for DM, viewing themselves as unrecognized saviors, will act even more fervently the more negative attention they get. This last phenomenon is known from traditional Christian religions as "the voice of one crying in the wilderness," so for our experiment with DM we chose a Christian cover organization.

We thank the numerous participating lecturers and students of Dortmund University. Detailed results of our study will be published after completion in an appropriate scientific publication.

Kind regards,

The Board of the Institute for Applied Didactics, Duisburg and Cologne.”

(As you might imagine, there is no such Institute. They were just trying as best they could to counter the effect that we had been having across the campus.)
We did consider some sort of legal action, but decided that would not accomplish anything. Instead we continued with the scientific lectures. The next year we die a series and called it theoLOGISCHes Denken.

By taking a stand for God and for truth, we were getting backlash from the world and from our enemy, who hates the truth. We were experiencing John 15:18-19

“If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.” John 15:18-19

This is yet another example of a truth statement as a promise. We are not of the world, and should not be surprised that we got such a reaction.

Or one thinks of another, not so popular, promise through the Apostle Paul: “Indeed, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” 2. Timothy 3:12