Helping Students Encounter Christ

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With your help, EC Stanford students are learning that walking along on another’s faith journey is not quick or easy but it is oh so rewarding

If you’ve been around Fr. Xavier lately, you know he gets pretty excited about the topic of Encounter Christ at Stanford:

“Catholics have a tradition of waiting for people to come to them; sort of a ‘we’ll leave the light on for you’ mentality. We want to bring the light to the students and more importantly, we want to teach Catholic students how to bring the light to other students.”

Last summer, CC@S began to work with Evangelical Catholic, an organization that teaches strategies for building person‐to‐person faith relationships. CC@S calls it EC for Encounter Christ, because the basic tenet of the program is to grow in relationship with Jesus Christ and his Church.

Your support of CC@S has helped Stanford students grow further in their faith and deeper in their relationship with God.

Your support of CC@S has helped Stanford students grow further in their faith and deeper in their relationship with God.

Now wrapping up its first quarter, the EC student leaders have learned a great deal. “We knew from the beginning that it was going to take time for people to get comfortable with talking about their faith from their heart instead of their head. Stanford students are used to living in their heads,” says EC student leader Daisy McKim. For student leaders, it can often be hard to remain patient and to trust the process.

For Daisy, a breakthrough came in one of the last weeks of her small group meeting fall quarter: students had concluded their personal reflections on the scriptures and were packing up their backpacks to head off to dorms and libraries for the evening. Suddenly, one of the students pointedly asked [pull quote] “You know how you talk about having a personal relationship with Jesus? How do you do that?” Daisy said, “everyone suddenly stopped what they were doing, eager to listen to the answer.”

“That’s when I knew we were getting somewhere, we really were going deeper. Everyone is hungry for that personal relationship with Jesus and we can help them with that.”