Campus Group Gets Attention By Offering to Go to Church

Tiffany Ewigleben is one of the leaders of CFI@GRCC (Grand Rapids Community College). Earlier this year, the school held a “Club Day” where different student organizations could promote themselves.

On short notice, and with a chance to win $200 on the line, Tiffany’s group decided to get students’ attention by making a special offer: Send An Atheist to Church.

Because our first event for the year (Food For Freethought) involves working with a non-profit food bank, we put up a donation box to go to the NPO in order for students to enter one of the two raffles. If students didn’t have any money but wanted to enter, we asked them to give us their “like” sticker, since part of the money we’d receive would go towards this NPO if we won the contest. Many people did both!

…

Resolution: We won second place for the most “likes”, a hundred and fifty dollar prize for our club.

That is an awesome way to make your atheist group known to the campus community and be generous at the same time. Well done!

Steven Olsen

Fantastic. I’ve been going to church on my own with a team from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but I should use it as a fundraiser first. 🙂
The Skeptical Scribe

This is hilarious! Send an atheist to church. I have been to church a couple of times, as an atheist.
Bob Carlson

The CFI must find it pretty tough sledding in Grand Rapids. I you Google the three words Grand Rapids Ministries you will get a seemingly endless stream of hits. In fact, the slogan of The Grand Rapids Atheist is “An Atheist Surrounded by Religiousness.”
Mike Brownstein

I seriously think this is an awesome idea especially for places where non-theism is not overtly accepted or acknowledged. I really enjoyed being a part of the Purdue one, and we’re looking into doing it again!
Korinthian

This idea sounds familiar somehow.
Tiffany Ewigleben

Korinthian- The idea is familiar, actually. If you look at the CFI blogspot, you can read the full article about the event, and where we got the idea. We modified it for our particular campus, but it existed before.
Thanks for the mention, btw, and it was good meeting you Hemant, albeit briefly, at the dinner after the rally in DC. Thanks for that as well!
Feather

Beat me to it, Korinthian.

I’m sure I’ve heard this somewhere before.

ciao
Tiffany

I thought I posted before, but it’s not here. er. Anyhoo-yes-this was developed by students and posted on the Secular Student Alliance webpage. If you read the whole CFI article, I give credit to it. 🙂 We just adapted it for our particular campus.