We are a group of UC San Diego graduate students, post-docs, and others who gather together to fellowship, worship, and learn what it means to be followers of Jesus in an academic setting. We provide a spiritual relief from the challenges and rigors of academia. With God’s blessing, we maintain a thoughtful and welcoming community with the intent to provide spiritual support and sustenance.
Individuals in GCF come from a variety of cultures and backgrounds, and we welcome Christians and non-Christians alike to participate in our times of fellowship. As Christians, we believe that we have a role as ambassadors for Christ. For this reason, we strive to be a community which closely reflects Jesus.
We do not consider ourselves a replacement for a church, but rather a complementary community whose primary focus is the exploration of academic life as followers of Christ and how faith impacts the way we think and act. Graduate school presents its own set of challenges and pitfalls that can try one’s faith. By growing together in faith, we hope to glorify God and attract our fellow scholars to God’s light.
“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” –John 13:35
Unified through Christ and compelled by His love, we as Christian graduate students and post-docs of the San Diego academic community, seek to live out our callings by loving the Lord our God with all of our hearts, with all of our minds, with all of our souls, and with all of our strengths and by loving our neighbors as ourselves (Matt. 22:37-38).
We come together as individuals to pursue an intimate, ever-deepening relationship with God that extends to all aspects of our lives. As academics, we seek to explore our faith from a deep intellectual perspective in order to better understand God’s kingdom and our role in it. As Christians, we seek to explore diverse academic and cultural questions, so that we may find a way to approach scholarship within the context of our Christian faith. We desire to surrender our lives in uncompromising obedience to His will, as we experience and worship God with our whole beings.
We come together as a community to share our lives, developing close friendships and fellowship with each other and with God which serves to strengthen our faith and affirm our callings, so that we may be encouraged and built up in the image of Christ, enabling us to step into our intended place as members of one body under Christ.
We come together as a witnessing community to declare the grace and reflect the glory of God among the campus community and to serve the world around us with an attitude of sacrificial (agape) love.