In Memoriam: Dr. Steve Hayner

It was 1987. I walked across Rutgers University campus with another freshman friend. We were on our way to a meeting for Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru). In the gobs of our gab we happened upon the topic of the recent scandalous departure of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship president, Gordon McDonald. Interim President, Tom Dunkerton, guided the organization for the next year, appointing Dr. Samuel Barkat as first VP of Multiethnic Ministries. Soon after, Dr. Steve Hayner would accept the mantle of president of the troubled organization. Over the next 13 years, Hayner guided Intervarsity into a period of stability, growth, and racial healing.

Perhaps the most significant contribution of Hayner’s leadership was his close partnership with Dr. Barkat. Together they stood on the sovereign foundations of Intervarsity’s historic struggles toward racial righteousness and guided the organization through a deep examination of its multiethnic dynamics and its white dominant culture. Ultimately, their work led the parachurch collegiate ministry through a transformative examination of its own white western cultural lens and how that lens shaped their understanding of Jesus and the gospel.

My first encounter with Hayner was as a young staff worker in the mid-1990s. At my first Intervarsity Staff Conference, Hayner stood before the approximately 1,000 staff and reflected on the Genesis 2 tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It was there that I heard for the first time that the tree was God’s grace to humanity. It was Hayner who unwrapped the profound truth that nowhere else in the garden did the humans want for anything. It was at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that humanity was confronted by what Pascal called “the God shaped vacuum” in the human soul — that void that can only be filled by God. According to Hayner, it was that tree that made it possible for humanity to enter into a love relationship with God. The tree offered the opportunity to choose in or out of relationship with God. The tree required trust.

Sitting in that conference ballroom, transfixed, I had no idea that Hayner’s revelation would fuel my own exploration of Genesis years later and ultimately help shape my understanding of the biblical concept of shalom (God’s holistic peace). Shalom is what happens when we encounter the proverbial “trees of the knowledge of good and evil” in our lives — those places that confront us with our need for God, those places that confront us with our desire for God. Shalom is what happens when we confront those “trees” and choose God, when we trust God. And shalom is broken when we don’t.

The Hayner/Barkat partnership ultimately led Intervarsity to engage a transformational strategy to address the organization’s issues of race and racism, and to pursue of racial reconciliation by deepening its understanding of shalom.

In the years after Hayner’s departure from Intervarsity, the fruit of his labor began to bloom. The organization was featured in Christianity Today as a model reconciling ministry for its faithful approach to multiethnicity and racial reconciliation. Later, in the context of campuses torn apart by racial strife and a world suffocated by ethnic cleansing, poverty, hunger, and AIDS, Intervarsity’s evangelists were prepared to articulate good news of a reconciling, healing and justice-wielding Jesus — and, as a result, the organization experienced record numbers of students deciding to follow the Jesus way. Hayner’s humble, yet courageous leadership laid these foundations.

In addition, countless national evangelical leaders committed to reconciliation and justice were forged in the fires of Steve Hayner’s Intervarsity: Brenda Salter McNeil, Soong-Chan Rah, Jimmy McGee, Andy Crouch, Nikki Toyama-Szeto, Kathy Kang, myself, and many, many more.

Following his time with Intervarsity, Dr. Hayner served as Senior Associate Pastor of High Point Church and Associate Pastor of Fountain of Life Family Ministry Center, a multiethnic church in Madison, Wis. In 2003, he accepted a call to teach at Columbia Theological Seminary as Peachtree Professor of Evangelism and Church Growth and, in 2009, he accepted the seminary’s invitation to serve as its president.

Earlier this week, the church celebrated the life and witness of Dr. Steve Hayner. Thousands gathered at Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, and thousands more offered quite prayers of gratefulness across the country.

Sojourners President Jim Wallis was among them:

Steve Hayner was exemplary of the kind of young evangelical leader we sorely need going into the future and that’s why he will be so missed. Steve was both very smart and creative, deeply faithful and innovative at the same time, and always courageous on issues of racial and social justice, which made him ahead of his time and most of his contemporaries. He might have also been one of the kindest, warmest, and loving leaders I have ever met in the world of faith-based organizations. Many of us will miss Steve.

Steve Hayner’s humble and courageous leadership gave us all a glimpse of what is possible when we really love God — when we trust and choose God’s way to wholeness and peace. With tears of gratefulness, I say thank you, Steve. Thank you for your faithful life. With it you blessed us all.

Lisa Sharon Harper is Senior Director of Mobilizing for Sojourners and co-author of Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith.