MIT GCF Hardcore Bible Study

Welcome to our Small Group Bible Study! We meet every Wednesday from 6-7:30 pm in Building 66 Room 369. Although we are located in the Chemical Engineering building, graduate students from all departments are welcome to join our group. On September 10, we will begin our study of Romans.

Here are the links to the various bits of info on this page:

• Study Questions
• About our Group
• Member Webpages/E-mail Addresses

About our Group

So how did we become known as the "Hardcore Bible Study"? Well, that is the contribution of David Chan, whose vocabulary consists solely of these three phrases: "Hard Core", "Rocks Hard", and "Smooth". He is well known throughout GCF for this, so when it came time to pick a name for our Bible study, it was the obvious choice for our study. Plus we are all pretty serious about our work and our love for digging into God's word. But we did consider such lofty alternatives as: "Building 66", "ChemE", "Intellectual", "Neo-Modern", "INTJ", "All Exec All the Time", "Really Cool Bible Study With Snacks", and the dreaded "Wednesday Night". Believe it or not, it came down to "Hardcore" and "Wednesday Night"!

A quick note about the character of our group: although the term "hardcore" may conjure up alternating images of Bereans or ardent defenders of the cross, we are actually a really nice group of people who welcome Christians at all stages of their faith, and if we end up debating, it's always friendly. We strive to understand the meaning of the passage (often referring to the Greek text), bring in the historical context (that's where commentaries come in handy), as well as interpret the application to our modern-day lives.

We used to meet Wednesdays at 6:00 pm in the CFL (W11-080). At that time, all of the other GCF bible studies met in living groups, such as Ashdown, Tang, and Eastgate. We wanted to be open to people living off-campus as well, hence we met 1.5 hours earlier than the other Bible studies. And we did tend to have many off-campus people in our study, many of whom were/are extremely well-read and love to discuss tough theological issues. Such illustrious alumni include: Joe and Margery Bonafede, Tim Chow, George and Jane Greco, Jason Heine, Tom Lee, and Pat Walton. Our newest alum is Donald Crankshaw!

In the spring of 2001, we thought that if we were to attract more off-campus folks, we should move our study to the daytime, since many people do want to go home and eat dinner at normal hours. So we started meeting on Thurdays at noon in the CFL. Anyway, by this time we had several on-campus people in our Bible study as well as off-campus people, and to this day our study is split about 50:50 on-campus:off-campus.

In the summer of 2002, we had a new idea. Well, mostly it was because running from one end of campus to another during the day sucked up a lot of time from our research. Anyway, we thought that most off-campus take the T to go home, so why not move our Bible study to a location on the east side of campus. Specifically, why not Building 66? We have several ChemE's in our study, so we knew the building and how to sweet-talk the admins into letting us book conference rooms. We also viewed it as an opportunity to do some department-based outreach. So we moved back to Wednesdays at 6:00 pm, and here we are!

We are currently studying Acts, but in the past we have tackled, in reverse chronological order: Hosea, John, Daniel, Romans, the minor Minor Prophets, and other books. As you can tell, we usually try to alternate between the Old and New Testaments.

Member Webpages/E-mail Addresses

A partial list:

Cynthia Lo clo@mit.edu	John Lee jsylee@mit.edu	David Chan dlcchan@mit.edu	Tim Finegan finegan@mit.edu	Sam Hill slh@mit.edu
Susan Kern susank@mit.edu	Tiffany Lapp tiff@mit.edu	Joe Lowery jllowe1@mit.edu	Muyiwa Ogunnika muyi@mit.edu	Eric Orozco eorozco@mit.edu
Ryan Pettit rlp@mit.edu	Mary Thompson mthompsonma@earthlink.net

To learn more about GCF, please e-mail:mit-gcf-info@mit.edu