Guest to share testimony of conversion
Students and staff who attend the Tuesday morning Chapel service on April 15 will experience a message from Andrew Ginsberg as part of the Christ and Culture Lecture Series. Ginsberg, a graduate of Duke University, spent 20 years as the vice president of LabCorp, working with genetic engineering. Approximately four years ago, Ginsberg then moved from North Carolina to Wisconsin to dive into Christian ministry and is now the vice president for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a national college ministry.
The Rev. Carolyn Poteet has known Ginsberg since they were undergraduate students at Duke, both having friends involved in the InterVarsity program.
“He was not a Christian when we were in school together,” said Poteet. “We were all praying for him to become a Christian and trying to share our faith with him and in one particular instance, he basically laughed me out of his dorm room. But, we continued to pray for him and then about seven years after graduation, God showed up in his life.”
InterVarsity has played a role in both Ginsberg and Poteet’s life, and Poteet even has family ties with the ministry.
“My parents were involved in it and I was as well in college,” Poteet said. “That was very formative in my background with college ministry and I learned how to lead bible studies and other things through that kind of ministry.”
Ginsberg will be speaking three separate times in Roberts Chapel over the course of Monday and Tuesday.
On Monday night at 7 p.m., he will address the ethics of science, healthcare and answer questions about evolutionary genetics.
At the Tuesday morning chapel service, Ginsberg will give a shorter version of his testimony to Christ and will expand upon that testimony later that night, while also sharing a message centered on the biblical story of feeding the 5,000.
“He has a very powerful testimony that I believe should be heard,” said Poteet. “Working with LabCorp all those years, he has had his faith tested in many ways and was forced to overcome a lot of different things.”
Poteet considers Ginsberg’s testimony very powerful also because of his Jewish background.
“I specifically wanted him to come because of his background and to look at the question of ‘What does it mean for a Jew to say that Jesus is the Messiah?'” said Poteet. “The Jewish people have spent thousands of years looking for the Messiah, and for a Jewish person to say he is the Messiah is a remarkable thing to say. I really wanted the students to hear about that from a Jewish perspective which is a very different angle than what most of us have heard before.”
Ginsberg will also be visiting with genetics and nursing classes during his visit to campus. Poteet admires and respects Ginsberg and believes he will be a great guest speaker.
“He loves to use the gifts that God has given him to be able to bless other people and encourage them,” said Poteet. “He’s just a joy to be around and I think the students will really enjoy getting to know him.”