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Volume 41, Issue 12
April 6, 2004
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April 6, 2004
MCC shuts
‘The Door’
Nick Martin
Mesa Legend
Drugs, alcohol and sex are the downfall of American life, two men shouted
to students for about five minutes before being driven off campus by College
Safety.
The two were preachers from The Door Christian Fellowship in Tempe, and
were on campus just before 11 a.m., March 24 to pass out flyers for an
upcoming revival and to preach their message.
“I believe they’re trying to silence the message,” one
of the preachers, Ben Mavis, 47, said about being asked to leave the campus.
As an alumnus of MCC, class of ‘77, Mavis said that he, more than
just about anyone, had a right to be on the campus.
But College Safety saw it differently. “We contacted him and told
him that he had to clear it through Student Services,” said Steve
Corich, the director of College Safety.
The issue wasn’t what the two street preachers were saying, Corich
said, but how they went about saying it.
The two should have first contacted MCC’s Student Services department,
gotten permission to have the public demonstration on campus and then
would have been given a specific time and place where they could preach,
Corich said.
In this case, coming to MCC was not planned by the two preachers. They
were passing out flyers in a nearby neighborhood and came to the campus
spontaneously, Mavis said.
As for students’ reaction to the two, some shouted things at the
preachers like,”Separation of church and state,” which Mavis
said is “ridiculous if you know anything about that law.”
But Mavis also said that many students gave a kinder reaction. “Some
of them were good, people were shaking our hands as they took the flyers,”
he said
The two passed out two different flyers — one in English, one in
Spanish. Both promoted revivals that would be held that night and the
following day respectively.
While disappointed by being asked to leave campus, Mavis admitted that
there was probably a protocol for doing what they did and said he would
check with College Safety before doing this next time. He said he hoped
there would be a next time.
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