Campus minister aims to challenge students on Christian doubts
STUDENT pubs are renowned dens of drunken debauchery – but they could soon be buzzing with theological discussion as the preaching ground of Edinburgh University’s first ever campus minister.
Rev Dr Liam Fraser, a 30-year-old self-proclaimed Doctor Who lookalike, has been appointed to challenge “widespread scepticism and indifference toward the Christian faith among the 50,000-strong university community”.
Dr Fraser said he plans to engage with students in pubs, cafes, libraries and in the university chaplaincy centre and corridors.
The married father-of-two said he looks like Doctor Who in a dog collar, with a passing resemblance to David Tennant’s incarnation in his trademark tweed jacket. He hopes to support young Christians who come to doubt their faith and become estranged from the Church of Scotland after they leave home.
The minister was temporarily paralysed and suffered a brain haemorrhage after contracting a condition called aplastic anaemia – an illness similar to leukaemia – at the age of three.
Dr Fraser, who was born in Edinburgh, said: “I feel called to reach those people who yearn, and long, and strive for something more, but are not sure what that something more is, who ask themselves from time to time: is this it?
“I hope to enlarge the imaginations of students and staff, and make the Christian faith a credible and attractive possibility once again.”
He added: “I will be making the point that you have a worth that is more than your career or your bank balance, that your life has greater meaning than the unremarkable truths that you’ve been taught since birth.”
Dr Fraser is based at the Greyfriars’ Charteris Centre, close to the many student flats on the Pleasance.