Casual Encounter: Jackson Williams and Allie Aschliman

The Sunday before the quiet period began didn’t quite get the memo; seniors took their graduation photos, students tossed frisbees on Memorial Mall and the Boilermaker Special rolled past the Engineering Fountain. These sights are familiar to most Boilermakers, but not to Jackson Williams and Allie Aschliman.

And even if they were, the sights were all but secondary to their goal of spreading the gospel.

Aschliman, a senior in education at IU, and Williams, a student at Midwestern Baptist Theological School stood between the Engineering Fountain and the Wilmeth Active Learning Center, walking up to anybody who would pass by and ask them about their relationship with Christianity.

“We've been pretty nervous,” Williams said. “We've really just hunkered down on the street and we’re talking to people who walk in and out of (WALC).”

“We know we're burdening people by being like, ‘Hey, can we talk to you?’ And it's like, no human wants to really do that unless it's something really important,” Aschliman said. “Like, yeah, salvation is so important so of course that's something that I want to do … but my flesh wants to stay in its comfortable little level and not do that.”

Williams and Aschliman planned to talk to people for about two more hours, having talked to four people at 3:30 p.m.

“If anything, (walking up to people) helps me,” Williams said. “Once you start doing it, you'll get good responses and sometimes you'll get neutral responses, and sometimes they'll be like, ‘I'm gay and you hate me and get away from me,’ and they hate you for … talking about Jesus.”

“I never liked that at all … once they walk away I try to pray for them.”

For Williams, he said the call to talk to students at universities is something personal.

“I was in the church my whole life,” Williams said. “In high school my sin really started to reveal itself. And I stole things, I drank, I smoked, I lied, I cheated, I committed sexual sin and then I got to IU and I went there just to party.”

Both were in West Lafayette to attend an event for the Salt Company, a college ministry of The Chapel, a church in the Greater Lafayette area. At the event, Williams planned to baptize his sister.

“My sister, going into college, thought she was a Christian but had little to no interest in Jesus Christ or talking about the Bible,” he said. “Then she came here and joined the Salt Company and she's excited about Christ now.”

Williams and Aschliman are engaged after a year of dating and have plans to get married this summer and want to travel across the country.

“He proposed at IU,” Aschliman said. “I was expecting it to be later, but he completely surprised me. We met on the intramural turf fields at IU, so he proposed to me there.”