The man behind the message
Most students have seen him preaching behind the TSC to passersby, but very few at USU know how Eli Brayley, a traveling preacher native to Canada, ended up in Logan, Utah.
Brayley’s journey started when he was 16 years old living in Fredericton New Brunswick, Canada where he was born and raised. It was at this age that Brayley said he was “born again” into Christianity.
“Born again Christian is not a denomination, it’s not even a label. I’m just a Christian. I think that when we start labeling ourselves by denominations we put ourselves in a box the Bible never intended,” he said.
Brayley can often be seen on the south side of the TSC preaching to students. Sometimes the discussions are just that, simple one-on-one chats about religion, while other encounters verge on heated debates.
“This is a very interesting campus because most people are one religion. You go to a typical campus elsewhere and there is not such a constancy, you’ll have tons of different kinds of people,” Brayley said.
And although Brayley’s message seems geared toward members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he said his messages are meant for everyone, not just the religious majority.
“I decided right from the beginning I was not here to win a popularity contest. The goal is to preach the gospel. People might hate it but they need to hear it,” he said.
However, Brayley also said USU students are fairly mild in their disagreements to his message. Occasionally he will receive a few hecklers but said he has never has he been in physical danger, which has not always been the case at other universities.
On two separate occasions while preaching on campuses in California, Brayley was punched by the recipients of his message who did not agree with what he was saying. Neither incident, however, has done anything to deter Brayley from preaching on campuses. But Brayley, now 22, said he didn’t just wake up one day and decide to evangelize on campuses around the world. For the first few years after he was born again, Brayley said he spent his time studying the Bible and finishing up high school.
Then, at age 18, as Brayley was entering college, he began open-air preaching at the farmers’ market in downtown Fredericton to shoppers and commuters.
“I had a little box, nervous as anything, stood up on it and preached for the very first time,” he said.
Brayley said he was inspired to begin open air preaching after reading a book about George Whitefield who’d been kicked out of the Anglican Church in the 1700s because of his beliefs.
In the book Whitefield, who was the forefront for the Methodist church, said, “The world is my parish,” words of wisdom Brayley said inspired him.
However, his format for preaching to those attending the farmers markets was different than the one he uses on college campuses, he said.
“I would just go and give a short 15-minute message and people would just talk to me after, but I didn’t have people asking me questions like I do on university campuses,” he said.
But halfway into his second year at University of New Brunswick where he was pursuing a degree in history and philosophy, Brayley said he found a new direction to take his preaching.
He and two fellow open air preachers, one from New York and the other from Michigan, decided the best way to spread the gospel was to go on a college tour and preach on campuses across the nation, he said. So the three companions maneuvered there way across the U.S. in an old 16 passenger van, funded solely by a small stipend sent monthly from a church in New York, and prayers, he said.
“We traveled for the year 2006 and 2007 and hit 60 plus campuses from New York to California. Everything from conservative Utah to Berkley, Calif., and through the Bible Belt,” he said.
After this year-long tour, Brayley said he and his companions went their separate ways. However, he said, shortly into the summer of 2007 he was invited to Utah by a local family who’d heard him speak at a campus in Montana.
“We never went through Utah on our tour, but there were some people from Utah following us and they drove up to Montana to see us, just a local family,” he said.
Originally Brayley was only going to stay for two weeks and preach on the USU campus, but eventually the two weeks turned into two months, which gave way to an invitation from a local family who invited him to move to Smithfield. Now Brayley spends the days he is not on campus at the Oasis Book Store in Logan working.
But Brayley said he isn’t just a preacher, although he admits that does make up the biggest portion of his life. He said he also loves to play soccer and chess, and enjoys reading. Most of all though, the preacher said he enjoys spending time with people.
“I just love people. Whether you’re a Mormon, Buddhist or atheist it doesn’t matter. People are created by God and I’ll hang out with anybody,” he said.
–greg.boyles@aggiemail.usu.edu