But what these groups really provide, more than ritual or theology, is community. And according to Reynolds, that is the single greatest desire of today's students. When Reynolds first came to MIT, the campus community was grieving the tragic death of Scott Krueger, the freshman who died of alcohol poisoning in 1997. "It really got me focused on helping people by creating more places where they can connect on a personal level," Reynolds says. Since then, Reynolds has been working hard to make the Tech Catholic Community on campus more than just a Sunday mass. By providing such things as community dinners, prayer groups, and retreats, he contends, "We are becoming a place where people come together and feel a personal attachment in an academic environment that can tend toward the impersonal."

Within this matrix of religious activity, a group like Campus Crusade can easily blend into the woodwork. However, Campus Crusade is on a mission—namely, to bring what it considers to be the pure, bare-bones essence of the Christian gospel to every undergraduate student on campus. Not only does the Crusade have the financial means to do this, but its members also put a huge chunk of their time and energy into strategizing ways to reach students—such as depositing into every undergrad's mailbox care packages that include everything from ramen noodles to postcards inscribed with the group's Web address.

But mainly, groups like Campus Crusade offer something that is far less tangible, something typically described as the "evangelical experience." Consider their Wednesday night gathering of small life-group leaders in Building 5. Caroline Peirce, a recent graduate of Wellesley College and an intern at Campus Crusade's MIT chapter, is leading the group in prayer. "Praying should be like breathing," she says, and from their unblinking faces and straight postures, it's clear that the assembled students are taking in each word. "Everywhere we go, everything we do, we should always be lifting up short prayers."

Peirce explains that prayer can be subdivided into four main constituents: adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication (as a memory aid, she offers the group the acronym ACTS). She cites Bible verses supporting each of these prayer components, and soon everyone's personal, dog-eared copy of the scriptures joins the clutter on the table. One student follows along in a paperback that is held together with duct tape.

Leading the group through each of these four stages, Peirce encourages everyone to start "adoring" God extemporaneously—and getting these students to pray out loud requires no prodding whatsoever. The room starts to buzz with the sound of their audible adoration. Eventually they move on to confession, and for this they sit silently for the better part of five minutes. Even for these students—as wholesome-looking a lot as you'll ever find on campus—there is apparently no shortage of things to confess.

For thanksgiving, they take turns expressing their gratitude to the Almighty—an exercise that reveals much of what draws them so deeply to this faith. They thank God for "the joy you give us, friends who hold us accountable, your peace, your faithfulness even when we're faithless, the strength to make it through tough times, guiding us so that we don't have to go through life alone, listening to us, loving us in spite of our shortcomings," among other things. Their eyes are closed, but their faces are full of expression. The language of their prayer is earnest, sincere, conversational. Were it not for telltale phrases such as "Lord, we lift up to you," any one of the students might be having a heart-to-heart phone chat with a dear friend.

And this, undoubtedly, is part of the genius of modern evangelicalism, the core of the evangelical experience: the seamless synthesis of the personal and the spiritual. There is little that's abstract about the God with whom they speak so casually and passionately. All the mysteries of faith seem overshadowed by a sense of the divine that's as tangible as a beaker.