Read below a great article from www.house2house.tv on campus church planting movements around the nation. This is a great picture of what it looks like to see an entire campus transformed by the Whole Body of Christ, bringing the Whole Gospel to the Whole Campus! Catch the Vision and join the movement!

STUDENTS’ STORIES

Service and Strategy

Jordan took a deep breath as he knocked on the door of a fellow student’s dorm room – his first one! He and a few friends were trying an experiment in their hall of residence at the University of Texas. As the door opened, a blast of music hit him. A somewhat disheveled guy wearing jeans and a T-shirt proclaiming him to be a freshman peered out.

“Hey, my name is Jordan and I live down the hall. Can I take out your trash?”

There was a shocked silence for a few seconds.

“Why are you doing this?”

“We are a group of Christians living just down the hall. We follow Jesus, and we reckon that He would probably take people’s trash out. We want to serve the people on our hall and get to know them.”

“Well, I guess so. I hate taking out my trash. That would be cool!”

As Jordan emptied the overflowing trash cans into the large black sack he was carrying he reflected on what had led him up to this point.

The previous semester, he and another friend, also a sophomore, had decided to live in one of the dorms on campus. They wanted to be very intentional about ministry, reaching out to the people that they lived around. They had come up with various different ideas of how they could contact them. The one that had caught their imagination was when they heard about a guy in another university who would pick up people’s trash once a week as a means of initiating a relationship with them. He would then invite them to a Bible study. The students respected him for serving them that way and the group had really grown as different ones began to follow Christ.

Jordan and his friend had decided to try this out. They found a couple of Christian girls down the hall from them and shared their vision of building a Christian community to serve the people around them. There were about a hundred people living on their floor and they settled on a Thursday night to go door to door offering to take out people’s trash. Now he was actually doing it!

“There’s a group of us going bowling on campus later this evening,” Jordan added as he was leaving the room. “Would you like to join us?”

That first evening, fifteen people went bowling, contacts from the evening’s trash collection. Jordan did not know the majority of them, although there were a couple he recognized.

And so their “authentic faith community” started. Each week, the Christians go around the dorm collecting people’s trash and looking for others to hang out with. And each week they invite anyone who is interested to join with them when they have finished to play board games, get involved in various other activities or go out to eat. There are now several who don’t yet know Jesus who also help them to collect trash, and consistently fifteen or so who regularly hang out with them.

About half way through the semester, Jordan put up a large poster on his door inviting people to a Bible study looking at the parables and teachings of Jesus. Seven or eight of the people they have contacted through the trash collection and who are more spiritually hungry come to that. There is no formal teaching; they just read a parable and talk about it to see what it means and how it could affect their lives. This has led to some really authentic discussions on the meaning and purpose of life, and a couple of girls are getting very close to following the Lord. They have started reading the Bible on their own, and join in the prayer times that have also started at 7:00 A.M. one morning.

Campus Renewal Ministries (CRM) is a group that seeks to network the different ministries on campus. It is not a campus ministry in itself. There are about forty five different ministries working on that campus and CRM helps to keep them in relationship with one another and seeking God for a common strategy to reach the campus. (CRM also works in many other universities across the nation.) Justin, who works full time with the ministry, describes a little of its history at that university.

“In the year 2000, we brought in a group to spiritually map the campus in order to find out what different distinct subcultures were there. We also surveyed each of the ministries working on campus in order to see what was happening collectively across the campus and which groups the different Christian ministries were reaching. And we decided that every October we would bring someone in to advise and interact with us to help us to come up with new vision steps for the coming year.

“In the fall of 2001, the various different campus ministers realized that their ministries needed to be more of what we termed a “go-to” church rather than a “come-to” church. We started thinking about what that would look like and how we could help the different ministries on the campus move in that direction. At that time we wrote a vision statement for a campus saturation plan that reads, “We want to see a viable Christian community in every college, club, residence and culture at our university.” That has continued to be the vision statement behind what we do. It has not been easy. The first year we did very little, but in the last two years we have made some headway.

“Last year we did a survey and found that there were five hundred different communities that exist on campus. The agency that worked with us on this project came up with eight different cultural profiles of the students from “creatives” (artistic types) and gym rats (athletes who associate with the different physical activities in which they engage), to intellectuals. For each of these groups we are in the process of developing and refining a “family tree.” Under a group, for example, the “creatives,” we find out which of the different colleges within the university tends to have that profile of student, where they live and where they hang out. We treat the whole family tree as a foreign mission field. We are attempting to have Christians intentionally living where they live or hanging out in those areas where they congregate in an attempt to minister to them. They are deliberately going to places where there is not yet any kind of witness. They are trying to form “authentic faith communities” which is a term that all the different ministries working on campus are happy to use for the groups that form from this.

“Most of the Christian students involved in the authentic faith communities, especially the leaders, are also committed to different churches. But for fringe people, this is their church. We use the term “authentic faith community” rather than “church” because we are trying to do it in a more ecumenical way. All the different ministries working on campus call them that and all the AFCs are networked together.

“This is a long term plan. The end goal is that every student in the university would have a relevant Christian community that they could interact with for the four years that they are at college. We estimate that there are five hundred communities that we are trying to reach, and we have AFCs (effectively simple churches) in sixty of them. Four hundred and forty more to go!”

Huan is another student whom the Lord is using to start an AFC. He lives in one of the smallest dorms on campus. Three years ago, another Christian student who was working in the dorm as a Residents’ Assistant with fifty students assigned to him, started to invite some of these students to go to church with him. He would love them and hang out with them, and eventually started a small group where they could come together to study God. Many of the students wanted to do great things in their lives, and he invited them to come and seek God about this.

The next year, Huan took over his position as Residents’ Assistant and he started taking students to this small group too. Huan is from Mainland China, and he works a lot with other Chinese students. Many of them are facing difficulties in transitioning to life in the U.S., and they come to him broken and despairing. Huan shares with them how hard he found it too, and how God has transformed his life and has the power to change their situations. He demonstrates his love for them by hanging out with them, and sharing his life with them. Every day they eat or work out together, and at the weekend they do different activities together. As Huan shares with them what God is doing in his life, he finds that these students want to get to know God too, and several have become Christians.

Huan is in the petroleum engineering department, and he is working with others there too. A group of Muslim students from Indonesia are very suspicious of Christians, but Huan shares every aspect of his life, including what God is doing with him and the difficulties and challenges he faces, with them. Because they have been working on projects with him for two years, they have seen how God has changed him. Huan loves them and respects them. He knows that he cannot change them, but he faithfully prays that God will work in their lives. Many of them will talk to him or go home with him. Huan is very sensitive to them and invites them to hang out with his Christian friends.

“You are different from a lot of the Christians I have met,” one of them told him. “You respect me and love me, but other guys make fun of me.”

“How are you able to stay joyful when you go through all these difficulties?” they ask him.

“It is because God makes so much difference in my life,” is his reply.

Several of them are about to graduate and return to their home country. Huan is praying that before they go they will want to know this God who they have watched firsthand making such a difference in his life.

Every Thursday night, his AFC meets together to study the Word, share their lives together and pray for one another. They, too, serve their community by collecting trash and sweeping floors. Sometimes they play video games in an attempt to reach out.

Huan loves to disciple his fellow students even before they become Christians. As he hangs out with them, sharing meals or working out with them on a regular basis, he finds that it is usually not long before they respond to the genuine love they are sensing. He will then invite them to a more purposeful study on how they can go deeper with God; soon they give their hearts to Jesus.

Run by the students, and without rules, the university co-ops tend to be a little wilder; there is lots of drug use and sexual activity. Three years ago, an AFC started in one of them. As the group met together and prayed once a week, they would leave their door open and people started to come by and hang out. Many unbelievers would come by to worship and to pray and be prayed for. And again, some became Christians.

Last year the Christian group started doing something radical. The co-op has a reputation for its wild parties, and when the party is over, the place is totally trashed. The AFC decided that they would be the ones to serve at the parties and to clear up at the end. So they greet people at the door, serve the drinks, do all the things needed to keep the party running and then clean up afterwards. This has been very significant spiritually. People still talk about it today. And those in the co-op know that the Christians pray on a weekly basis for their neighbors. They know where they can go to for prayer or help.

CRM runs training for those leading the AFCs once a month. The training is designed to help people to live more intentionally and missionally with the group they hang out with. Not all the groups are full-fledged AFCs yet. Some are like a pioneer mission with one or two students trying to build relationships, but there is not yet enough spiritual interest to even start a seeker group. But many are catching the vision, and the AFCs are continuing to expand.

Other groups around the country are seeing similar moves of the Holy Spirit.

Back in 1998, Jaeson, a freshman and a new Christian, was sitting in his Philosophy 101 class of several hundred students.

“Who here believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?” the professor asked.

Jaeson immediately raised his hand. But as he looked around the room, he realized that he and one other friend were the only ones to have done so. Shocked, he began to pray daily for hours, prayer walking the campus and crying out to God for the more than 28,000 students there.

Soon God began to open the doors for him and the student government actually sponsored him to hold evangelistic events on campus. Hundreds of students were touched and gave their lives to Christ, but not many of them subsequently became part of a healthy local church. Jaeson pondered the problem for a long time.

In his research across different campuses, he found the same problem common to all. Most of the students thought that church was “boring, irrelevant and hypocritical.” Yet at the same time, many of their lives were hurting and broken, and, in their desperation for meaning and reality, many were turning to partying, drugs or sex in an attempt to fill the emptiness and find some purpose in living.

After graduation, Jaeson worked for a while at a tech job, but soon quit that in order to focus on missions work. This changed his perspective on church, as he began to see some very different models of how people gathered together. He realized that the simple, relationship-based churches that he saw in countries like China or India, where people shared their lives together on a daily basis, would be intensely relevant in a student context.

“If an 18 year old, uneducated, Chinese girl can plant a hundred churches a year, why can’t a college freshman plant a few churches on their campus?” he thought.

Jaeson started a ministry called Campus Church Networks (CCN). The purpose of CCN is to train students to start campus churches that reach out to those around them in the US and different parts of the world. If a student can be trained to win his network of friends to Christ and start a small church, and that student can then train others to do the same, this thing could multiply and spread like wildfire. It could reach into every segment of the student population and transform the campuses.

Already this is beginning to catch on. In Colorado Springs, Michele, a campus church planter who works with CCN and YWAM, is watching God ignite spontaneous prayer groups across the campuses that have a focus on praying for revival and repentance.

It started when an early morning prayer group, in conjunction with a similar group in another college, agreed to confess 2 Chronicles 7:14 over the campus and the nation at 7:14 A.M. every morning. (This verse says “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves and pray, and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and heal their land.) This is now spreading with groups of students getting together at 7:14 A.M. to pray this prayer on various campuses around the nation. They have a vision of 714 groups all over the country seeking God in this way, and eventually hope to implement a 24/7 prayer model on the campus. They know that this will result in campus churches being planted.

The students of today are the leaders of tomorrow. If we can reach them today, they are the ones who will change their communities, cities, and eventually the nations. Many moves of God have started with students. Could the same be about to happen again?