Last week at Southern Seminary a group of 70 collegiate ministers and church planters gathered to discuss a growing area in missions today. These men and women arrived from the United States and Canada, and for three days addressed a multitude of issues related to reaching students through church planting and training students as church planters. A special word of appreciation goes to Brian Frye, with Ohio Baptist Collegiate Ministries, for his heart and leadership for bringing several groups together to make this event happen.
You will want to keep an eye out for the videos of this three-day event. They are likely to be on-line soon.
During this event, the participants shared blessings, challenges, and what they believed is working well and working not so well. They agreed on some matters and agreed to disagree on other matters.
I am very thankful that over the past several years, a growing number of people are seeing the importance of church planting and college students. As a college student (many moons ago), I was heavily involved in the Baptist Student Union on my college campus. At that time, no one was talking about church planting and college students. At best, we talked about evangelism and getting new believers assimilated in local churches.
I recognize there are numerous concerns related to collegiate church planting, but the strengths far outweigh the limitations. In this post, I want to share with you why I am supportive of such missionary activities.
Church planting is church planting whether it is among a highly heterogeneous population or homogeneous population. The purposes and principles are the same regardless of the location, demographic, or people group.
I am pro-collegiate church planting because I am pro-church planting. An apologetic for collegiate church planting is in many ways the same apologetic for church planting in general. However, because this notion of collegiate church planting is still a foreign way of thinking to many of us, I want to share with you a few collegiate-church-planting-specific reasons why I am pro-collegiate church planting:
1) College students need Jesus, and only a small percentage have Him.
2) There is a great amount of passion that many young adults have for Jesus and His mission. We need to respond to this moment in their lives. They need to be equipped and released for ministry. They need empowerment not permission to do the Great Commission.
3) Students are impressionable. We have the potential to model before them what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Closely connected to this is that we have the opportunity to model a highly reproducible, and healthy, expression of the local church. Such an approach to church planting has the potential to spread rapidly with such a responsive group.
4) Closely related to their zeal is the fact that many students can be raised up quickly as healthy leaders.
5) Many students do not have all of the life responsibilities that come with time, making them highly mobile. They are more likely to carry the gospel and multiply churches across the world faster than most older adults.
6) Students can be challenged to major in fields that will place them in positions of influence in the global marketplace. Obtaining such credentials would allow them to have a natural platform for ministry while being able to support themselves financially as they plant churches.
7) Many of the world’s unreached and least reached peoples are on college campuses and open to hearing about Jesus.
8 ) Keeping church expressions highly biblical (and simple) allows international students to develop translatable skills they can apply when they return to their countries that are not open to the gospel.
Keep an eye on what the Spirit is doing on and near the college campuses of the world. The students of today are the most influential leaders in the world of later today.
Here are a few of my resources to assist you in this area:
Article: P.L.A.N.T.S: Equipping Seminary and College Students in Church Planting
Links: Collegiate Missions
Podcast: Record Number of International Students in US Higher Education
Post: International Students
Post: Students and Global Evangelization
i’ve been involved in college student ministry work on several levels and at several times in my life. only one of those “ventures” involved church planting, and that was in wuhan, china — where i worked as an english teacher and made disciples.
one problem we ran into — that i wonder if you’d speak to — is the high turnover of college students. you’ve got someone involved in a small home church for 3ish years at the most, and then they move elsewhere. i see that as a great way for them to take the gospel to their next location. but the churches we planted lacked permanence.
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Thanks for sharing, James. Great point. If I recall correctly there was some discussion of this matter at the event. Hopefully it will be on the videos. My email is jpayne@sbts.edu. Send me an email with a number and let’s set up a time to talk about this matter. My hands would be too tired if I had to type my response with clarity. 🙂
Sounds great.
J. D.
If anyone is interested in hearing some of the great stuff that was talked about at the CCPC, please check out the Vimeo channel here:
http://vimeo.com/channels/collaborative
Only a few videos are online so far, but there are more coming, including the 2 panel discussion sessions.
Dear Sir/Madam,
Dear child of God,
Warm greetings in christ to you. This is a greeting from Ethiopia, one of the oldest countries in Africa. We are the believers of Jesus Christ as our personal savior and worship him in every situation existing in our country. Here, we are motivated to salute and write to you by searching the online services you release with the same trust and belief in God to us. That is, our congregation is named as Ethiopian Misgana church, Bonga chapel. The meaning of Misgana is thanksgiving which is similar to your vision and mission statements. We are keen to communicate with you and pray to each other in the coming days. Get in touch for better communication for spreading the Gospel of Christ all over the world. Thank you so much for your understanding and allowing us to join your channel.
With regards,
Getachew Robo, Email: grehobot@gmail.com
Chair, church elders fellowship
Thank you for your kind words, Getachew. May the Lord continue to bless and use you greatly in His Kingdom work.