Shannon Hughes said it felt purposeful to her that the Baptist Campus Ministries building at Auburn University is located about a block from one of the biggest bars in the Southeastern Conference.
“We feel like God placed us here for a reason,” said Hughes, who serves as Baptist campus minister there. “We started asking, ‘What would it look like if we reached students during the hours they’re at the bars?’”
The start of that answer was to revive an outreach they’d done years ago — making pancakes for students as they leave the bars. On Feb. 16, they started around 11 p.m. and made pancakes until around 3 a.m.
“Pancakes are easy, they’re cheap, and people love pancakes that early in the morning,” Hughes said.
Working together
About 25 students from Auburn’s BCM and the BCM groups at Tuskegee University and Alabama State University worked together to invite students in and serve pancakes. While they did those things, they had conversations with other students about spiritual things for hours overnight into Feb. 17.
Since January 2023, Auburn’s BCM has been partnering with the other two schools’ BCM groups, which are led by campus minister Zach Beasley, to do evangelism training together.
“We were with them in the fall, so we invited them over to join us for this,” Hughes said.
Starting at 9 p.m. on Friday, the students learned about some of the conversations they might encounter during the pancake outreach and how to walk someone through the 3 Circles method of evangelism. They also learned how to shift the conversation to invite someone to follow Christ.
“Some of the students stayed back and as people came in, they would sit at the tables with them and engage them with the gospel,” Hughes said. “A lot of them stayed for 30 minutes even and had conversations.”
‘Seeing fruit’
One student professed new faith in Christ.
“We’re following up with him and others we had contacts for,” Hughes said.
The BCM students “did a great job, they were super excited and felt like they were seeing fruit and having good conversations,” she said.
Overall, 300 people were served pancakes, and students had 169 gospel conversations at the tables and on the streets.
“It was a really great event, certainly something we’re going to continue to do,” Hughes said.
She said she was excited because the weekend helped equip the students to serve at BeachReach, an evangelistic event held in Panama City Beach, Florida, during spring break the first full week of March.
“We saw really incredible things happening at BeachReach through our students, so those were two amazing events that were purposeful for helping our students hone their gospel sharing skills and see the fruit of that,” Hughes said. “We’re excited to see how the Lord uses those experiences as they share their faith day to day.”
She said she’s also excited that Clint Culpepper, Auburn’s new lead campus minister, will be bringing with him a passion to find more creative methods to reach Auburn students.
“I’m super excited about him coming on board and being a part of events like these,” Hughes said.
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