Lee Lawson said if he’s honest, his first impression was that they were just weirdos playing board games outside.
“But I had finished a test and had nothing else to do,” he said.
So he joined them just to see what was going on. And Lawson, then a student at Jeff State Community College’s Shelby-Hoover campus, found out quickly he was wrong.
There was a lot more to it than that.
Jacob Freeman, Baptist campus minister for the University of Montevallo and the Shelby-Hoover location of Jeff State, had been coming over for a while to try to start a Bible study on Lawson’s campus, but so far it had been difficult to get a group going.
“So I would set up a tent and table and chairs and have pizza and games,” Freeman said. “It was a time for relationship building and engagement with a short Bible study. We could ask, ‘What are you doing tomorrow for lunch?’ and that was basically an inroad to a further conversation.”
Lawson bought in.
“I found out it was actually an opportunity to share the gospel, and I asked how I could help,” he said. “Jacob and a guy named Brandon Mallette (then college minister at Valleydale Baptist Church) took me to Waffle House, took me under their wing and helped me figure out what evangelism looked like on a college campus.”
New faith
Lawson hadn’t been a follower of Jesus for very long at that point.
“I became a believer during the COVID pandemic — a lot of us were just sitting alone and thinking about the hard questions of life,” he said. “I grew up with a cultural understanding of Christianity and I loved Jesus, but now I understand it was really a God of my own creation. He was easy on the things I was easy on, hard on the things I was hard on.”
Lawson began his new faith on his own as what Freeman calls a “YouTube disciple” — someone who devours sermons online.
“The number of students today who are YouTube disciples is astonishing,” Freeman said. “If people are serious about their faith, I can throw out two or three names, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, I watch them.’”
Lawson said when he met Freeman, “it was really just chance encounter kind of thing — of course now I would call that providence.”
He was already serious about his faith at that point, “but it was another pivot point when I ran into Jacob and Brandon that helped me pursue theology as part of my relationship with Christ.”
Every Thursday for three years, Lawson helped with the pizza and games outreach effort, called “Putting the Community Back in Community College.”
“From there, we would take the next step and introduce them to Jesus and the gospel,” he said.
Along the way, when Freeman would need to miss a Thursday, he would ask Lawson to teach a short Bible study there.
“It was the first time I was having to prepare to teach whatever the lesson was for that day,” Lawson said.
Future ministry
Fast-forward to today, and Lawson has finished up at Jeff State — and enrolled at Montevallo so he can continue doing ministry alongside Freeman, whom he said has both taught and modeled for him how to share the gospel charitably.
Lawson is also preparing for future ministry.
“I really want to be a part of the ministry. I really want to be full time, I just have no idea what avenue yet,” Lawson said. “I’ve learned not to make a super rigid plan because God always has different ideas, and I want to be faithful to his leading and prompting. I don’t know what ministry will look like in the future, but right now I’m looking at finishing my bachelor’s so I can go to seminary.”
And right now, he’s excited about the work God is doing on college campuses through Baptist Campus Ministries.
“God has not forgotten Montevallo, and God has not forgotten these universities,” he said. “There are people who will respond positively to the gospel, we just have to be faithful to proclaim the gospel.”
For more information about the University of Montevallo’s BCM, visit montevallobcm.com.
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