This summer, several Baptist Campus Ministries (BCM) teams served on mission throughout the world while also receiving the opportunity to learn more about the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), missions and their Baptist heritage.
Five students from Jacksonville State University (JSU), along with campus minister Gary Brittain and wife, Donna, ministered with other student groups at the SBC’s annual meeting in Houston, Texas. The team served in various ways while in Houston, but the main focus was helping with registration and providing information about various opportunities and upcoming events. The team also helped organize a block party in inner-city Houston where they were able to meet and serve many families.
Drew Sprayberry, a JSU student, participated in the SBC trip and found the event to be a great learning experience. He described it as “eye-opening” because it taught him a lot about how Southern Baptists work together.
“It was a very encouraging experience for me,” he said, noting he hopes to pursue collegiate ministry as a career. “I learned a lot about different seminaries and different opportunities in the missions field right now, across the world.”
Sprayberry also met many people who have similar hearts for missions and ministry, and several ministers took the time to share with him about their personal experiences of entering the ministry.
“I have a lot of hope in the fact that I know that Southern Baptists haven’t given up on any of the things that are in my heart for ministry … that we really do all strive to reach the world for Christ, and that’s encouraging to me — that as a group of people, we’re doing what we are called to do,” he said.
Another group of students spent two weeks serving in Santiago, Chile. Ten students from Judson College, University of Mobile, University of South Alabama, Auburn University, Troy University and University of Alabama, along with Alabama Baptist state missionary Chris Mills and volunteer Tanner Ethridge, traveled to Santiago, where they served with Southern Baptist representative Greg Idell. Their main area of ministry focused on conducting spiritual surveys with college students on 15 college campuses in the city of more than 6 million people, 400,000 of them students.
Each day they journeyed in groups of two and had conversations with students, opening the door to share the gospel and connect students with small groups and local churches. Some students were not interested in discussing their beliefs, but others were open to conversations about faith, team members said.
Jessca Weller, a student and residence adviser at Judson, said she was able to meet with one student a number of times. Though this student did not make a decision to follow Christ, Weller trusts that, through their conversations, “seeds were planted and that the Lord will water those seeds later on through other people.”
Weller, who hopes to serve as a Journeyman upon graduation, said she found the trip helpful because she was able to see long-term service options from a missionary’s perspective. Weller and the team were able to spend time with Idell and his family and see what life is like in a missions context.
“We got to work with the missionaries and with the family and see what the Lord is doing in their lives on an everyday basis,” Weller said. “[It was] cool to see where I could be in the next couple of years.”
Idell, who has been with the International Mission Board for more than 16 years, said his main focus in Chile is mobilizing college students serving across Latin America and coordinating the Hands-On program.
He also spends time with the university students himself and equips Chilean Baptist churches to do the same, but students are best suited to reach other students, which is the emphasis of his strategy, he said.
A former BCM minister himself, Idell explained, “That’s what BCM is about — a missions organization to reach people and do evangelism, but it’s also a training opportunity, to train students. Students tend to be teachable and are making decisions about what they’re going to do with their lives.”
Weller is one who plans to continue in missions back in Alabama. One way she plans to do that is to build new relationships with freshmen girls in her dorm as they begin college in the fall. She also wants to use some of her conversational skills to open doors to sharing the gospel.
Idell also emphasized the importance of sharing with students various avenues of service. Most students will not serve in full-time missions, but there are other ways they can give such as through the Cooperative Program and to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, he said. “Most of these students aren’t going to come back and live overseas, but their involvement in their churches in praying and giving, and continuing to see missions happen is vital.”
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