Imagine yourself as a college student showing up on a college campus where you don’t know a single person. You don’t even know your roommate in the dorm and really don’t want to — you aren’t used to making new friends anyway. But you also don’t know the first place to begin finding friends.
Then you remember — the only other group you have ever been a part of was your church youth group, and you were as active as the next teenager in the weekly activities.
Now, a week goes by, and you still haven’t met anyone.
Where can Christian students find spiritual growth?
The Alabama State Board of Missions’ (SBOM) answer is Baptist Campus Ministries (BCM), the Southern Baptist college ministries scattered across the nation. For many college students, BCM is the answer.
Alex Flora, freshman at the University of Alabama (UA), said, “I struggled with whether it was the right thing to come off to school but trusted that it was God’s will.
“And when I did get there, the challenging part was the social life — seeing people going to the clubs and parties. They were everywhere, and everyone was going,” he said of his arrival at UA, nearly seven hours from home.
But Flora had a jump on things, even before leaving home. The BCM campus minister, Matt Kerlin, and a couple of his college student leaders had contacted Flora over the summer. They shared the discipleship and ministry opportunities available to him at UA’s BCM if he would decide to get involved.
And he did get involved. In fact, after getting involved in a small group Bible study his freshman year, he began leading music on BCM’s worship team.
“I am building strong relationships, lasting relationships,” he said. He is also leading praise and worship with his guitar at a local church on Sunday mornings.
Four hours south of Tuscaloosa, Elizabeth Brackin, a junior at Troy State University, also found her answer to continue growing in her relationship with God at the BCM.
In her four years at Troy, Brackin’s involvement at the BCM flamed the fire of her God-given call to missions. She has gone on two 10-week summer missions trips: one to Harrodsburg, Ky., and one to Newport, R.I. During her spring break in 2002, Brackin accompanied Troy State’s BCM to New York for a weeklong missions trip.
Two hours north of Troy in Auburn, Janie Miller attended Auburn University 1997–2000. She made her way to the BCM in her first two weeks of college. “The biggest challenge for me wasn’t the drinking and the clubs, because I was never really into that. For me, it was the accountability from the friends I met.
“I came from a small youth group. When I left, there were maybe four of us. I had never really been encouraged to do Bible study.”
Actively involved
At the BCM, however, her commitment to Christ grew, and she became involved in almost every ministry BCM offered: Freshman Bible study, the drama team ZooTroop and King’s Acres (a children’s ministry), to name a few. She also began singing on the BCM praise team.
And because of her BCM’s commitment to missions (which characterizes BCMs nationally), she spent a summer helping with a church planting project in New Jersey and working with college students in that area.
Clete Sipes, former campus minister at Auburn’s BCM, summed up his personal mission statement as: “To make disciple-makers.”
Miller is a product of that statement. She is now on staff at Auburn’s BCM. During spring break, she took several college students to Illinois to help with a church planting missions project.
“Missions is one of the biggest things we use to disciple [college students], to train them to be evangelists and personal ministers of the gospel,” Kerlin said. “Missions is the strength of BCM on a social and spiritual level.” And it’s true.
Sipes said the transition to college from high school is “super big.” He said that many Christian high school students arrive at college each year who were a level 10 in the spiritual life in high school, but their faith has never been tested on a college level.
Sipes said that is why BCM exists. Keith Loomis, associate in the office of collegiate and student ministries at the SBOM, described the life of a young adult Christian as a pilgrimage. He added, “We want to let students see that the college years are not a time to pause in their relationships with Christ but as a launching pad for those relationships.”
Kerlin said that college students would describe their involvement in missions as a fun and a growing experience. “We’ll spend 30 hours in a van, and all day in the sun,” but Kerlin said the students would come back having had the time of their lives. And they will be better adults for it.
“Evangelism and missions involvement at college preps students for a career of ministry [in life and] in the church,” Kerlin said.
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