PHILADELPHIA (BP)- The task was enormous. They wanted every campus in the United States to have a Gospel ministry presence.
For Brian Musser, a self-funded collegiate minister at Drexel University, that meant learning about every campus currently being reached by Baptist Collegiate Ministries (BCM). But it also meant learning which campuses were not being reached.
Musser is one of several Southern Baptist collegiate leaders across the nation who are members of the Baptist Collegiate Network, BCNet for short, who volunteer time to find ways to provide encouragement, resources and new ideas to other college ministers.
Of primary importance to the organization’s multiplication committee, which Musser chairs, is how to get more Gospel-centered ministries present on campuses across the United States where there currently is no Baptist presence.
“We kept coming back to this idea that we won’t be able to go everywhere, and we won’t be able to have a campus minister on every campus,” Musser said. “We started looking at how different Baptist campus ministry is than some of the other campus ministry organizations (such as Cru and InterVarsity), and we realized our difference is our direct connection to the local church.”
He added, “Unlike these other national organizations, we don’t have to be on every campus because we have churches who can be involved.”
Musser’s team began to ask how the BCMs could be an extension of those churches and how to best equip the churches to reach the campuses where there is no ministry presently. The team knew they didn’t need to help large churches do this and that several of the larger state schools already had ministry presence on their campuses.
But what about the average/normal-sized local churches and the smaller-sized and “not as glamorous” schools, universities and colleges?
“We thought we could do that,” he said.
The multiplication team kicked around the idea for several years, developing three overarching goals:
- find ways to help local Baptist churches reach their nearby campuses with the Gospel;
- connect with Every Campus, a collaborative organization of 40 campus ministries, including Campus Crusade for Christ (Cru) and Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, two of the nation’s largest campus ministries, and more than 100 ministry partners, on behalf of Baptist Student Ministries to be a part of the larger work of reaching the campus;
- find ways to help state, regional and province directors with the challenges of their specific contexts.
Musser and his team discovered thatEvery Campus maintains a national database of campus ministries. To date, it has identified about 4,200 unique campuses in the United States, about 1,200 of which have at least one ministry on campus and about 1,300 of which have multiple ministries.
And then there are 1,700 campuses where there is “no known ministry.”
Finding out this information wasn’t easy. Unlike Cru, who has one master database for its organization, Musser had to contact each of the 40 different campus ministries in the Southern Baptist Convention to find out the number of campuses and campus ministries in their state or region.
He is confident he didn’t capture all the numbers because there easily could be a Gospel presence on a campus that is attached to a local church and not known by any state or national entity. His method also would not discover any grassroots efforts started by students or local ministries.
Knowing this, he and his colleagues are very careful to say there are 1,700 campuses “with no known ministry.”
“‘Known’ is a very important word … because I assume that there are tons of small student-led Bible study started and initiated by students that are not connected to larger organization that we just don’t know about,” he said.
Once the 1,700 schools were identified, the team started looking at their sizes and other dynamics. It turns out 600 of the campuses had 1,000 students or more, which meant 1,100 of them were fewer than 1,000 students.
“Think about that,” Musser said, “600 campuses with over a thousand students each! That’s 600,000 students – a lot of students!”
A lot of students who potentially have no access to the Gospel, he stressed.
“And then there’s another 1,100 campuses with under 1,000 students. Who knows the math on that, but it’s a significant number of students without a Gospel presence on their campus,” he said.
His team drilled down a bit more. Of the 600 campuses that had 1,000 students or more, they discovered 400 of those campuses were community colleges. Another 100-plus of the campuses were branch campuses of larger institutions, such as Penn State’s regional campuses, that are separate from the main campus.
“We realized the campuses with no known Gospel ministry presence were also the hardest campuses to place a campus minister,” Musser said. “It’s hard to get on a community campus, where most students commute, and even harder to raise support to be a missionary on these campuses.”
All the research led Every Campus to the same conclusion that the BCNet multiplication committee reached: to get a Gospel presence on every campus would require churches.
Musser noted this was a “huge transition” and “systemic change” for a lot of the parachurch organizations that are not denominationally affiliated.
“I’m sitting in both of those conversations, and there’s … an amazing sort of crossroads and I’m like, yeah, if anybody has the ability to figure out how to how to mobilize the normal size, average-sized local church to reach the smaller schools, it’s the Southern Baptists,” Musser said.
Accordingly, he and his colleagues, Paul Worcester, national director of collegiate evangelism at the North American Mission Board; Kurt Shiver, Baptist collegiate minister at the North Central Baptist Church in Gainesville, Fla.; and Devon Bartholomew, Christian Protestant chaplain at Syracuse University in New York, among others, began thinking about what that would look like.
That led to Musser’s team members interviewing church pastors heavily involved in campus ministries and compiling the information into what eventually became the book, “The Campus across the Street: Encouraging the Local Church to Engage the Nearby Campus.”
This book is a group effort from the members of the BCNet’s multiplication committee: Musser, Matt Middlecamp, Clayton Bullion, Barry Sproles, Garrett Harmon, Kevin Jones, Kurt Shiver and Beverly Skinner as well as Devon Bartholomew and Paul Worcester, who contributed as unofficial honorary members of the committee.
Rather than being an academic “how to” guide, the book takes readers on an imaginary journey with different individuals from a local church located near a college campus. The journey is imagined, providing keen insights on how to do the ministry, mixed in with stories from real-life churches in Pennsylvania and South Jersey who are actively engaging campuses and students.
Readers are introduced to real ideas, information and resources that are being successfully used at colleges and universities throughout the country. In addition, there are tangible activities for churches to do to help them connect with the young adults in the nearby campus community. In addition, at the end of each chapter, there is a quick summary of the main ideas, a resource list, the suggested activities and discussion questions.
The book highlights seven mindset shifts, based on Matthew 9:35-38, that the normal church will need to make to reach the ordinary campus across the street. Knowing that multiple church-based, parachurch and denominational ministries are dedicated to reaching large state schools, the focus of this book is on small to medium-sized churches reaching small to medium-sized campuses.
“Many times, the smaller private schools and community colleges get overlooked,” Musser said. “Yet most of the time there are ordinary congregations in the same neighborhood as these smaller campuses.”
The goal of the book, he said, is “to not only encourage local churches to engage the nearby campuses with the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the sake of the Kingdom of God but also to equip and empower the local churches to succeed.”
“The Campus Across the Street” e-book is offered freely on BCNet’s website, here. To learn more about the work of BCNet, visit https://collegeministry.com.
