By CHIP HUTCHESON, Kentucky Today
RICHMOND, Ky. (KT) — The leadership team for the Eastern Kentucky University Baptist Campus Ministry will launch an ambitious gospel schedule when students return to the classroom on August 16.
More than 40 students and staff gathered last weekend for training at Laurel Lake, with the main focus being on evangelism.
“We got all our leaders together and planned the semester,” said Jake Hancock, regional campus minister for the Richmond region.
“We have a big event on Saturday,” he said. The BCM plans to serve more than 1,000 pancakes from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. “We plan to get contact information and follow up with gospel conversations,” Hancock noted.
That event kicks off a whirlwind first month for the BCM leadership team, and Hancock is encouraged by the training conducted last weekend.
“I think every student refocused their heart for evangelism,” Hancock said. “We know that the harvest is plentiful — it’s not a lack of people, but it’s a lack of laborers. That was communicated so well. We need to see our campus as the harvest, knowing that Jesus has prepared people to receive the gospel. We see our job is to go out and labor.
“We had a rejuvenating time — a lot of fun, a blast — and it really unified our group to hit the ground, to spend and be spent for the gospel. I’m excited to see what God will do with this leadership team. We covet people’s prayers — pray we will be faithful to the people God gives us for the kingdom’s sake.”
The team’s primary goal is to set up gospel conversations. “We talked about leveraging every major campus happening, every major social event, to set up a gospel conversation. We went through the strategy of the conversation, such as setting a time to get coffee or lunch with people, and then we talked about what takes place. Our team has been taught to ask about the person’s story, then tell your story and then God’s story. Team members can use 3 Circles or any evangelism tool they want, but they want to be in a good space without distractions, and they know going in they are going to share the gospel.
“Our goal is to have 500 gospel appointments in the first month,” Hancock added. “That is a heavy goal, but if every leader does one or two a week for the first month we can meet that goal.”
The importance of the local church, personal spiritual disciplines, missions, small groups and time management were also topics of the retreat discussions.
Hancock led training on the significance of the local church, explaining the differences between campus ministry and the church. “Jesus didn’t die for campus ministry; He died for the church,” Hancock told team members. “We talked about why one needs to see how the gospel changes the single mother, how it works in the life of the widower, how it works in children — you can’t serve those in campus ministry because we don’t have children or older people, so if you want to serve, you need to be in the local church. We had a heavy focus on joining the church.”
Discipleship training involved setting a goal of “going from lost to labor in one year — we don’t want to recycle, we want to create new disciples,” Hancock said, stressing the desire to see people come to faith in Christ and then progress to sharing their faith.
Plans are to have an event every day for the first 14 days of the fall semester. “We did a lot of team planning, wanting to see how we can best leverage the use of our time for the kingdom. We talked about how we can best connect students to ministries and the local church and create disciples through that.”
Paul Worcester, the national collegiate director for the North American Mission Board, taught the leadership group through a Zoom call, focusing on “reaching and serving our campus.”
Rob Patterson, evangelism team leader for the Kentucky Baptist Convention, said student leadership retreats “are vital to the advance of the gospel — they equip and empower students to impact their campuses for Christ.”
And that experience carries benefits over many years.
“One of the testimonies I consistently hear from pastors and leaders across the commonwealth is that their first leadership opportunities came through the ministries of the Baptist Campus Ministry,” Patterson noted.
“We love creating spaces where students can find authentic community on campus, but Christian community is defined by a cause,” Patterson said. “Our regional campus ministers are committed to discipling students to live missionally while on campus. If they can learn how to make disciples while preparing for a career, then they are ready to live on mission regardless of where that career takes them.”
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