In North Carolina, a pastor’s wife emailed Campus Crusade’s staff wanting to start a ministry at Richmond Community College. By the time the staff met with her, the pastor’s wife had already established Campus Crusade as a recognized group on her campus, had 3 student officers, a faculty sponsor and a church partnership. As students stood in line at the campus bookstore to buy their books for the semester, the pastor’s wife was giving away flyers directing students to visit everystudent.com, an evangelistic Web site of Campus Crusade. There was also information on the flyer about a kickoff event that the ministry was having the next week.

When the Campus Crusade staff showed up at Richmond Community College to offer some coaching, the pastor’s wife had put together an outreach with a live band, 600 slices of pizza and an iPod that had been donated by the church partnership. To enter to win the iPod, students were asked to fill out a “30 second survey” that was downloaded from GodSquad. The survey generated over 100 contacts of people interested in small group Bible studies or knowing God personally. Over 60 students heard the gospel during the concert. GodSquad played a central role in helping to equip this pastor’s wife to begin the Campus Crusade ministry at Richmond Community College.

On August 29th, Katy and I joined other Campus Crusade staff in passing out Freshman Survival Kits. During our three hours at the community college, we passed out 300 kits. We had a great location at the activity fair and many students stopped to fill out spiritual interest surveys and meet our key student leader.

It was fun to be around the students that are trusting God to launch a movement at Seminole County Community College. Blake is a 24 year old who had attended college for a year and then sold insurance for 3 years. He often wondered why he made that choice but now he believes it is because God has raised him up at this hour to be part reaching students for Christ. He re-enrolled in school this fall. He is full of enthusiasm for what God could do at SCC. He did a great job of meeting students and inviting them to a pizza party that evening.

Blake appreciated us being there. He could not have pulled it off without some help. I enjoyed being a part of it and I feel like I took so much more away that anything I put into it.

Katy was in her element. She jumped in and helped. The other staff and students enjoyed having her there with us. Katy passed out Survival Kits, helped with spiritual interest surveys and helped Blake pass out flyers advertising tonight’s meeting.

I was able to explain to Katy that a lot of my work in building Web sites is to help students like Blake reach their campus. I am glad she got to see that and experience a college campus. She would love to do it again.

Anne and I had visited this campus 8 years ago to explore and put up posters that might help raise up a student leader. We also spent time praying for the campus. I remember praying that God would raise up a movement there. It was exciting to be part of answering that prayer several years later.

I have posted pictures of our day.

• Flickr.com
• Facebook

Fifty students came back that evening for a pizza party. Here is an account from my collegue, Amanda Stephens:

“As we ordered the pizza after Club Rush, we decided to trust God for 50 students. So we ordered 12 large pizzas! Well, God was faithful and we had about 50 students come…..only one slice of pizza was left at the end of the night. Blake organized their first weekly meeting. We played games, had ice-breakers, and two girls led us in praise and worship.

One student even brought dessert for us. God showed up in so many ways. For example, we were supposed to only have half of the room we were in, but at the last minute the other group’s meeting was canceled so we were able to open the room up to accommodate our larger group. We feel like we have a lot of momentum and we’ll be pretty busy this semester keeping up with it.”

It is really amazing that 50 students showed up for the pizza party. Ministry on community college campuses is a real challenge because they are commuter schools and do not have the same sense of “community” that non-commuter schools have. I think it is quite a testimony that 50 students showed up for an event at night. Especially when you consider that many community college students also work a job. We are looking forward to seeing what God does in the coming months.

The following week, 30 students came to the second meeting. We look forward to seeing what God is going to do at Seminole Community College.