Collegiate church planting offers much insight into effective ecclesial and evangelistic praxis.
Many great movements of God have started on college campuses. Often, the fuel of the Awakenings and spiritual revivals in North America was ignited by students whose hearts were enflamed by a passion for God’s glory and mission.
Today, the prospects of such a movement of God are increasingly likely. God is definitely at work on our university campuses.
It seems that college campuses present fertile soil for locating, equipping, and releasing laborers for the harvest. In fact, many like Brian Frye[1] believe that “the university years provide the best context to introduce, train, and catalyze new church planters and planting teams.”
Even more, some believe that the university campus itself is ripe for the launch of church plants designed with the university as its primary mission field.
The university setting provides a defined harvest field like few other domains of society in North America. The students are connected via formal and informal relational networks that foster the organic dissemination of compelling ideas.
Church planters committed to declaring the good news of Jesus can naturally leverage these relational webs to communicate who Jesus is and convincingly demonstrate the hope he brings. In this relationally rich environment, vibrant, healthy churches spring up on college campuses in a comparatively rapid fashion.
In collegiate church planting, emphasis is given to introducing those who are far from God to a life-giving relationship with Jesus. Once connected to him, newly minted disciples are able to live out their faith in a transparently authentic biblical community among other students who are growing in the same faith and practice.
The university is a prime context for exploratory Bible studies, ...
from Christianity Today Magazine https://ift.tt/2yIT6a0
No comments:
Post a Comment