One of the areas I oversee at our church is our college ministry. I wanted to walk you through some of how we work on connecting new students to the ministry.

When it comes to connecting new students in the fall, we've got a pretty detailed plan. First, you need to know a little about our church and city. Our church is literally across the street from a great Christian school, California Baptist University. We're about 10 minutes down the street from Riverside Community College with thousands of students. We're about 15-20 minutes across town from UC Riverside which has over 17,000 students. We focus a lot of our connection efforts on CBU as they're super-close, but have seen a major increase in RCC and UCR students in the last year.

What we do at CBU:

• We have a large banner that we put up on the corner of our church property advertising our college ministry. It looks REALLY good and it's amazing how many students we talk to that reference the banner.
  
• Table at involvement fair for new students. We had fall calendars as well as an invite card for our tuesday night gathering.
• First big Sunday back we do a free lunch for college students.....we had 18 feet of burrito this year...and we ran out.
• First Tuesday when school's back in session we called it "Sundae Tuesday." Kicked off the year with worship/teaching and then had an ice cream sundae bar afterwards.
• All of the students who attend on Sunday mornings get a phone call from a student within two days thanking them for coming and letting them know about other stuff going on.

What we're doing with RCC and UCR (still a major work in progress):

• Our evangelism pastor is basically the campus pastor for Campus Crusade for Christ at RCC and is on campus weekly.
  
• We will be doing some sort of BBQ/welcome event for UCR students (they're on the quarter system and move in this Sunday). We've also begun partnering some with the Asian-American Christian Fellowship there.

Where we need to head:

• We need some sort of on-campus presence at both of these public schools at the beginning of the school year - maybe a table handing out free blue books, coffee, or something else.
• We need some sort of on-going Bible study/small group presence happening on the UCR campus that's led by students in our church.
• We need to continue building on the natural friendship networks that exist. This has been what's moved us forward with UCR students.....students connecting those other students they know.
  

Labels: college ministry

This entry was posted by Mike Lovato, on Monday, September 15, 2008. You can leave your response.