Our Fall Semester on campus starts this Monday the 26th! We are so excited to represent you on campus as we seek to reach students for Christ.

In order to grasp the importance of reaching college students on today’s campus please take a look at part of an article from an online newspaper about the growing atheist movement on campus:you on campus as we seek to reach students for Christ.

This month at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a select group of students will show their humanitarian spirit by participating in the Bleedin’ Heathens Blood Drive. On February 12, they will eat cake to celebrate Darwin Day, and earlier this year, they performed “de-baptism” ceremonies to celebrate Blasphemy Day, attended a War on Christmas Party, and set up Hug An Atheist and Ask An Atheist booths in the campus quad…

The Ohio-based Secular Student Alliance, which a USA Today writer once called a “Godless Campus Crusade for Christ,” incorporated as a nonprofit in 2001. By 2007, 80 campus groups had affiliated with them, 100 by 2008, 174 by 2009, and today there are 394 SSA student groups on campuses across the country. “We have been seeing rapid growth in the past couple of years, and it shows no sign of slowing down,” says Jesse Galef, communications director at SSA. “It used to be that we would go to campuses and encourage students to pass out flyers. Now, the students are coming to us almost faster than we can keep up with… As the secular students clear up misconceptions about what it means to be secular, I feel that more students will leave their faith,” says Galef.

I hope that as you read part of this sobering article you will feel the weight of reaching college students. However, we don’t need to be dismayed. Professor Christian Smith, a world-renowned sociologist of religion from Notre Dame University explains in another article, “among recently surveyed college students, 2.7 times more report that their religious beliefs have strengthened during their college experience than say their beliefs weakened.”

Professor Smith observes that one of the main reasons that the University is not the faith-shredder we often think of is because of “the increase in presence and effectiveness of campus-based ministries like Cru, InterVarsity, and Young Life.”

Thank you for allowing us to have a full-time presence on the college campus so that we can invest in the next generation of leaders! We are in this together!