G od is moving in our generation. Slowly but surely, he is ushering university students back into the lost and dying

world around them. Future Nurses, Professors, Engineers, and Artists are no longer satisfied worshipping in the confines of

Church programs. Instead they are returning to the labs, studios, and study halls where they pursue their passions and professions!

These students are on mission…for God and for the campus. They are sparks of light in the darkness, points of truth in the clubs, dorms, and organizations that create America’s college culture.

SPARKS (published by Campus Renewal Ministries) collects the stories of these students, painting a picture of God’s move through

missional communities in our generation.

Read this LONGHORNS sample chapter from SPARKS, and discover the way that Jesus is moving through the lives of broken and restored young men and women on one of the largest public

campuses in the United States.

After you’ve downloaded and read LONGHORNS, spread the story. Email it to your friends, pastors, family and list serves. Let people know that this is not a generation that has lost its faith, but one

that bears great hope in the Lord!

To access the full SPARKS book and read more stories of college missional communities, including in-depth personal stories of the students that are leading them, visit our website to access the

e-book for $1.99 at: www.campusrenewal.org/sparks

“My prayer is not that you take them out of the world…As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.”

– John 17:15 & 18 (NIV)

LonGhornsThe students you’ve read about thus far have some amazing stories. Yet, they are far from unique. Visiting one university in particular provides a picture of Spark Groups moving beyond isolated instances, and instead creating a movement that has begun to engulf a campus.

Enter the University of Texas. Founded in 1883, this campus is a liberal bastion/oasis in the midst of the North American “Bible Belt.” Many of the state’s Christian students, when considering attending Austin’s cultural epicenter, are given a stern warning by youth pastors and family members:

“If you go to Austin, you’ll lose your faith.”

While the majority of these incoming students identify themselves as Christian affiliated in their applications to attend, only 6% of UT’s student population was actually involved in a campus ministry during the 2003-2004 school year. In this way, UT’s Christian activity more closely resembled universities in the Northwest and Northeast, as opposed to other southern schools that have higher percentages of their student body attending church meetings.

Texas is easily recognized as a major sports player in the NCAA, and is considered one of the more successful public academic institutions in the nation. Because of the school’s great influence and impact in the state’s professional businesses and industries, many churches and national ministries see this campus as one that merits special attention in its funding and manpower. As a result, UT has been blessed with the presence of 103 full-time and 102 part-time campus ministers. Comprising the staff of 61

distinct ministry organizations on campus. These 205 laborers are faithfully leading the students involved in their ministry programs, pushing them to in turn pray and evangelize on a campus of 50,000 students.

Still, in 2003, for the millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours that these well-intentioned ministries were investing in a vision to see spiritual transformation on their campus, there was an alarming sense of weathering a storm with no end in sight. Discipleship within the Church was happening, but not in such a way that was bringing in new believers. While each ministry had it’s own perspective on the sovereignty and timing of the Lord, there lingered above most of the diverse staff members an unfulfilled expectation:

God intended that many more students would know His name at the University of Texas.

This overwhelming sense of God’s will led the vocational and student spiritual leaders of the campus to try and connect with the un-churched student population.

Preaching outside, inviting apologists, and offering free sno-cones were just a few of the many ways that ministries attempted to bridge the church’s gap with the university that year. For all of their efforts, surveys still showed that only 1 out of every 10 students involved in an on-campus ministry actually came to know Jesus after enrollment. In other words, on average 90% of all students involved in church organizations at UT had already been involved in a youth or bible group while they were in high school. “Conversion Growth,” as it’s referred to in ministry circles, was almost non-extant. The Church was making little advancement in leading students newly to the Lord.

Troubled by these numbers and the seeming lack of success that was meeting the efforts of their individual ministries, campus ministers began praying together. They began asking God what could be done collectively, in an effort to promote the Gospel on campus and meet new students who did not believe in Him.

Spiritually Mapping the Campus.

Beginning in 1997, a prayer group of campus ministers from diverse backgrounds began meeting regularly to build relationship and join in vision together for the UT campus. In 2001, this same prayer group would provide a launching pad for what has been to date the largest movement of collegiate missional communities in the nation.

The first step these ministers took in an effort to better understand the needs and habits of students on campus, was a joint effort in Spiritual Mapping. While “Spiritual Mapping” has many definitions in the broader Christian community, campus ministers in Austin embraced a simple one:

“To learn more about what God is doing on campus and what the Enemy is trying to do, both inside and outside of the Church.”With this goal in mind the Longhorn Chronicles was born, a collection of statistical information that yielded great insight into the lives of students at the University of Texas. This fifty-page research document was divided into 3 parts, The Harvesters, The Harvest, and the Field.

“Harvesters” represented the over 3,000 students at UT that were already active members in Christian ministries on campus. In this section, surveys given to each Christian student sought answers to questions such as:

1. How often do you spend time in prayer? 2. How often do you feel depressed?3. How many hours a day do you spend on your computer?

With these anonymous inquiries, campus ministers were given a greater understanding of the spiritual habits of Christians on campus, as well as the manner in which young Texas men and women were spending their time in academics, recreation, and relationships.

“Harvest” represented all 50,000 students at UT, 94% of whom had no ministry home. This vast majority was harder for campus ministers to gather data on. For help, they turned to statistical information that had already been published by the university’s sociology department. This yielded insight into campus area crimes, drug use, spiritual backgrounds, and departmental nuances that were associated with Longhorn students.

Harvest statistics painted a picture, not of the many Christian students that UT ministries already had influence over, but of the unreached generation that they so desperately desired to serve with the Gospel. Providing specific points of prayer, campus ministers and students used this section of the Longhorn Chronicles to poke holes in the strongholds of the evil one.

“The Field” was perhaps the most beneficial section of the Longhorn Chronicles in relation to the Spark Group movement that would soon engulf the campus. Here the layout of UT’s many student communities were drawn out, as well as the number of those communities that were being intentionally reached with the Gospel by a campus ministry.

Because the University of Texas has an overwhelming number of registered student organizations, in addition to it’s many

housing and college-specific affiliated programs, narrowing the number of student communities to be reached was a difficult task. Eventually, UT’s campus ministers embraced specific criteria for delineating between real student “communities” and groups that were communities in name only. To meet their criteria, each legitimate community needed to meet on at least a weekly basis, have a regular group of participating members, and some palpable influence on the campus community at large.

After using these parameters to sift through a list of 1200 potential student groups (including residential communities), campus ministers were left with roughly 900 distinct communities of students that met regularly and were considered to have some measure of influence on the campus at large. Of this great number, only 15 communities were accounted for as being intentionally targeted by ministries for prayer, service, and sharing the Gospel. This only left… 885 unreached communities! In 1999, (CRM) had broached the idea of having prayer groups in every residence on campus, but never saw this fully come to pass. Now in 2004, as the entire Christian community was confronted with their lack of presence in secular community on campus, ministry leaders were again encouraged by CRM to embrace a bold long-term vision:

To see every secular student community on campus have a group of Christian students, intentionally praying, serving, and sharing the Gospel within it.

With Scripture mandating a call to “make disciples of all nations”, there seemed no reason not to saturate the world at their door with the truth of the Gospel. The question was how to accomplish this with 3,000 Christian laborers who had accustomed themselves to spending most, if not all of their time, in the confines of church community.

Overloading Our Students.

Being a student is hard enough for the average 20 year old. Finding yourself as a Christian leader however, adds a whole new set of responsibilities and commitments. I still recall the first time I sat down to assess an average week. I intentionally drew out a timetable, creating an honest picture of how and where I was spending myself as a Junior in college.

Waking in the morning to Krispy Kreme and the smell of sausage, 20 hours a week were devoted to my part-time job as a cafeteria worker. As a full-time student, another 20 hours found me in class or a local coffee shop, chatting with baristas and pounding the books. 10 morning hours were spent on the trails and back roads of my hometown, logging in the miles of running that kept my macaroni-fed body from turning obese.

Last to track, were my hours spent investing in church and ministry related activities. Weekends were spent serving on the set-up and take down team from time to time, then attending our Church’s morning service. Friday nights were spent at a worship service for my college ministry group, while Tuesdays were spent planning for the co-ed small group I led, held the next night on Wednesday. Monday, I spent the evening with an all male discipleship group that I took through Wild at Heart on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Once a week, I connected with two other young men to form an LTG, or Life Transformation Group, which was intended to hold me accountable to my male peers. Finally, I averaged in the time I spent on special projects for the college group, including training for spring break mission trips as a team leader and helping with outreach events that were held on a monthly basis. All told, the hours added up to 25 per week spent on these types of activities. While I found merit in each of my

commitments to our ministry group, I was stunned by the amount of time I spent on organized ministry commitments.

Once, while pondering my schedule out loud, an older woman told me to stop, explaining that counting ministry hours was sinful. Looking back, I realize that, while her heart was in the right place, this may have been the worst advice that I’ve ever received. What after all, is more valuable than the time with which we live our lives? In order to be proper stewards of the time entrusted to us, it is only responsible to consider how we offer the few hours of life we have on Earth unto the Lord!

Many Christian student leaders share a similar schedule to the one I navigated that year. Overloaded with academic, part-time job, and church commitments, they are deprived of the time and energy necessary to invest relationally in the unbelieving world around them. Only when they are released to do this will they be able to share their perspective on faith, Jesus, and life in general.

Changing Church Paradigms.

Surveying students showed that they were indeed physically present in the greater campus community, both recreationally and professionally. In fact, 40% of students were counted as being involved in secular organizations. Still, 67% of the same students surveyed admitted to only talking about their faith with unbelieving friends once a month! This meant that though students were in a position to share their faith with non-Christians, they were either not able, or not willing to use their time cultivating those opportunities with them.

Looking at these statistics, it became clear that there were two main obstacles to seeing Spark Groups thrive on the UT campus. First, was the lack of time availability for potential Christian

leaders of this movement. Second, many of the Christian students that both had connections to a secular community and possessed the time to invest in friendships with non-believers, still lacked the intentionality required to pray for and share the gospel with those communities on a weekly basis.

Addressing these issues, several campus ministries made a commitment to change their models of student leadership in an attempt to promote Spark Groups as their primary way to reach the lost. These changes included:

1. Encouraging Christian students involved in secular communities to commit themselves to start a Spark Group within it. This would often replace leading traditional bible studies for their current Christian organization.2. To send all potential Spark Group leaders to a training time, where students from a variety of Christian organizations would receive instruction on how to intentionally integrate themselves into and share the Gospel within the secular organization that they were focusing on.

While these may seem like common sense solutions to the obstacles campus ministers faced in facilitating Spark Groups, they were quite revolutionary at the time.

Freeing students ready to lead Spark Groups from having to lead traditional bible-study groups within their ministry was a frightening prospect for many vocational campus ministers. First, there was a legitimate concern that as strong potential small group leaders began investing themselves outside of the Church Body, that younger students within the college ministry would have no one to lead their discipleship groups and recruiting efforts. Because turnover is so high in most college ministries, the presence of strong leaders during one class year can make or

break the health and numbers of an entire generation within the organization. When numbers inside a college ministry group begin to decline, the men and women in charge of these groups are often taken to task, with the possibility of replacement or being fired not far off.

Joining with other ministries for the purposes of training students was another difficult venture. Because these training times would involve leaders from the Methodist, Reformed, Evangelical, Baptist, Charismatic groups, etc, a natural tension arose. After all, every group had its own specific views on doctrine and unique vision for reaching the campus, all of which had merit. Questions such as “How will our students learn together? Will training times include doctrine our ministry disagrees with?” and “Are things going to get weird when we worship together?” were all raised as concerns leading up to the united training time. Ultimately, it was decided by many campus ministers that the vision of seeing the gospel move on campus was more important than shielding their students from a potentially difficult training situation. These leaders took a faith step, believing that because God seemed to have designed this Spark Group training project, He would also be faithful to sustain their ministries in the absence of students that might otherwise lead their traditional discipleship groups.

Making this decision to partner in training less difficult was the reality that campus ministers now knew each other well. Praying together on a weekly basis for several years had shown them that each ministry had a core desire to see Jesus glorified on campus. Though each group had it’s own personality, way of viewing scripture, and worship preferences, shared prayer brought to light the common desires and values that each of these ministers shared with one another. Trust was built in this way at the feet of

the Lord.

Big Things Start Small…VERY Small

Generously, the local Baptist Student Ministry had offered their building to be used for united training times. Thirty students from five different ministries showed up for the first meeting of a course called Retrospect, facilitated by Justin Christopher of Campus Renewal Ministries and led by Glenn Smith of New Church Initiatives (a church-planting ministry based in Houston).

Diligently, for eight weeks students representing the different denominational and church backgrounds on campus came together to ask several questions:

How is mission truly defined?How does the Church GO TO the lost, rather than forcing them to COME TO it?Where were their relationships and influence outside of the church community?

By asking these questions, the training time was able to challenge long embedded notions of what and how ministry was supposed to look like on university campuses. Slowly, it began to dawn on students that they, NOT their campus pastors, were in the greatest position to change their campus for Christ. It became clear that the Church was with them wherever they went, and was not simply a location or time of celebration restricted to Sunday mornings. Perhaps most important of all was the realization that many of their unbelieving friends, while they may never be willing to enter a traditional worship service or small group, were more than willing to talk about Jesus on a personal level with members of their own community. With this change in perception came a UT generation of more open, hopeful, and intentional Christian student leaders

that have continued to shape the Church community in Austin to this day.

Through the course’s two separate classes and two-year running period, the Spark Group movement at UT grew from 15 distinct mission groups to 60. Spark Groups were now represented in such groups as the Cheerleading Team, Plan II Honors program, and various dormitories. Yet for all of this growth, Spark Group leaders and campus ministers still sensed a need for something more significant, a catalyst of some sort that could truly move the entire Body of Christ to be more missional in its outlook. God’s answer to this prayer would reveal itself during a spring-time Christian event… Rez Week.

Resurrecting the Body.

In the 3rd week of March for the last 14 years, most registered Christian ministries at UT come together for one full week of celebration. Originally scheduled during the week leading up to Easter, the event was pushed back one week to enable more liturgically oriented Christian groups to participate. With their inclusion, has come one of the largest, most diverse annual Christian events on college campuses today.

For 6 days, 24 hours a day, students cover the campus in prayer, committing to lead an hour of worship in an outdoor structure that sits in the middle of UT’s campus. Walking past the event’s main space, Church of Christ students can be heard singing accapella in the wee hours of the night, while Campus Crusade students bust out the djembe and guitar to welcome a new day over Ken’s Donuts in the mornings. Rez Week, as the event is called, is a truly special time of united prayer and worship that many Christian

leaders on campus look forward to. With over 150 volunteers every year, the event also boasts a slew of performance artists throughout the day, sharing Jesus through music, poetry, and other forms of live art.

Evenings are the highlight of the week. Early on, Rez Week’s coordinators invited such big name contemporary performers as the Newsboys, Caedmon’s Call and Rich Mullins. However, once campus ministers began praying together consistently, Rez week increasingly booked speakers and bands that more specifically reflected the spiritual climate of the campus. Instead of booking the most popular speakers they could find, the leaders of Rez Week began inviting men and women capable of touching UT with the words it truly needed to hear. Because of this shift in focus, Rez Week has become a united occasion that consistently builds itself upon the fruit and prayer of years past, rather than simply draining local churches of their resources for a one-time event.

In 2005, with the Spark movement at UT still young, Donald Miller was chosen by students and campus ministers as Rez Week’s evening speaker. Still riding a wave of popularity from his then-recently released Blue Like Jazz book, Miller was able to connect with an already present undercurrent of desire to see Christianity authentically expressed at the University of Texas. As students pondered the highly personalized ways in which the author shared Jesus, the campus soil was being tilled for practical application. If Jesus, the mystery of the ages, could be shared through simple everyday experiences, how could students best position themselves to do this in the life of non-believers?

With the collective Church at UT’s mind now primed for opportunities to be missional, the coordinators of 2007’s Rez Week spent a great deal of time praying into the question of who their annual speakers would be. After numerous planning

meetings and discussions, both campus ministers and student leaders agreed that simple-church planters Neil Cole and Jaeson Ma would be responsible for helping steward this choice time in UT’s Christian history.

Cole, a well-known author to many local and para-church leaders around the nation, was best recognized for his written material on church small groups and community structure. Recently, Neil had turned his attention to writing on relational evangelism and grassroots church-planting movements. 2007 also marked the year that he released his new book, Organic Church. In it, Neil pushed for a more natural societal expression of Church, more ready to serve the needs of a generation that desperately longed for authenticity and deep relationships. Jaeson, though only 26, had just burst onto the scene as a wildly popular speaker in charismatic ministry streams. At the time, he too was in the process of writing a book entitled The Blueprint. Representing his ministry Campus Church Networks, Jaeson had spent the last three years traveling the world, encouraging college students to start “simple churches” with or without the aid of more traditional local church structures. He understood these expressions of church to be fully church. Whether students were taking communion together in a dorm room, or baptizing new believers in pools, Jaeson exhorted them each to walk in their full authority as followers of Jesus.

While the coordinators of Rez Week were excited about the upcoming event, doubts passed between them in its preparation. Would students attend the sessions taught by two lesser-known speakers? Could two “simple-church” leaders connect with students from more traditional local church backgrounds? Was it too ambitious to ask these two men to challenge students to the practical application of Spark Groups?

Natural as they were, their doubts were ultimately ill founded. Students attended en masse, despite rainstorms that attempted to turn them away. Neil spoke the first two nights, sharing personal stories of sharing the gospel with drunks and Wiccans. He drew a picture of Jesus moving on the outskirts of society. Jaeson then took over, relaying news of God moving through students on campuses throughout the nation.

Prepped beforehand with an explanation of how God was impacting the UT campus, campus ministers had requested that Jaeson finish his speaking time with a specific call to action. As he described a similar movement of students at Hong Kong University, he asked:

“How many of you guys understand that lives were changed and hearts were touched because someone was willing to G-O, GO! My question to you tonight is, are YOU willing to go?”

Exhorting students to adopt a secular organization on campus to pray for and imbed themselves in, the simple church planter had various Spark Group and church pastors distribute sign-up sheets at the front of each venue. On them were spaces for Christian students to put their name, contact info, and the community of UT students that they were interested in starting a Spark Group in.

Most Spark Groups at this point were led by students familiar with one another from attending church services together. However, because Jaeson had challenged students to start Spark Groups in the context of a united ministry meeting, potential Spark Group leaders were now able to connect across ministry lines to create networks of Christians based on personal affinities. Baptist students joined with Methodists to pray for and share the Gospel with fraternities and sororities, while Church of Christ students

joined with Pentacostal students to reach business students and videogame enthusiasts alike.

Overnight, the slowly growing Spark Group movement had exploded, adding another 80 groups that were reaching out to residences and secular organizations across the campus! Suddenly, with 160 Spark Groups now ready to take the campus in fall of 2008, the intimidating vision of reaching all 900 distinct communities at UT was beginning to seem like a reality!

Now two years later, UT has over 200 Spark Groups on campus, and has seen the percentage of students involved in Christian ministries increase from 6% in 2001 to 9.5% in 2009. In other words, the number of Christians on campus has almost increased by 50% since students stopped waiting for the campus to fill church pews and began taking church TO the campus. Perhaps one day, there will be a generation of Longhorn students that finds it impossible to be a part of the University of Texas, without having a believing student that is praying and sharing the gospel with them, while serving their needs in the same community!

Measuring a Movement.

As more and more churches continue to embrace the move of God to send students back into the secular organizations of the UT community, they have in turn been forced to revisit their ministry definitions and measures of structure and success.

For the majority of campus ministries in America, “success” at reaching a particular campus with the Gospel is measured empirically by gathering student data:

1. Number of students in Bible Study Groups2. Number of new attendees to Bible Study Groups

3. Number of students attending large group worship service4. Number of students baptized.

This data collection, while seemingly detached and cold, is actually a very fair attempt at answering the difficult to gauge questions of:

1. Are students being discipled in scripture?2. Is the campus ministry connecting with new students ?3. Does the campus ministry have a healthy group of student leaders?4. Is the campus ministry leading people to find Jesus for the first time?

With these numbers, campus ministers are able to plan ahead for the next semester’s events and resources, as they give them a better picture of their ministry group’s student landscape and activity. Also, the data typically provides a source of accountability for church and campus ministry staff, with their governing body or director being given a general idea of whether or not the local campus minister is performing to professional expectations.

Unfortunately, almost all of these measures of success are based upon one prevailing assumption: That students are COMING TO Bible-Studies and Events hosted by churches and campus ministries. While many Christian students from churched backgrounds are more than willing to attend and integrate themselves into church and campus ministry communities, thereby filling the attending and leadership numbers for campus ministries, most non-Christian students are not. Instead, these students (often from un-churched backgrounds), will either avoid these “churchy” activities altogether, or visit once, never to be seen again in a ministry setting. As a result, the answers to the questions of baptism numbers and first-time believers in Jesus,

are almost always a tiny percentage of an overall campus ministry population (usually around 10%).

The Spark Group movement at UT was an attempt to change this COME TO ministry model to a GO TO ministry model by sending Christian students back out into the secular communities of the campus. The expectation was that by positioning Christian students in secular communities that prayer, service, and the Gospel would go with them, resulting in a much more intimate and real exposure of Jesus to every student on the Texas campus.

Embracing this new model for student evangelism led to an awkward situation for many church and campus ministry leaders. How were they supposed to measure the success of their ministry programs, now that they were encouraging many of their leaders to spend time developing relationships and community outside of them? How does a campus minister explain to a regional superior or church supervisor, that even though the attendance at his ministry’s weekly service has declined by 50% in one semester, more lost students are being reached with the Gospel than the previous three semesters combined?

As more campus ministries became involved in the Spark movement at UT, these measurement roadblocks became more and more apparent. Finally, a group of campus ministers began to meet in 2008 to develop a new way of measuring “success” in the student-led Spark Groups that were exploding on campus. Instead of focusing on numbers associated with attendance, they shifted questions to reflect numbers associated with relationships. For instance:

1. How many new people did Spark Group members meet in the target community?2. How many spiritual conversations did Spark Group members

have with non-believers?3. How many students were engaged by Spark Group-initiated activities within a specific community?

Now success was not being measured by simple questions of church attendance. Rather, it was now measured by quantifying the ability of Christians to share time, life, and the Gospel with lost friends in their secular communities through both formal and informal activities. The hope was that by developing these new measures, church and campus ministries would not only be able to have a better sense of how Spark Group members were spending their time intentionally ministering, but that each vocational campus minister would also be equipped to communicate successes to the donors and supervisors that hold their efforts accountable. Planning ahead was also better served through these measurements, as campus ministers now had numbers they could pray through and discuss as they found ways to better serve the Spark Groups within their church or campus ministry.

Shifting Structures and Sending Out Students.

Tackling the measurement roadblock to the Spark Group movement was made easier by the presence of several local ministry programs that had already developed their own means of measuring success through missional communities. Of these, Hill Country Bible Church UT, stood out.

Over the last 4 years of the Spark movement at UT, multiple campus ministry groups struggled to find ways of freeing their students to live missionaly on campus, resourcing them as they went. HCBCUT, an intergenerational church with a campus focus, decided to restructure their college ministry programs completely. As a relatively young church plant, HCBCUT still had the advantage

of being in process. After several years of marketing themselves on campus, their church had recruited a large number of highly talented, committed student leaders. Still, there was a noticeable absence of non-believers in their church programs. Despite their success at establishing themselves at the university, the church’s leadership finally decided that a major overhaul in structure was needed. The goal? Students living on mission…for Jesus and for the campus.

In Summer of 2007, Hill Country Bible shut down it’s primary weekly gathering and told it’s students to spend the time they normally would on Wednesday night with Christians, instead with friends that didn’t know Jesus. Though HCBCUT still offered Sunday services for students to connect, it was a drastic move to encourage students in living life outside the Church community. Very few campus ministries in the nation would dare to call off their main meeting of the week, as it is often the glue that holds campus communities together.

Additionally, the Bible Church adjusted their structure to serve student leaders committed to the idea of living on mission among non-believing students. Vocational staff at HCBCUT spent time praying for and identifying which students to spend extra time building this vision into, with the expectation that as they experienced success on mission that other people in the church would become infected by the stories of God’s powerful move among the missional communities that these students planted.

Choosing eight, HCBCUT set up a unique leadership program for them called “Entrepreneurs.” Essentially, the program was an internship that called students to divide their time evenly between school, church, and the secular community which they were each committed to praying for and serving with the Gospel. In order to help this first batch of missional students succeed and free up

their time, the church attempted to remove financial constraints such as part –time jobs, by providing the students with a stipend to sustain their efforts.

The Entrepreneurs had varying degrees of success on an individual basis, but the risks taken by HCBCUT paid great dividends overall, as the program helped shift existing paradigms of how Christians on campus should invest their time and relationships. Today, every student at HCBCUT is expected to follow the path set by these early Entrepreneurs, and HCBCUT has the largest number of missional communities among the 61 campus ministries at UT. Of the 200 Spark Groups at Texas, at least 50 are attributed to the missional efforts of Hill Country Bible Church UT.

Many people ask whether missional communities and Spark Groups in particular are required to have a connection with a larger local church body. While Campus Renewal does not believe that this connection is necessary, we have seen great success come from missional communities like those at HCBCUT, that thrive in an environment of intergenerational leadership, mutual submission, a larger social network and consistent accountability. Perhaps the most encouraging and impressive part of Hill Country’s story, is not their Entrepreneur program, resource creating, or missional community explosion, but instead their willingness to be obedient to God. He came to them with a specific vision that required great risk and lifestyle changes on the part of every staff member and student inside of this church’s ministry. By stepping out in faith, they have not only experienced greater success engaging the campus, but have also matured as a Christian community and set the tone for many other ministries at UT that have an increasingly similar vision.

Fruitful Implications.

A mere four years after the Spark movement at UT began, the climate on campus continues to shift. Churches are alive with stories of student missionaries and new believers. Campus ministers who were once frustrated with the lack of fruit and impact in their ministries, are now seeing the Lord bring exciting new relationships and opportunities to serve the campus. Most importantly, students, the true missionaries on campus, are experiencing Christian life to its fullest. No longer cloistered together in the safety of their ministries, they are engaging the greater world around them, taking risks and sharing God’s word.

C.T. Studd, a Christian missionary living in India, once said:

“Some wish to live within the sound of a chapel bell; I wish to run a rescue mission within a yard of hell.”

Now, as God moves through the Body of Christ at UT collectively, it too is walking in agreement with this perspective.

Ultimately, God’s move at UT has little to do with a “new” ministry program, special events, or talented speakers. Instead, the catalyst for spiritual renewal at UT has always been rooted in the story of Jesus. Before any Christian student embraced a secular organization at UT, He chose us.

It was after all Jesus who left His perfect place at the right hand of the Father, to step into a broken, sinful, hopeless world. With Him came redemption, healing, and the presence of God. He was the first point of light, the first Spark in a world where we were all still flailing in the dark. Spark Groups simply encourage students to take this story to heart, as they are vessels of God’s redemptive story for the colleges and universities of our nation. In

each one of them dwells the Holy Spirit of God, and with it goes the power to change any club, major, or residence on campus.

Consider now your own school. If God can increase the number of Christians by over 30% (6%-9.5%) on a ‘progressive’ campus like UT-Austin, what could He do at your university? Is he calling you to be a Spark to the men and women that surround you everyday? What new chapter in His story will you have the opportunity to write in your club, department, or residence?

I encourage you to pray for the answers to these questions. If you believe that you too should be leading a Spark Group, please move onto the next book section and start on your way.

If you wish to learn more about how God is moving through United Prayer and Spark Group planting, please visit www.texasunited.org, or send an email to info@campusrenewal.org. Campus Renewal Ministries has resources specifically designed to coach and assist any student or church leader that desires to see a greater degree of unity and collaboration between churches on their campus. To learn more about these united groups that launched the Spark Group movement at UT, go to www.campusrenewal.org , or email info@campusrenewal.org.