God On Campus - Charisma Article
God on Campus
Charisma Magazine, Sept. 2007
By Suzy Richardson
A new spirituality is stirring America’s college students. Here’s how the Holy Spirit is touching the digital generation.
...Now more than ever, campuses are reporting a dramatic increase in the number of students seeking spirituality. According to a recent New York Times article, officials from a slew of prominent secular colleges including Harvard, Colgate, the University of Wisconsin and the University of California-Berkeley are reporting that students today are "drawn to religion and spirituality with more fervor than at any time they can remember."
...Chi Alpha Campus Ministries, which is affiliated with the Assemblies of God, has also experienced a recent surge of student growth. "In the last two years, our numbers have doubled," reports Dennis Gaylor, national director of Chi Alpha
...Jaeson Ma, president of Campus Church Networks, a student-led church-planting movement, helped launch the Campus Transformation Network with a simple Web site, campustransformation .com, where college students and ministry leaders nationwide could sign up to pray for their campuses. "When we started telling people three years ago about our vision, people thought we were crazy," he says.
But after just one semester, the number of campuses involved grew from 10 to more than 70. For the first time recorded in history there was not one hour of broken prayer for the nation's colleges. Today, roughly 120 campuses have committed to pray.
Across the nation, students and leaders have set up prayer rooms—even prayer tents—where students pray for their campuses and for their world. They pray to end abortion and to stop terrorism, but they also pray for their roommates and family members. Ultimately, they want to see revival on campuses nationwide.
At San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, California, the members of Carpe Diem Christian Fellowship, a ministry affiliated with Chi Alpha, have been seeing miraculous healings. In 2005, director Matthew Gonzales says he felt God leading him to pray for Jim Yanko, who was then Delta's baseball coach.
In 2003 Yanko underwent an operation for a malignant, grade-four tumor and was again facing surgery for suspicious tumor cells. But when Yanko went in for surgery the day after Gonzales prayed for him, he says the doctors could find no cancerous cells.
Two years later, he says he is still cancer-free. "I am now trying to be as much of an inspiration as I possibly can be to the other people that are going through the same episode I went through, not just the patients themselves, but the family and the loved ones and everything else," Yanko says.
Emboldened by the testimony, Carpe Diem students are now praying for those in their community. At a Wal-Mart, two students prayed for a woman in the candy aisle who was bound to a wheelchair because of a hip injury. Gonzales says after the students laid hands on the woman and prayed for her, she was able to stand up and walk.
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At Arizona State University, prayer-room coordinator Chris Ngai has also seen prayer change lives. He recalls a student who walked into the prayer room late one night, on the verge of committing suicide. A handful of students talked to him—and then they prayed for him. "One minute he was crying, and the next, he was thanking us," Ngai says.
Student response to around-the-clock prayer is no surprise, Ma says. "Prayer has been so attractive because it's not about theology or theory; it's about encountering a living God that you can feel and know and hear," he says. "They're not falling in love with religion; they are falling in love with Jesus."
And through prayer, they are uniting like never before. "We're seeing students from all fellowships joining hands together for the very first time and realizing that, 'Hey, we're all on the same mission; we're all here for the same goal and the same God," adds Ma, author of The Blueprint: A Revolutionary Plan to Plant Missional Communities on Campuses. "The goal is to equip students in prayer ... to reach every student on every campus for Christ," he says of the book, published on July 7.
As they unite, students are flocking to events such as TheCall Nashville, where on July 7, young adults filled an entire stadium to pray for revival in the nation. Passion '07, a four-day indoor conference for college students, attracted an estimated 20,000 students from around the world in January. Likewise, the International House of Prayer—a prayer meeting that began in 1999 and continues today—attracts masses of students.
"One of the reasons we have found favor with these young people is the sound of hope," says TheCall founder Lou Engle, "that through massive fasting and prayer, a nation can turn back to God."
...Jeremy Story, president of Campus Renewal Ministries, whose mission is to unite students and college pastors through prayer and action, says in order to engage students, leaders must unite. In recent years, he says, that has been happening more and more.
"An increasing number of churches on college campuses across America very intentionally are praying together and are seeking the Lord together," he says. "That was an unheard-of concept. There is no history of that occurring to this degree of a significant level in prior years of campus ministry in our country, so it's huge."
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