1. Encourage students to be bold
Our survey last year revealed that 76% of non-Christian students would go to church if a friend invited them. This is great news! There’s only one problem: Christian students aren’t inviting them. There is a huge chasm between the openness of non-Christian students and the confidence of Christian students to invite. As a church leader, you can address this. We need you to speak into this gap.
Christian students assume that their friends will think they are judgemental, weirdly religious, or just a bit odd - but this simply isn’t the case. This research shows that their friends are not freaked out at all. They might be positively indifferent and say “oh right, nice” but they are very unlikely to react negatively. There is no need for Christian students to fear hostility from their friends. In fact, these friends may feel let down if the Christian doesn’t offer to share something that is such a big part of their identity. The non-Christian student is likely to respond with “if you actually believe this, why on earth didn’t you tell me? Do you not care enough about me or do you not really believe it? Which is it?”
This means that there is so much freedom for Christian students to invite and to sow the seeds of the gospel liberally and without fear. We need to encourage our students not to say their friends’ “no” for them. Humans have always been terrible barometers of where other humans are at. I don’t suspect many people thought Saul was about to have an encounter with Jesus when he set off for Damascus! But he did! Encourage your students to be bold in who they invite, who knows what the response will be. We recently heard of a student worker who got all their students to text a friend and invite them to church next Sunday. They did and 7 students came as guests, just from those texts. Let’s be bold and assume that God will do the rest. The parable of the growing seed in Mark 4 reminds us that “a man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how” - we sow, God grows!
2. Get students reading scripture