There are 2.94 million students in the UK, but only 1% are actively engaged with church. For those of us involved in student ministry, the temptation can be to focus entirely on those students we have within our churches. Even for these students, our vision can be small. We hope that we’ll be able to provide some community for them through their time at Uni, that they’d have a support network in the church as they begin stepping into adulthood. Maybe they’ll even be discipled a little along the way, and leave Uni with a deeper faith than the faith they started with.
What if we’re not dreaming big enough?
76% of non-Christian students said they would try church if a friend invited them. This generation of students are increasingly open and curious about spiritual things. They’re hungry to find out more. They just need someone to invite them. What if the Christian students already in our churches didn’t just survive Uni with their faith intact, but actually came alive in their faith? What if they invited their friends to church and their friends actually came along? What if the students they invited found hope in Jesus? If just a tiny proportion of that 76% ended up coming to faith, it would double the number of Christian students in the country!
We believe in a God who loves the students in this country and is able to turn their hearts towards him. He’s done similar things before, and he can do it again. In the revival in the Hebrides in the 1940s, hundreds of young people, previously disengaged with church, suddenly felt compelled to go to church for spontaneous prayer meetings in the middle of the night. In the Great Awakening of the Eighteenth Century, tens of thousands of people came to faith in just a few years. What would it look like for God to do something like that in our time, in our day, among students in this country? God’s never going to tell us we dreamed too big, or put too much faith in him.
Ephesians 3:20 reminds us that God ‘is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us’.
What would it look like to orient your student ministry towards those who don’t yet know Jesus, and trust that God can do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine?
