Adrian has an amazing story to tell about the expansion and growth of the student work at St Paul's, Weston-Super-Mare. 

Weston-Super-Mare has a new campus (planted from Bath Spa Uni) that reaches about 600 students, growing each year. Adrian noticed that none of the local churches were doing any outreach to the student on this campus including themselves. St Paul's started with no students at all, only a few young people that were heading to university in the next few years. 

This is a bit about how it all started according to Adrian, the curate at St Paul's: 

On the 11th Sept 2014 we went to the very small freshers fair (only a couple of hundred attended), chatting to students and handing out doughnuts. Our team were there to chat to students and get their contact details to keep in touch. Over the next week I followed up all the contacts (just short of 60) and personally invited them to a student meal we were running at St Paul's. The 21st September marked our first student meal and 16 students attended. Over this term we continued monthly student meals and student brunches, we often have jamming sessions after the meals with loads of instruments. 

Over this time I made personal meeting for a cuppa tea building relationships with these students. This meant by the end of the term we had regular contact with 50+ students. A key point is that none of the students we had made contact with were Christians, all were new to church, yet by the end of the first term we had a small group of 5 that regularly came to our young adults service. 

One success of the first term was a student asking US if we were going to run alpha! We decided to run one and see how it went. How amazing is that?! So we ran Alpha which was a small group of 5, with no drop offs. We are about to see our first baptism of a student! Along side this we also run an ‘adopt a student’ programme where students can be linked up with a family in the church that will provide food as well as a place to do washing, most importantly these families are committed to praying for their student. Coming up next term we are going into each of the three accommodation blocks to cook a meal and clean kitchens in the madness of their final term.

Our two big high points for us at St Paul's are:

 

• Seeing 5 of the student who now regularly attend the church and are exploring what their faith looks like which is now resulting in the first baptisms. 
• Getting parents visit us and email us to say thank you for looking after their children, we didn't expect this. One of the parents is now exploring doing Alpha in their home town!

How encouraging is this story? Share this to encourage others working with students few or many.