USA (MNN) — Airport shuttles are busy as Urbana 18 participants leave St. Louis, Missouri. Urbana 18 brought together hundreds of college kids for five days of seminars, worship, and Bible study.
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As students head home today, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship is equipping them for spiritual battle. The “EveryCampus” initiative is starting now, explains InterVarsity’s Jon Hietbrink.
“The…initial goal of that is to mobilize a prayer walk on all 5,000 campuses of the country between now and January 1, 2020,” he states.
As explained here, approximately 77% of U.S. college campuses lack a community of Christ-sharing believers. EveryCampus is designed to change that. It’s a collaborative prayer effort between several campus ministries, prayer networks, and church networks.
“Certainly people have prayed on these campuses before, but never in a concerted, unified way,” Hietbrink says.
Through EveryCampus, collaborators are trying to accomplish something they couldn’t do through individual effort: “namely, trying to mobilize witness on every single campus in the country.”
Mobilizing prayer for EveryCampus
Prior to launching at Urbana 18, collaborators developed and tested a prototype of the EveryCampus website. Now that the site is live, “students can go on and download a customized prayer guide for every single campus in the country,” Hietbrink says.
“They can sign up and receive – either by text or by email – this customized prayer guide that… after they leave Urbana, they can [use to] go and prayer walk on the campus.”
EveryCampus collaborators are trying to mobilize prayer for campuses and on campuses, adds Hietbrink. Along with Urbana, the movement is premiering at “a lot of Cru’s winter conferences, and then some additional conferences and other places as well.
“From here, our hope is that students and faculty, volunteers, church members, parents – anyone, really – will join in and start prayer walking campuses all over the country.”
You don’t have to be a college student to pray on campus. Join the movement here.
“Already the “magic number” is down from 5,000 to about 4,500 that are left to go. The dream is that yeah, that number would be zero by the time the year is out in 2019,” Hietbrink adds.
“We’re no more than a degree or two removed from every campus in the country right now, and I just think this is something Jesus is in… [I] have a lot of hope that that’s actually going to happen.”
Pray for organizers and leaders as they meet in the coming weeks. Plans are underway to highlight EveryCampus on February 28, 2019, the Collegiate Day of Prayer.
