InterVarsity Christian Fellowship recently announced that they will focus on catalyzing Christian student movements on 2,500 college campuses in the next 12 years. Below Ed Stetzer talks with InterVarsity president Tom Lin about this bold goal.
Ed: Ministry on 2,500 college campuses is a huge goal. Can you share a bit about how InterVarsity came to this calling?
Tom: When I became president of InterVarsity in 2016, I started praying with InterVarsity’s leadership team about where we were as a ministry and what God wanted to do next through us.
Right now, the Spirit is doing tremendous things on campus. By God’s grace, we have more than 1,000 chapters on almost 700 campuses, and are planting ministry on new campuses around the country.
And record numbers of students and faculty are making first-time decisions to follow Jesus in our chapters, more than at any other time in our 77-year history. This propulsive energy has been exciting to watch.
At the same time, as leaders fasted and prayed together, God kept returning us to a challenging truth: 53 percent of the 2,500 US campuses with more than 1,000 students still have no campus ministry to speak of.
That really broke our hearts. By 2030, we want high school seniors to be able to enroll at any college in the U.S. and find a loving, vibrant, missional Christian community waiting there to welcome them. We want every student and faculty member to have the opportunity to hear the gospel and experience the hope of Christ.