80% of the world’s evangelical Christians live in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Over the last 50 years, God’s church has grown exponentially in these areas.

These regions have tremendous mission sending potential to help bring the gospel to unreached peoples, but they currently send only 20% of the world’s cross-cultural missionaries!

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This infographic provides a visual score for seven data points ranked on a 0 to 100 scale. Faded icons show scores for other countries on the mobilization index. See below for actual scores and country-specific insights.

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I believe that the first month of the Fall semester is the most important month of the entire year for collegiate leaders! The quantity and quality of new students that you reach during this narrow window of time has potential the next 3 years (and beyond) in profound ways. The freshmen that you reach will become your future student leaders and staff who will influence your potential for multiplication and movement in the years to come. Not all opportunities are created equal!&nbsp;
&ldquo;Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.&rdquo; Ephesians 5:15-16
More importantly, I believe your Fall Outreach is an unprecedented opportunity to reach lost students with the gospel. People often come to Christ in trouble and transition. Going to college is the first major transition in someone&rsquo;s life and many students are open to new friendships and experiences during this time. Do you remember your first weeks as a freshman in college? I believe the friends a student makes in the first weeks on campus often impact the rest of their lives!&nbsp;
In this article, I will not primarily focus on the &ldquo;how-to&rdquo; of Fall Outreach. I have covered that in <a href="https://www.vianations.org/articles/launchyoself" rel="follow">this article</a> and the audio workshop <a href="https://www.vianations.org/students/podcasts/summer-sessions-2021/give-me-freshman-or-give-me-death-by-paul-worcester" rel="follow">Give Me Freshman or Give Me Death</a>. Instead, I want to share more pastoral lessons I have learned the hard way over the years!&nbsp;

1. Prioritize Personal Touch Over Perfect Events

Pulling off 10-plus outreach events to welcome new students can present a daunting list of details to take care of! For those of us who are not administratively minded, this season can cause us to fall head-first into a black hole of stress. Ordering flyers, booking meeting rooms, communicating with campus officials, Costco runs, and making sure all the chairs are set up perfectly for our kick-off meeting can give us a migraine.
Personally, I remember getting so overwhelmed with the details related to each event that I would miss relational opportunities the Lord was providing. I would get so worked up by the fact that the intern forgot to pick up the ice, that I would drop the ball on my first conversation with a brand-new freshman! Trust me, that freshman cares far more about if they can connect with the people in your group than if the Coke that comes with their free burger is icy cold.&nbsp;
New students are not primarily looking for epic events; they are looking for friends!&nbsp;
New students are self-focused and asking questions like &ldquo;do I fit in?&rdquo; and &ldquo;are these my kind of people?&rdquo; It is crucial that all of our events provide enough relational space so that your student leaders and staff can make genuine relational connections with new students and set up <a href="https://www.gensend.org/resource/how-to-share-jesus-using-gospel-appointments/" rel="follow">gospel appointments</a>. It&rsquo;s actually possible to be too efficient and sterile with your events, which hinders the ability to form genuine friendships. Personal is most powerful!&nbsp;
If your plans to reach students are ambitious enough and you are hosting multiple events, it is inevitable that there will be some mistakes and mishaps along the way! Don&rsquo;t let the stress of all the details harsh the vibe. Keep a light-hearted, upbeat attitude that will trickle down to your student leaders and new students.&nbsp;

The first month of the year often provides collegiate leaders with the highest highs and the lowest lows of the year. That packed-out first weekly meeting provides the perfect opportunity to get a crowd shot from the corner for your Instagram but it doesn&rsquo;t necessarily provide an accurate picture of what God is really doing. I love Shad&rsquo;s advice on this: &nbsp;
&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t get overly impressed with large crowds and don&rsquo;t get overly depressed with small crowds.&rdquo; Steve Shadrach
I spent far too many Fall Outreach seasons riding the emotional roller coaster that depended on the whims of flaky 18-year-olds! As leaders, it is our job to set the example by keeping a sober-minded perspective in the highs and lows of this first month. We should celebrate the wins, but it doesn&rsquo;t serve us well to label every event as the birth of the next great revival. Only God knows what is happening in the spiritual realm, and time will tell us more of what he is really doing.&nbsp;
One of my claims to fame is that I have led one of the lamest events in the history of college ministry. When my wife Christy and I were starting our ministry at Chico State, we decided to do a fun event every day for the first week of school in order to build relationships with students. We decided to do an information table in the student union on the first day of school and got 10 interested contacts! We rushed home and sent out a text to who we naively anticipated would be our first 10 students to join the ministry. We invited them to a &ldquo;pizza party&rdquo; at a nearby pizza place. The problem was that we were broke (we had not read <a href="https://www.viagenerosity.org/resources/the-god-ask" rel="follow">The God Ask</a> yet), so our plan was to let students buy their own pizza! I told you it was lame! I guess it could have been worse, because two graduate students actually showed up to our &ldquo;epic&rdquo; event. After buying their own pizza, we had an awkward conversation for 30 minutes and never saw them again! This was the launch of what would eventually become a viral gospel movement on the campus and beyond. You gotta start somewhere!
Transparently, I wrestled with insecurity and discouragement all the time during the early years of building our ministry. I wish that I could go back in time and put both hands on my own shoulders and look deep in my own eyes and shout &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t worry about the numbers right now! Build deeply into the students that God has given you and God will bless you with exponential impact over time.&rdquo; &nbsp;I spent far too many nights at our ministry events counting and double counting exactly how many students were in attendance when my real focus should have been on loving the students in the room. Get off the emotional roller coaster!&nbsp;

Our competition is not other ministries, our competition is the gates of hell!
Life is too short to lose a wink of sleep when that cool Christian freshman decides to join a different ministry on campus. The average college campus across North America is about 5% reached with the gospel. Who is going after the 95%? On many campuses, there are dozens of churches and ministries fighting over the ever-decreasing 5% when there is a vast &ldquo;blue ocean&rdquo; of lost students who are rarely being engaged. I am asking God for ministry leaders who share the mindset of missionary hero C.T. Studd:&nbsp;

One of my first days of tabling at Chico State I had a conversation with another ministry leader on campus that I will never forget. Our newly minted student organization had just finished setting up our information table in hopes of meeting some of the parade of lost freshmen funneling past us. This ministry leader came up to introduce himself and immediately commented, &ldquo;Another Christian student organization?! Looks like this campus is close to over-saturation.&rdquo; Talk about a warm, encouraging welcome! I don&rsquo;t remember my response to his comment, and since then I have had plenty of time to come up with some zinger responses, but those will remain unspoken. Keep in mind, Chico had only a handful of Christian ministries reaching approximately 3% of the 30,000 college students in our community. That doesn&rsquo;t sound like over-saturation to me! It may be if your primary goal is to fight over the ever-shrinking slice of already Christian students. The truth is, we could add a dozen new ministries in Chico (provided that they are truly focused on reaching the lost) and we still wouldn&rsquo;t reach over-saturation! Don&rsquo;t buy into the over-saturation myth!
Imagine that you and a small team had the task of harvesting a vast field of crops and you only had one week to do it. You and your squad are working tirelessly from sun up to sun down bringing in the harvest. All of a sudden, you discover that your boss hired another crew to set up right beside you, to cover another part of the field. What would your response be? Would it be resentment or relief? It would be relief, because your job just got much easier! Remember, the problem is not with the harvest. The harvest is plentiful, the problem is a lack of laborers (Matthew 9:36-38). Then why do we struggle with mixed emotions when we see another college ministry or church show up and start successfully reaching students with the gospel?

I want to close with one verse that I challenge you to memorize, meditate on, and share with your team during this season:

If what my friend Shane Pruitt and I have been sensing is true, and this is actually &ldquo;<a href="https://www.namb.net/podcast_channel/gensendpod/" rel="follow">The Revival Generation</a>,&rdquo; then you can bet on there being a counter-attack from the enemy. Every great movement of God has been marked by fierce opposition and spiritual warfare. The enemy hates the work you are trying to do and will do anything in his power to distract and discourage you during this season. Don&rsquo;t be surprised when all hell breaks loose as you advance against the gates of hell!&nbsp;
When your car breaks down and your kids get sick and there is relational drama in the ministry all on the day of your big outreach event: Keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill the duties of your ministry! Keep your hand to the plow, stay focused, and don&rsquo;t give up.&nbsp;
Take comfort in the fact that God is always working in far more ways than you and I can imagine and HE wants to fulfill HIS mission far more than you and I do! If you are suffering for the sake of the gospel, remember you are in a long line of spiritual giants who have paved the way for you to be doing what you do. I love this quote by Hudson Taylor describing his life in a journal entry:&nbsp;

3 Reminders During Fall Outreach

In This Article

Paul Worcester

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