The Five Stages of A Crowd:

A Defense of Our Approach

This video not only explains our unique yet biblical style of campus evangelism, but is an excellent teaching tool for all who desire to win souls to our Lord Jesus Christ.

Why The Campuses?

"Why do you preach on college campuses everyday? Are we the only sinners?" a student asked.

"No, but tomorrow you may be the influential sinners unless I cam persuade you to become influential saints!" I replied.

The center of influence in Jesus' day was the synagogue. That is where you found our Lord much of the time. I am convinced that if the Son of God had come to the United States in the twenty-first century, rather than Israel in the first century, he would have gone to the campuses. The universities control the mind of America.

As go the campuses so goes the nation. The college students are tomorrow's politicians, lawyers, doctors, educators, bureaucrats, journalists, businessmen and corporation leaders. If there is going to be a national awakening, this is the stratum of society that must be reached. The hippie radical movement of the 60's started at Berkeley and spread like wildfire to the other campuses. The same could happen today with a movement of the Spirit of God among the students.

Collegians are at a crucial age. During these years they are making choices that will determine the direction of their lives. They are away from home for the first time. They are idealistic--still questioning and looking for answers to the issues of life. Their hearts are relatively tender.

The universities are communities within themselves. Some have over 50,000 students, as well as professors, administrators and staff. Yet, local churches and campus ministries have failed miserably to reach them. It will be a terrible day at judgment when believers realize that the blood of multitudes of college students will be on their hands because they did not "rise up for God against the evildoers, and stand with him against the workers of iniquity." They have refused to warn the wicked to turn from their wickedness and live for God.

 The Churches Have Failed to Reach the Campuses

The local churches are family-oriented institutions and,therefore, the typical pastor does not include the students in his vision. He does not see how they can be much help in building a great church. Many pastors are intimidated by students, wrongly considering them to be intellectuals. Some feel they don't have the education or the knowledge to deal with them.

The churches are spending millions of dollars to take the Gospel to the nations of the world but they are ignoring the thousands of international students in their own back yards. On campus, we regularly preach to students from the four corners of the earth. Many who hear us are from nations that are virtually closed to missionaries.

In 1983 we met a man at the University of Louisville. He was from Saudi Arabia and had been in America for only three weeks. Although raised a Moslem, he said he desired to read the Bible and become a Christian. But he feared that if he converted he would be killed when he returned home. After instructing him in the Word we introduced the young Arab to a believer who invited him to a Bible study for further instruction.

A group of Iranian Moslem students at the University of Illinois told us that we are very well known in their country. Iranians on campuses all over the United States have heard us and returned to their own nation to talk of our preaching.

While living in Columbia, Missouri, (2004-2013) our family befriended a group of Vietnamese graduate students who worked for the communist government and had never heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We invited the students and their families to our home for Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations and shared the truth with them. The first year that they came, our daughters, Martha and Priscilla, got on the floor with the Nativity scene and shared the Christmas story with the Vietnamese. The two daughters of one of the families, ages 12 and 7 were converted to Christ and studying the Bible. The parents we also very interested also.

The conservative campus ministries which claim to be evangelical are usually weak and socially oriented. They have built "Christian centers" with pool and ping pong tables that emphasize recreation and fellowship, not the Gospel, worship, and service to God. Students connected with these ministries are usually vexed and intimidated by the filthy conduct of the student body. These "Christians" are preoccupied with humanistic studies and their social lives to the point that they have stripped themselves of any power with God or man. With their lukewarm version of Christianity and ignorance of Biblical doctrine and sound Theology, these "evangelicals" are often the greatest hindrance to the spread of the Gospel on campus.

The liberals have united to build centers that usually go under the banner of the United Campus Ministry. They often are hotbeds of homosexuals, lesbians, socialists, feminists, abortionists and their sympathizers. We are a thorn in the flesh to these ecumenicals who view us with ridicule and contempt. Even though they bear the name of Christ, the liberals will go to great lengths to disassociate themselves from us.

At a Big Ten university a local church invited me to speak for three evening services. The meetings were scheduled at the Wesley Foundation, an ecumenical building just off campus. After we advertised the services in the school newspaper, the foundation called the church pastor on the carpet. When he defended my Gospel preaching, a Wesley Foundation minister cursed: "*!!**!#, I don't believe what he is preaching is the Gospel!" He also wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper denouncing my preaching. This ecumenicalist had suddenly become unecumenical.

The Campus Pulpit

Before the era of shopping malls the downtown square was an ideal place for reaching people. Preachers could gather great crowds by preaching in towns and cities throughout America. Today, however, the downtowns are deserted and the streets and sidewalks of major cities are too congested with automobiles and pedestrians in a hurry to do business. City ordinances often unconstitutionally prohibit street preaching without a permit, which is often difficult to obtain.

The campuses are a more secluded environment which have lawns, malls and patios providing natural places for students to gather between classes. There is no street and traffic noise to hinder the message from being heard. Most universities have a free speech policy and tradition. Therefore, it would be more accurate to call us campus preachers rather than street preachers.

Street ministers have the disadvantage of attempting to witness to people that are often under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Their minds are preoccupied with the immediate satisfactions of the lusts of the flesh. We preach during the day when the students are still sober. They have been exercising their intellects in the classrooms and are often anxious to engage in discussion. We introduce contemporary issues in a biblical context. We present the opposite of what they have heard in the humanistic classrooms. Argument and debate result and it draws a larger crowd. Sparks fly for awhile but when he students calm down we are able to teach effectively. This is important since few students have heard the biblical doctrines accurately presented and defended. It has not always been this way.

Consider the Paths of Our Fathers

In the stone gateway to Ohio University, founded in 1804, is engraved this quotation from the Congressional Ordinance of 1787: "Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." Obviously, our Founding Fathers never intended to separate religion and morality from education. They recognized that religion, morality and knowledge were the fundamentals of education, good government and a happy people.

In fact, America's most prestigious universities, Harvard, William and Mary, Yale and Princeton were founded to prepare men for the clergy. The Bible was the chief text and theology was the main course of study. The charter of William and Mary, written in 1693, states the college was founded "to the end that the church of Virginia may be furnished with a seminary of ministers of the gospel, and that the youth may be piously educated in good letters and manners, and that the Christian faith may be propagated among the Western Indians, to the glory of Almighty God."

In colonial America, religion was the major influence on student life. Each college required daily chapel and prayer, Sunday church attendance and divinity studies. Student conduct was closely regulated according to the moral precepts of Christianity. For example, the first code of Harvard laws in 1646 provided the following: "Everyone shall consider the main end of his life and studies, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life. Seeing the Lord giveth wisdom, everyone shall seriously, by prayer in secret, seek wisdom of Him. Everyone shall so exercise himself in reading the scriptures twice a day that they may be ready to give an account of their proficiency therein . . ."

This emphasis was not limited to the colleges founded by church denominations. The 1785 charter of the University of Georgia said that in order to promote national prosperity one of the institution's first objectives would be to encourage and support the principles of Christianity and morality and to provide the instruction that would mold the students to the love of virtue and good order. To accomplish this, the ninth law of the charter required that all professors and administrators be of the Christian religion, and take a public oath of allegiance and fidelity.

Through the nineteenth century practically all institutions of higher learning had compulsory daily chapel services for faculty and students.

"We all attended chapel in those days (1890), and took turns in conducting the exercises; each took his turn in reading an appropriate selection from the Bible and elucidating its religious and ethical meaning," said Dr. Barton W. Everman of Indiana State University.

Even so, there was a constant battle throughout the nineteenth century between the religious and the secular sectors on campuses. Sporadic revivals helped Christianity maintain eminence during this time. However, in the twentieth century the majority of colleges began to develop a vast extra-curricular program making it difficult for religious organizations to compete successfully with intercollegiate athletics, the social programs of fraternities and sororities and other secular student groups. Finally, in the 1920's the state universities wielded the death blow to organized religion by making chapel attendance optional. Consequently, by the end of the 1930's, chapel instruction virtually died and today is nonexistent. Theology, once considered the queen of the sciences, lost academic respectability.

Although the state universities led the way in secularism, the church-founded institutions were not far behind in ousting Christianity. Today I find more believers on the state campuses than at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oberlin and other church-related institutions.

Our goal is to bring a revival of Christianity to the campuses of America. We agree with Noah Porter, the former president of Yale University:

"The position which we occupy is that the Christian faith is the perfection of human reason; that supernatural and historical Christianity is the only Christianity which is worth defending or which is capable of being defended on the grounds of reason or history; and that such Christianity, when interpreted by enlightened judgment, as to its truths and precepts, is not only friendly to the highest forms of culture, but is an essential condition of the same," said Noah Porter, the President of Yale College, in 1878.