Grace and peace. I’m Brian Musser, the Baptist Campus Minister at Drexel University. I am a campus missionary sent by the Baptist Resource Network on your behalf to connect with students on one particular campus. But we’re here today to talk about what the BRN can do together to reach the 284 campuses in the Pennsylvania and South Jersey area, the 750,000 students that make up our region.
And as we’re looking at those numbers and those campuses, about a hundred of those 284 campuses have no known, no known gospel presence on those campuses. Now, they might have a small group Bible study or there might be a Bible-believing local church reaching out to them. But from our point of view, from the national level, we can’t see or identify a campus ministry, a Gospel presence on those campuses, and we want to change that.
Now, there is a larger Christian community trying to change that, but here at the BRN, we’re looking at changing that in a couple of very specific ways. First, we have campus-based campus missionaries. Right now there are four of them. One at Penn West, Clarion; Scott Underhill; Eric Reiber at Penn State’s Main campus; Brady Rennix, doing about four campuses in the Montgomery area, Montgomery County Community College, DelVal University, Chestnut Hill College, and Gwynedd Mercy College; and myself again at Drexel University. So that’s one of the ways churches can get involved through BRN Campus missionaries. Check with your campus missionaries, see who you want to partner with to reach those specific areas.
But also we want to encourage, equip and empower our local churches to reach the nearby campuses. There’s quite a few smaller schools in Pennsylvania that probably will never have a full-fledged missionary or staff person paying attention to it, but they have a local church and more likely have a local BRN church nearby that can reach across the campus and engage that campus in a missional way.
And BRN wants to come alongside you to help you equip you and empower you to reach it either through lay or volunteer staff from your church or figuring out how an intern might be a way to work or ultimately maybe helping encourage you in some churches in the area to come together and see if you can send a missionary there.
And then ultimately, we want to become a “Sending” network. We want to be able to send folks from our campus ministries and our collegiate interested churches to the entirety of those 284 campuses, especially the hundred with no known ministry presence on them.
How can we impact the campuses in our entire region? That’s what we’re looking for. Our Impact Funds help us do that. There is one specifically about Next Generation Mobilization that will be you partnering with the BRN to reach the next generation, and especially reach the college students and the college campuses here in our area.
It is a great need. The church needs to reach the next generation in order to impact the communities and the world around us. I hope you decide to partner with us through the Impact Funds. Thank you.
