How to Evangelize to College Students | David Russell

We are back with another episode of the Room for Nuance podcast, not live, but we are coming to you from an undisclosed location. The studio is still not in working order, but I'm sitting here.

With Dave Russell from Oakhurst Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. And you flew here. I flew here. You guys flew me here. Thank you.

Your arms must be tired.

I indeed.

Okay. We've set the tone for the interview, brother. Will you open us in prayer? Then we'll jump right in.

Let's do it.

Okay.

Father in heaven, we thank you for this time to pause and to connect and to consider your word and the call to make disciples to the ends of the earth and to consider what that would look like for churches, to make disciples of college students, to engage college campuses for the sake of spreading the gospel.

Lord, we pray that this conversation would be a help to those who are listening, to those who are college students, to those who work in churches who are seeking to reach those campuses. Lord, we pray that this would be helpful in edifying that you'd be glorified in our conversation.

In Jesus name. Amen.

Amen. We have brought you here today, Dave Russell, to talk about campus ministry and you've written a book on it.

I have not written a book. A couple of articles.

A couple of articles. Where can those be found?

You can find one on TGC. That's going to be about should college students join a church close to their college campus. And then Nine Marks has one. Mobilizing the church to evangelize on the college campus.

So if you've written two articles and no books, why are we interviewing you on the subject?

That's a good question, man. Yeah. So I think I'm a pastor now.

Okay.

But for 15 years worked in campus ministry.

15 years.

15 years.

So how long have you been a pastor?

I've been a pastor now at Oakhurst Baptist Church for going on nine years this fall.

Okay.

And then I served previously on staff at Capitol Hill Baptist Church. Served as an elder there for four years.

Wow. Well, can you just start with your testimony? Give us the three to five minute version of it and then we'll move into college ministry stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. I was saved, I believe, at a young age. I say I believe because I had the benefit of growing up at home with two Christian parents. And so as long as I can remember going to a gospel preaching church, learning the gospel at home, learning the gospel at church, my parents were meaningfully involved in local churches.

So it was a great blessing. And I did grow up in a time probably where revivalistic methods were more common. So I'm not sure if it was when I was at five years of age or 12 years of age. At some point when I was younger, I believe I was converted.

A pretty pivotal place for me though was my freshman year of college. And so at that point, I've moved out of my house. I've gone on to a college campus.

Which college?

UNC Charlotte. So the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Tar Heels?

No, the Tar Heels are at Chapel Hill.

Okay.

So it's kind of like the Alabama system. We're in Charlotte. Large campus though. Right now it's about 25 ,000 students.

Home of the?

49ers.

Oh.

We play in the American Athletic Conference.

Weren't they just in the Super Bowl?

Uh, no.

Okay. Anyways, continue on.

San Francisco. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

We're the other 49ers. We had a gold rush in Charlotte, North Carolina in 18. We did.

So that's why they say Charlotte is the San Francisco of the East Coast.

They do say that.

Okay. Yes.

Yes.

So back to your story.

Back to the Charlotte 49ers. So yeah, went off to college and was at a place really where I was going to have to decide what was I going to pursue? Was I going to pursue the typical college life, partying, whatnot?

Or was I going to pursue Christ? And the decision got made pretty quickly. Like the first night I moved in, I was going to pursue the party life. And so sadly, that's kind of where I was going. The first couple months of school and really looking around on my dorm, on my campus, hardly any Christians.

I mean, I think on my floor, 50 guys. I think there were maybe two guys that were showing evidence of a relationship with Christ, a real walk with Christ. And so it almost just didn't seem possible on mine.

Like, what am I going to do to have fun? What's my life going to be? Who am I going to hang out with? And as a college freshman, you're starting over. You're wanting to make friends. You're wanting to develop your social life and whatnot.

So yeah, sadly, I kind of had this idea of, hey, maybe I'll just like get more serious about the Lord after college. And by God's grace, he had different plans. Probably two months into classes, I came home one night from partying and I was feeling guilty about the way that I was living, but really didn't know what to do with that guilt.

And I looked up on my desk and there was a book my mom had given me to take off to school. And it was something about taking your faith off to college. I don't remember the name of the book. And she had written a handwritten note about how she was praying for me.

And I felt miserable. I felt about an inch high because I'm thinking about the state of my life at that time, how I was living versus how I was raised, what I knew to be true from God's word. And I remember praying at that moment at my desk and just asking the Lord for help.

Just some sort of general prayer. I don't recall exactly what I prayed. However, like a week later, there was a guy on my dorm floor who worked with the campus ministry. He was meeting some other guys, starting a Bible study.

They invited me to that Bible study. I jumped in. Some of those guys in that Bible study were believers.

Some weren't.

We were studying through the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew. And we got to Matthew 6, 24. I remember studying Matthew 6, 24. No one can serve two masters. You will hate the one and love the other, hold to one, despise the other.

And the Lord convicted me of that, that I was living as if I could serve two masters. And there was just a place of repentance. Lord, I don't want to live like this. I want to pursue you. And by God's grace, really through that Bible study, from that point forward, the rest of my college years, which thankfully, that was only two months in.

So the rest of my college years were spent growing as a Christian. It's where I learned how to evangelize, learned how to disciple. And I can look back, have lots of great memories of the Lord's blessing on that time.

So it's not a surprise that you got into college ministry. I mean, one of the most formative seasons of your life was on the college campus. Were you self-conscious of that? Did you think like, man, look what the Lord's done in my life on the campus.

I need to turn back around and sort of work in this field.

I did.

I was really close though to going on the foreign mission field. So at one point I'd actually made the decision, I'm going to go serve in East Asia. And before I made that final commitment, like signing on the dotted line, in my mind I'd said, I'm doing this.

I told others I'm doing this. I had gotten an offer from a campus ministry to come and serve. And it was kind of like at the last minute, I just felt the desire to come back, like you said, to come back to campus and to try to be that impact on others and serve in the way that I was served as a student.

Did you finish your four-year degree?

I did.

What was it in?

It was in communications, public relations.

Man, what does that even mean?

Yeah.

I mean, you're a pastor, I guess.

It helps out.

I mean, it probably helps a little.

Okay, yeah.

So you finished your four-year degree. Was it right after that you jumped right back in?

I mean, it was like two weeks after I graduated and started.

Yeah.

And who did you work for?

I worked for Campus Outreach at that time down in Charlotte.

So can you just sort of, I want you to tell us about who Campus Outreach is, but for the sake of clarity, if you could also contrast Campus Outreach with the other major college ministries that people might know of like Crewe and so on and so forth.

That's right.

Most people are going to know Crewe, InterVarsity. Campus Outreach was started in 1978 in the great state of Alabama.

Wow.

Which campus?

Samford University in Birmingham.

Look at that, okay.

Started by Frank Barker, some men out of his church.

Is that the Presbyterian guy?

Briarwood Presbyterian.

Yeah, there you go.

He's with the Lord now.

Yeah, he did. He passed on the same day as Tim Keller, I think, or the same weekend.

Everything to Harry Reader. Harry Reader went and replaced Frank Barker, but Harry Reader was very involved and instrumental in getting Campus Outreach going in North Carolina when he served as a pastor in that state.

Wow.

Yeah, so both those men committed to evangelism and committed to campus evangelism. So it's a younger ministry and it's different. Like Crewe, InterVarsity are going to be international true parachurch organizations.

Campus Outreach is a little bit different. It's going to be church-based and more franchise, for lack of a better way to describe it. So effectively, a local church would take in a Campus Outreach ministry for that particular region.

And the authority for that Campus Outreach would be the church there in that region.

Okay, so you said true. Parachurch versus church-based.

Yeah.

Can you elaborate on the distinction there?

Yeah, so when we were in DC, you were at Capitol Baptist when I was there. So the same relationship that like a nine marks ministry with Capitol Baptist Church where they had

Or Desiring God with Piper Church or whatever.

Yeah, they're under the authority on the umbrella of that particular church. So in terms of just who's being hired, all the sort of oversight spiritually provided by that local church.

Okay, but for the other ones, Crewe, InterVarsity.

Yeah, I'm not an expert on them. As far as I know, they're going to be parachurch ministry. So they're going to have boards and how their governance is going to be, is going to be set up outside of a local church, outside of a denomination, all that kind of thing.

Okay, are you at all paying attention to like the Crewe controversy surrounding gay and homosexual language and the training that they're giving their workers and stuff?

I've started to hear more about it. I don't know a lot about it. And I think that's part of the concern for me in campus ministry. Campus ministry is always going to have these new winds of kind of like the edgy theology coming through.

It's going to hit campus ministry first. So when I was doing campus ministry in North Carolina, back in 06, everyone was passing out Rob Bell's DVDs on campus, the NUMA.

NUMA, yeah, more like old ma.

Yeah, Blue Light Jazz was getting passed around,.

Donald Miller.

Donald Miller, yeah.

So kind of like trendy, edgy, that kind of thing hits campus ministries pretty quickly. And then you tend to have younger staff. Most of us, you know, at that point didn't have theological training. I got my seminary degree while I was on staff with campus ministry.

But where'd you study?

Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Yeah, okay.

So yeah, so I think the protection and the help that a local church provides a campus ministry is just that doctrinal anchor. And you're not having to make all those decisions. What are we going to say about this?

What are we going to do on this issue? You're with a church. And so when I was in DC, we were an extension of the local church ministering on college campuses.

Is there a place for parachurch ministries?

I think so. I often say, let's not make parachurch a cuss word.

Okay.

So I think if parachurches are functioning the way they should function, they're coming alongside local churches. So we're pastors, we're generalists, right? We're ministering to all kinds of people, young and old, senior citizens, 80-year-olds and 18-year-old college students.

We're thinking through preschool, nursery, all those things, right? And parachurch ministries can zoom in and focus in on niche ministries. They can focus on refugees. They can focus on college students.

They can focus on sports ministry. So those can be helpful things. Like they're focused. They can develop some sort of expertise on how to reach these particular groups. But if they're not connecting to local churches, I think that's when they get outside of the proper design of what you'd want to see a parachurch ministry doing.

So connect, that's pretty loose, pretty vague, pretty ambiguous. I mean, campus outreach is sitting directly under the authority of the local church. All the ministry flows out and flows back to it, which I think is good.

What do you do for a different kind of pair? And listen, maybe you didn't want to come here and talk about all this today, but I do think it's interesting. Like how connected does it need to be?

Yeah, so all the staff on a parachurch ministry should be members of evangelical churches, right? And so I know someone in the town I'm from that works with Fellowship of Christian Athletes. That's parachurch.

That's not underneath the denomination or church, but he and his staff meaningfully connected to local churches and trying to get their students connected to local churches. So that's a good example of a parachurch that's reaching a specific kind of student, student athletes, that's really specific.

They have a different schedule, even than regular students getting into those places sometimes can be challenging. How do you get onto a particular team to share the gospel, to try to disciple? So think of parachurch, if it's functioning well, it's an arm that's going to extend from a local church.

And in that sense, it's just, hey, it's a member of a local church. He works for an outside organization, but you should be unfolding your work back into a local church. That's just normal Christian ministry where it should be.

Okay, so going back to campus outreach, you're on staff, you're working for this organization under the umbrella of the church franchise. Great image, by the way, I love that. How do you bring people back into the local church?

What does that look like? And maybe can you also give us some examples that you've seen of college ministries where there's no attempt to do that and maybe some of the damage done by that?

Yeah, so what we were trying to do was really go church to campus and campus to church. So a lot of times you don't see that first move of a church making the move to a college campus for evangelism. And here's why, it can be difficult.

Campuses tend to be, if it's a normal college campus, it's like a city within a city, right? So when most of us, I'm 45 now, when I'm going to bed, college students probably are just in the middle of their studies, maybe getting ready to order a late night pizza.

It's a different place to minister. For years when I was in campus ministry, our weekly meetings were at nine o 'clock at night. We don't do anything in my local church on a regular schedule at nine o 'clock at night.

If we did, not many people would likely show up.

I don't do anything in my house after nine o 'clock at night.

Yeah, so it's a city within a city and a college campus is set up to be that, right? So it's like, it's one of the few places where you live there, you work there, you eat there, your gym's there, your recreation, intramural sports, it's there.

You might have a job on campus, your library's there. You don't have to leave. That's why they're set up that way. My daughter's getting ready to go off to school and she's asking about, you know, this particular school won't let freshmen drive.

And I just said, well, you don't need to drive. Everything's here. Like you can get a ride to go somewhere, but everything you need is here. So yeah, it's set up to be a city within a city. And if you think about normal life, so I live in a suburban area of Charlotte, North Carolina.

I live in the city limits, but a suburban area. You're in the car going 25 minutes, pretty much anywhere. Drive here for work. Drive this direction for church. Drive here for the grocery store. Drive here for your kids' sports.

Drive here for the gym. You're just scattered all over the place. So most people are like pulling into the garage and pulling out and taking off. That's normal life. On a campus, it's not like that. So it's a great opportunity.

Meaning here's like a focused place where there's thousands of people. Some campuses, tens of thousands of people on these campuses tend to be people from all 50 states. A number of campuses are gonna have about a hundred nationalities present.

And if you go there, that's who's there. And they're all in an age 18 to 22 for the most part where they're learning, at least should be. Should be asking questions, who am I? Thinking about their future, engaging with new ideas.

So it's a great opportunity, but you have to go jump in the middle of it. And that can be challenging for churches to figure out how to do that. And that's why I think in part, campus ministries have maybe, like para-church ministries have taken that over because they've become experts.

They have the resources. They can make things happen. So the first turn is churches mobilized to evangelize on campus. The next turn is what you're doing on campus and folding that back into the local church.

So yeah, what that looked like in DC, we had a full-time staff team. So I was full-time with Campus Outreach DC. That was a ministry of Capitol Hill Baptist Church. I was freed up to focus my full-time efforts only on campus ministry.

Now, when I started serving as an elder, obviously I had some other responsibilities in the church, but my job, like business hours was on the college campus. We had a team of at that time, eight full-time staff.

That's all they did. And so our goal was meet 18 year olds, share the gospel with them, get investigative Bible studies going, for those Christian students that we met, try to encourage them, try to invest in their lives, try to get them plugged into our church, if not our church, to join some other church that's close by the campus and have them be discipled and meaningful members of a local church.

How do you do that? Is it just the messaging? Is it just, what do you say? Is it the literature you hand out?

Well, it's just gotta be your goal, right? So it's like our goal wasn't just to stop with the investigative Bible study in the dorm lobby. That's a starting point, but we were bringing unbelievers to church.

So I can think of one example, we're meeting students on campus. The first conversion we had in DC was a guy who he just smelled chocolate chip cookies being baked on his dorm floor. And it was a young lady who was a Christian, who was a freshman at the school, who was a member of our church.

She was baking cookies for this evangelistic meeting we were gonna have. And we brought Mark Devereux on campus and we had a one hour meeting in the lounge of this big freshman dorm. And it was called Ask Me Anything.

And he wanted a chocolate chip cookie. And she said, well, you gotta come to this meeting. This is what they're for. And you're welcome to have these cookies. So he came and he asked a lot of questions that night.

And after the meeting's over, I went up and talked to him. And I just asked him, hey man, like, do you think you understand the message of Christianity? And he looked at me and he said, I don't think I know what the message of Christianity is.

I know some things about Jesus, some things about Christianity. So I shared with him the gospel, the message of Christianity. He shared it very briefly. It was like 60 seconds, kind of like we were trained to do in our local church there.

And I said, what are your questions? And he had like half a dozen questions. And he was pre-med. I don't have a science background. I just said, man, I don't think I can answer all your questions satisfactorily.

But you know what? One of our associate pastors was a scientific advisor to the U .S. Senate before he was a pastor. And if you come to our church on Sunday, I'd love to introduce you to him. So he came, he came to church.

He's listening to an expositional sermon, opening up the Pew Bible, taking notes there. Afterwards, I take him over to this associate pastor, introduce them, and they have a conversation right then. And then I think they followed up at lunch.

So that's what it looks like to bring an 18-year-old unbelieving student, meet him on campus, meet him in a dorm, share the gospel on campus, but enfold him into the local church. I think it was like six months later, by God's grace, he got baptized in our local church, joined the church.

Praise God.

Amen.

Yeah.

You didn't really address the, I'm not trying to get you to bad talk or, you know, trash crew or IVP. It doesn't, I think there are more organizations than them out there, surely on college campuses.

Sure, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I think we've both seen situations where any kind of person is targeted and the end goal is to get them to raise their hand, to make a profession. And that's kind of where it ends. And that can be really dangerous.

It can be really harmful. And you've seen that, I'm sure.

Yeah, and I think even beyond that, maybe just growing your organization on campus. So it's very short-sighted. It's like, how is our particular campus ministry doing? But we always have the mindset of like, hey, we're not only concerned.

Obviously we're concerned with the state of their soul eternally. We don't think long-term eternally, but we don't wanna just think 18 to 22. We just ask the question, what are their lives gonna look like at 40?

Like, how can we set them up now? So that's where the normal Christian life comes into play. Like college students at 18, they need to, if they haven't baptized, they need to be baptized and join a local church and begin to live the normal Christian life.

That's gonna set them up to be walking with the Lord at 40. So that's, I think, where a lot of campus ministries miss the mark. It's what's going on campus, who's coming to our Bible studies, who's coming to our weekly meeting.

No real connection to any Christians outside of their age group. And maybe the staff person who is probably just like five years older than them anyways. I mean, I was with a guy last week that I discipled years ago.

And I was sitting down with him at dinner and I said, how old are you now? He said, 42, and I'm 45. He's just three years younger than me. I told my wife that, I said, isn't it hard to think? I think he's only three years younger than me.

At the time when I was 24 and he was 21, I just seemed like light years ahead of him, right? In his mind and in mine. So I think you can have a lot of passion, zeal, good intentions in campus ministry with kind of this passionate young group of people.

But if it's disconnected from a local church, a lot of it's gonna fizzle out when they hit 23 and they go to work somewhere else and they leave that campus ministry and don't have that structure they got used to that really only exists there in a campus ministry.

But Dave, don't you understand that college students are kind of this unique demographic? They're their own people group. They speak their own language. They're in their own socioeconomic bracket. They have their own cultural, linguistic, blah, blah, blah.

And we can't really expect to get them into the church.

Yeah, I think that's ridiculous. I think it's, so it's not helpful when pastors or when churches think like that, like, hey, we're just gonna let them be a special case. It's not helpful when para-church ministries think of themselves that way.

Hey, this is just four years, unique time, almost like you're just like floating in between like being in your parents' home and the real world. And I've seen it anecdotally, just in our ministry, I've seen it actually be a time where it's like four years is a long period of time, right?

Very formative period of time. Your prefrontal cortex is solidifying. I mean, it's a big deal.

It's a long period of time. It's a long enough period of time to be a member of a local church where your college campus is. If you think about four years, like I'm in a pretty transient city right now.

There's plenty of people who are in our city working for less than four years before they get transferred somewhere else. So you don't do college students any favors by treating them as if there's some special case.

So give me the campus outreach spiel. You probably had to do it a bunch when you were support raising, when you were interacting with naysayers who didn't really understand the mission. What's the sell that you would give?

I mean that in the least carnal way possible. Like what's the sell that you would give them?

Yeah, like the people that I was raising financial support from.

You know, there's 2 million college students in America today and this is why we need to target them. You know, whatever that version is.

I was never that big on just making college students out to be special. My older brother did not go to college. He learned to trade. He's an electrician. I was

Probably makes more money than you.

He may, he may, yeah. He's got more steady work than most people do. So he's never been out of work. I'll tell you that. But, and I was like, of all the grandkids on my side of the family, there was like maybe two of us that went to college.

So I've kind of not liked the idea of treating college students like they're special. So, you know, people will say a lot of things. It's a strategic place. I think it is strategic, but you can make a lot of areas out to be strategic.

It's strategic to reach refugees who've just moved into America. So there is a strategy that it's, if anything, I would look at it. I more or less pitched it as, this is one of the most open evangelistic opportunities I think in our country is college campuses.

And for the very reason I mentioned to you, here's thousands of students, life concentrated in this place from all over the place. You know, even now in Charlotte, North Carolina, we've baptized students from all over the state of North Carolina, students who've come from the Northeast.

We had a student from the UK who got baptized in our church who brought, he was a soccer player at the school and brought the whole soccer team. All the coaches came to watch him get baptized. So it's just a great opportunity evangelistically.

So, you know, doing ministry in my neighborhood now, it's slow, man. I mean, there'll be days of time where I don't see my neighbors. They pull into their garage, put the garage door down and go inside.

Like you may see them when they're coming out to get their mail. If they have a dog, you're likely to see them more often because they're out walking their dog. But it's challenging oftentimes to do ministry in suburban America.

But you go on a college campus, here's thousands of people. It's not hard to get into a conversation. And so I just think it's strategic in the sense of it's one of the most open evangelistic targets I can think of.

Is that changing? Is it becoming increasingly difficult with our, you know, almost post-Christian America to get onto college campuses, especially if you're an evangelical?

It is.

And there's a difference between private schools and public schools. So like state schools, you have a right to be on those. Where private schools,.

You don't,.

They can decide as private property. They can decide who they want to come on there.

But even in state schools, there's been pushback and certain campus ministries have been pushed out and they've had to fight those battles.

Yeah, you're right. You're right.

And I think it's kind of a testing ground to see. What do you push for? I'm of the opinion, like we should push to be there and that we shouldn't kind of give into those areas. But so, I mean, you know, we're on a state campus.

So my church, we have a campus ministry with a

CO? Campus Outreach?

No, no, we started our own.

Okay.

Oakhurst Campus Ministry. And we are a chartered student organization on a state campus. As long as there's a small group of students. So for us, we started small, had a few students who were members of our church that wanted to start an organization.

We got an official charter, which what that means is that we can reserve room space in the student union. And that's where we have our weekly meetings. And that kind of serves as one of our outreach tools.

So trying to build relationships during the week and whatever relationships we have, bringing those to those meetings to be able to try to influence them. And then at those meetings, we've got church members that are serving who come in and they'll be the ones that bring the pizza or bring Chick-fil-A and Krispy Kreme and are there to interact with students, try to follow up with a number of our members will come and try to build relationships that will like disciple these students and form personal discipling relationships.

So it's kind of our way to kind of reach on the campus and use that arm to unfold them into our local church.

A couple of questions. Number one, why did you do your own instead of buying into the franchise that you came from?

Well, cause they already existed in Charlotte. So they were already at a local church there. So you just can't do two.

It's like Chick-fil-A. You can't have two franchises too close to each other.

I think you can, but that's not my call.

Okay, roger that. So you started your own. Can you talk us through what like a tip? I'm guessing you did most of the training to get your church rocking and rolling with this ministry.

Myself and then Jonathan Morgan. So Jonathan was on our staff team in DC for seven years. So between he and I, 22 years of campus ministry. So together, he's done a lot.

Yeah, okay. So what does a typical meeting look like? Hosted by Oakhurst. What did you call it again?