4 Ways to Pray for InterVarsity’s Black Campus Ministries
For years, InterVarsity’s Black Campus Ministries (BCM) has been faithful in creating spaces for Black college students to engage the gospel and their blackness. No matter the type of university (community college, a Predominantly White Institution, or Historically Black College and University), campuses have served as a birthing ground for tomorrow’s leaders. Across the country, Black students are saying yes to Jesus, leading Christ-centered justice movements on campus, leading in their churches, and choosing purposeful living grounded in God’s Word and faith.
Each February during Black History Month, Black students gather for a time of refreshment, worship, fellowship, and sending at BCM student conferences all across the country. Would you pray for the Holy Spirit to prepare these spaces?
Like many others, BCM has felt the burdensome weight of COVID. Campus ministers, students, and faculty have all been affected. As we anticipate and long to be fully together again, we pray for wisdom.
Since the recent surge in COVID cases, BCM has decided to move our BCM Staff Conference online. This decision was a hard one, due to our strong desire to be together. Would you pray that even though this conference will be online again, it would be a gift to BCM campus ministers and staff? We long for the conference to be a space where staff can hear from the Lord and be sent. Where we can come together in fellowship and learn new strategies and tips for campus.
Although, as a ministry, we hold grief in one hand, we hold joy and celebration in the other. BCM is still creating spaces for students to encounter Jesus. Young campus ministers are leading with a deep passion. Our elders are continually guiding us with wisdom. We praise God!
Here are a few ways to pray for BCM:
Pray for BCM student conferences across the country. Pray for students, who may be attending a conference alone, to feel connected to the ministry. Pray for students to start new things on campus and that the conferences are highly catalytic.
Pray for the BCM Staff Conference and the health and safety of our campus ministers.
Pray for BCM campus staff to rest well and be filled with joy and endurance.
Pray for campus ministers to be fully funded, so they can focus on reaching more students with the good news of Jesus!
Kadrian Hinton is an InterVarsity Campus Staff Minister in Central and West Ohio, where her ministry is focused on Black undergraduate students. You can support her ministry at donate.intervarsity.org/donate#19998.
And as we consider one of the core tenets of our faith, that Jesus’ work on the cross reconciles us both to God and others (Eph 2:14–17), we see this as the foundation for biblical reconciliation. Jesus, and Jesus alone, is the basis for the unity that we believe already exists among God’s people of every ethnicity and culture.
God loves to talk with us! And the more we become familiar with conversing with him about the small things in life, the less scary it is to listen to him for the bigger things.
I often think about the gospel and how it was presented to me. It was in the country roads of southern Arkansas, where my grandmother sang in the choir of a Black church. It was the hands raised, the strength of the Black women, and the rapping of the pastor that excited my soul. It always struck me that pain, joy, and hope could coexist.
Over 40,000 students on eight campuses with only one known campus ministry in the most post-Christian city in the US. That was the situation InterVarsity Associate Area Director Jessica Pafumi found herself in when she felt God calling her to plant campus ministries in her hometown of Springfield-Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 2019.
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