By Brian Blackwell, Baptist Message staff writer
BATON ROUGE, La. (LBM) – An evangelistic and ministry strategy aimed at inviting and mobilizing Louisiana Baptist middle and high school students to reach their classmates for Christ is ready to roll out for the upcoming school year.
The Student Missionary evangelism strategy, which will launch in early August, is a guide for a training ground for students to learn how to be intentional about being an evangelist on their campus over the school year.
Sixth to twelfth graders will be commissioned by their church to share the Gospel at their school. Once a student enrolls in the effort, he or she will be matched with a coach who will help the student grow in Christ and receive the tools necessary to share Jesus with their classmates.
Moreover, the student will have at least four prayer partners who will receive a monthly update from the participant.
Steve Masters, coordinator of the program and director of the Louisiana Baptist Collegiate Ministry at LSU, said he hopes many churches will partner with students and help foster a foundation of discipleship that will carry on past high school.
“Many seniors already have checked out of their faith and student ministry involvement by the time they reach the final year of high school,” Masters told the Baptist Message. “The best place to reach students is our schools. If we can walk beside them, we can better help reduce that rate and help them reach their classmates.”
Masters said once the student missionary graduates from high school, he or she then will have a strong evangelistic lifestyle to live out in college, the workplace, armed forces or other areas of life. The student will be encouraged to remain in contact with their mentor and church and participate in mission trips, become involved in a local church and, if in college, contact a BCM director to be paired with an upperclassman to continue being coached.
The groundwork for the effort began in 2001, when a campus missionary strategy and manual were first introduced by the North American Mission Board. Eleven years later, the student ministry team of NAMB, under the leadership of Chad Childress, revised the campus missionary strategy and the manual.
In spring 2023, a team of state convention student ministry strategists and college ministers then took over the ministry strategy and renamed it student missionary and revised the manual for the ministry. The team members included A.J. Ruff (middle school student pastor, Cypress Baptist Church, Benton), Bryant Laird (associate director of student ministry, South Carolina Baptist Convention), Jay Barbier (youth specialist, Tennessee Baptist Mission Board), John Nugent (minister of youth, Temple Baptist Church, Ruston), Lee Myers (student pastor, First Baptist Church, Jonesboro, Arkansas), Mark Robinson (Baptist Collegiate Ministry team director, Louisiana Baptists), Matthew James (associate vice president for enrollment, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary), Sam Swann (team leader, Student Leadership Development and Evangelism, Baptist Convention of New Mexico), Shane Pruitt (national Next Gen director, North American Mission Board), Warren Gassaway (student ministry specialist, Arkansas Baptist State Convention), and Masters.
“This is a similar to a discipleship leadership training program I have used for 30 years on college campuses,” Robinson said. “It was very effective. Students found an opportunity for a deeper level of commitment to their church and other organizations and were ambassadors for the Gospel. This approach has even shaped many students to be full-time ministers.”
TESTIMONIALS
Louisiana Baptist and national student ministerial leaders have endorsed the effort.
“With more and more schools being closed off to youth leaders visiting them, the future of Student Ministry has to be raising up student missionaries to send onto campuses, because the schools can’t keep those students out,” Pruitt said. “The Student Missionary ministry is an incredible tool to help raise up student missionaries for the glory of God.”
”Every healthy youth ministry is doing everything they can to see students come to know Christ and then to step up in their faith to share their faith with friends and family,” said Nathan Iblings, student minister at First Baptist Church, Denham Springs. “Many student ministries struggle with preparing students for evangelism as well as sending students into the real world once they graduate. The ministry provides the structure, intentionality, and accountability to accomplish these goals.
“By involving the larger church, the students feel supported and loved in a way that spurs them on for further evangelism,” he continued. “It also shows the student missionaries what having a life on mission can really look like. This shows the students how they can be disciple makers no matter their situation. Schools, colleges, workplaces, communities and more will all be blessed through the strong disciples and missionaries being formed in the student missionary ministry.”
Richard Ross, senior professor of student ministry at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas, said his prayer is these student missionaries will make a difference in their schools for Christ.
“On a Sunday morning every fall, in a tiny church with only one teenager, I pray that congregation will have damp eyes as they commission that brave student to be a missionary to his or her school campus,” he said. “On a Sunday morning every fall, in a megachurch with hundreds of teenagers, I pray that congregation will have damp eyes as they commission a multitude of students to be missionaries to their multiple school campuses. For the fulfillment of the Great Commission and for lifetime kingdom impact on the young, I greatly desire to see the public commissioning of teenage Student Missionaries to become normative in SBC churches.”
For more information on how to participate in the Student Missionary program, visit studentmissionary.com or contact Masters at 225.964.0830.
