Mission Critical Priorities: Campus Ministry Seeks to Add 100 Campuses by 2013

The historic heartbeat of Athletes in Action is the campus ministry, in which students are led to Christ and trained to share their faith, recruited to Global Sports Teams participation or other opportunities and often even recruited to join staff later and multiply the efforts.

So it comes as no surprise that one of AIA’s most faith-stretching goals is to expand the campus ministry to an additional 100 college campuses by July 2013.

“Our ministry statement is ‘trusting God to build spiritual movements in every athletic department that will impact the campus, community and the world for Christ,’” says Scott Mottice, co-interim national campus director. “There are currently about 1,500 athletic departments in the United States, and we have a presence in about 10 percent of them right now. But we believe God is calling us to provide opportunities for all of those departments to have someone who knows Christ.”

The goal will involve tightening the existing partnership between the campus team, global sports teams, pro ministry and the sports complex, using all outlets to identify potential campus leaders, volunteers or those with a heart to join staff and begin a new campus chapter. The groups are already heavily intertwined, Mottice says.

Students may join an AIA team for a summer overseas mission trip, then return to a campus without an AIA presence and desire to begin a study. Coaches who were involved in AIA as student athletes may end up at a school without AIA and decide to lead out in the effort to get a chapter going. Sometimes former college athletes will want to bring AIA to a school near their current home and they apply to become affiliate staff or volunteers to start the ministry. No matter what the scenario, Mottice says, “Those are key to raising up new campuses for the ministry.”

A big part of the goal to add 100 campuses is to make at least 10 of those campuses historically black colleges or universities (HBCUs), dovetailing into the mission priority of diversity.

At least 40 schools have already been identified across AIA’s ten regions, with a few already launching as of August 2011. Those include Kentucky State and Johnson C. Smith University, both HBCUs in the Mid-South Region, and Paine College in the Southeast Region. The rest of the 100 is literally up to God.

“We get random calls all the time from schools we are not currently working, so we don’t want to limit where we expand,” Mottice says. “We want to see where God is moving and join Him there.”

By Teresa Young, AIA Communications

Pray for:

• Athletes on new campuses to begin AIA work
• Courage for athletes taking a stand for Christ
• Funds to launch new campuses
• Open doors on campuses without AIA

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