Tyler, a freshman at Queens College in New York, expected college to be his fresh start, a way to escape his hometown, and a place to find himself.
Most students enter college with this same mindset, with a burning desire to discover who they are and what their life should look like. When you support InterVarsity, you help students like Tyler find the deeper life in Jesus they’re truly longing for.
Since hearing about Jesus, Darren continuously struggled with his faith. That was until Jesus spoke to him clearly and gave him purpose at the Urbana 22 Student Missions Conference.
To celebrate Black History Month, we’re featuring God’s work through InterVarsity’s Black Campus Ministries (BCM) in Alabama. As a student herself, all Summer wanted was a deeper relationship with Jesus. Now as a campus minister, she gets to witness Jesus drawing students closer to himself. Read more of her story below.
Silbano uses his story and experiences to reach often overlooked corners of campus, including formerly incarcerated students.
Brandon met Jesus for the first time as a freshman at MIT.
Zelma had some joyful and some traumatic childhood moments. She was baptized as a kid, but turned away from God as she grew up. When she attended College of the Muscogee Nation, she struggled with nightmares, sleeping, and drinking. But eventually, she accepted Jesus transferred schools, and stumbled upon the InterVarsity chapter, making friends, reading Scripture, praying, and having her many questions answered. By the next year, she was leading a Bible study.
I came into college with burning questions: Was the gospel really true, or was being Christian just a cultural expectation I had from where I grew up? Could following Jesus actually be good for me? Maybe moving to Boston was a chance to start over with new people and finally get some answers.
Andrew McDowell, an InterVarsity alumnus of Occidental College, experienced Jesus through InterVarsity in a way that shaped the rest of his life. Today, he runs With Love, a nonprofit centered around a social enterprise market and cafe, that helps fund community programs around health, child development, and career skills for those in southwest Los Angeles.
Before Andrew McDowell founded With Love Community Programs, he was a college student trying to figure out his purpose.
“I came into college wide-eyed, not knowing what I wanted to do,” he said.
When she was a student at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, God used InterVarsity to give Emma a deep love for the Bible, build friendships, and spark her calling into ministry. But after she graduated, Emma’s former InterVarsity chapter dwindled and eventually closed. Then, one day, Emma got a phone call out of the blue.
"The Mark Drama" was one of the most powerful demonstrations of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection that I’d ever witnessed.