In just under a month students will be flooding back to our universities and colleges across Arkansas as they begin a new semester or start their college journey. Baptist Collegiate Ministry (BCM) leaders across our state have worked over the summer to ensure that many of these students, especially our freshmen, have received an individual contact from us as directors, or from one of our student leaders. Why is it so important for us to make these contacts with these freshmen?
Contacting freshman students is a crucial part of the success of our ministries each year. Sure, we will be meeting freshmen at orientation and our schools’ welcome events but making contact and forming a relationship with these students will help us to be on their radar even before stepping foot on our campuses. The more freshmen we contact, the more freshmen will be involved in some facet of our ministry throughout the year.
For us at Weevil BCM, it is more about the student that it is even about building our ministry footprint. We place great significance on the first four weeks of the fall semester each year. We label this time as “First Four.” We will host more events during these four weeks than most of the rest of the year. In the fall of 2021, we hosted fifteen “First Four” events that reached over 600 students on our campus. During these events we get a chance to gather contact information on these students with hopes of setting up Gospel appointments with them and for our leaders to get a chance to meet and begin to build relationships with them.
These first four weeks are incredibly important in the life of these students and our ministry. Decisions that these students will make during these first four weeks will determine, in great part, the next four years of their lives, and possibly their eternity.
We have proven methods that we use to gather incoming freshmen’s contact information each year. One of the best ways that we do this is to receive their information from their home church. You can share the website, https://www.absc.org/freshmen/, with your student or go to the site and input their information. Please never hesitate to reach out to us personally to share information about any of your graduates so we can do our best to make contact with them leading up to their freshman year!