Christian Union (CU), a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing the Christian gospel to university students, has implemented a novel way to reach their hearts and minds with the message. The organization has recently launched CU Rise, a social media campaign targeting students at America’s top universities.
CU’s founder and CEO, Matt Bennett, oversees ten campus chapters of the organization at elite research universities such as Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and Yale, to name a few. He noted that while other college ministries are focused on getting to as many universities as possible, CU has a very specialized focus.
“Our focus is on Christian leadership development at very academically intense universities that are also very secular,” Bennett said.
He explained that approximately two-thirds of the country’s top leaders in business, government, education, and the media come from the nation’s top twenty universities. Hence, CU focuses on these schools as they produce the nation’s leaders.
“These students are leadership-minded, ambitious young people. If we want to change the nation, we need to [target] these people and minister to them,” he said. ”We want to see the students graduating from [these universities] being devout for Christ and knowing how that translates to being good citizens. So many of the world’s most important developments have come about because of devout Christians who saw it as their calling to improve the world, whether it be someone like Isaac Newton or someone like William Wilberforce, who outlawed the slave trade in the United Kingdom. It’s that mindset we’re looking to cultivate.”
To that end, CU has launched the most focused evangelistic campaign in its 20 years of existence. Through its CU Rise outreach initiative, the organization is “mobilizing students to share the gospel more boldly, strategically, and frequently than ever,” states the group’s press release.
The large-scale campaign will use social media platforms to saturate each of the ten universities with Christian messages three to five times per academic year. According to the press release, the gospel will be shared 210,000 times during this spring semester – three times for each of the 70,000 students CU serves.
In addition to the social media outreach, each CU chapter will organize local events “ranging from intellectual engagement lectures to book distributions to small group question-and-answer sessions. The hope is that interested and even uninterested students would be given multiple avenues to engage the gospel and their questions of faith,” states the press release.
Disclaimer: Matt Bennett, founder and CEO of Christian Union, is the brother of Monty Bennett, publisher at The Dallas Express.