By Eden Morris I Reporter
Highland Baptist Church‘s Drew Humphrey and Harris Creek Baptist Church‘s Dale Wallace, their respective churches’ college pastors, said they are witnessing a prayer and evangelism movement on Baylor’s campus.
“Baylor students are outpacing previous generations of spiritual movement,” Wallace said.
Humphrey said he believes the evangelism movement started through prayer emphasis.
“What happened here is that there was prayer momentum surrounding primarily the FM72 movement,” Humphrey said. “What happens in those kinds of movements is that they blossom into an outreach movement and evangelism.”
Humphrey said he believes that this evangelism movement is one that will last.
“Those are the kind of evangelism movements that can can actually survive, because it’s not about like one hype weekend or sermon, although those are helpful and we need those,” he said. “It actually comes from a place of prayer that has budded into or blossomed into a love for the lost or an intercession for the lost.”
Wallace said his biggest regret in college at Baylor was not sharing the gospel, and he believes Baylor students today are not going to have that same regret.
“Most of the evangelism momentum is students stepping into leadership roles or mobilizing and doing it,” Humphrey said.
Nicknamed AIM based on Acts 20:24, formerly known as “Evangers,” a group started by Baylor students walks campus spreading the gospel.
Austin junior Thomas Morelli and San Mateo, Calif., junior Abe Yeager are two members of AIM.
Yeager and Morelli said they were encouraged by Kyle Martin, CEO of Time to Revive, in evangelism trainings he led during their freshman year at Baylor and decided to start evangelizing on campus weekly.
“I started to bring people along with me, bring guys I was discipling and ask them to come with and share the gospel with me, and doing it with them and leading them in that and raising them up and then sending them out to do it by themselves,” Yaeger said.
Yeager said he gives the credit for AIM to Morelli. Morelli was a part of a student evangelism team for FM72 that turned into a year-round evangelism movement.
“This did not need to just be an FM72 evangelism thing,” Morelli said. “That’s when we created the evangelist group, [myself] and others, to do outreach together. There’s now around 200 people in the group.”
Thus, AIM was born.
“The most beautiful part I’ve seen the Lord work in is that this evangelism is not something that our parents’ generation would consider as evangelism or something that older pastors would consider as evangelism, in the sense of going out on the street and street preaching and randomly just walking up to people,” Yeager said.
Yeager said AIM’s only agenda is to love people, and the primary way of doing that is listening to them.
“Our goal is not to be converts,” Yeager said. “Our goal is to get people the gospel, have them understand the power of Christ’s gospel that is available to their life, allow them to receive that and create a space where we’re facilitating the gospel in a way that leads to discipleship.”
Yeager said he has seen joy in sharing the gospel and life-giving moments being proclaimed to people who are not yet believers.
“The Lord’s hand of favor is definitely upon the people here,” Yeager said. “It’s definitely upon the students and the ministers in the churches. And I’ve been so blessed at the way that the Lord is using the church in Waco to activate students, to activate his people, to then go and love people. Go and reach the nations, go and make disciples and go and spread the love of Christ in the ways that He has prepared us to do.”
