Campus Aflame

Changing American society through college awakenings.

A ministry of Collegians for Christ, Campus Aflames’ sole purpose is to bring about change in American society through prompting college awakenings. We believe a revival can be sparked on campuses nationwide through the faithful and dedicated formation of small student prayer groups on campuses. If one college campus could get on fire for the Lord, ramifications would soon spread to local churches and communities. Campus Aflame believes the only way to see this impactful change is by students gathering together in prayer. Matthew 18:19-20 states: “Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”


Campus Aflame works to bring students together for prayer on college campuses. We try to get young people passionate about the issues facing our country today, and strive to provide students with a desire to initiate positive and lasting change. Campus Aflame wants to see a religious awakening sweep across colleges nationwide, and for it to produce revival in the hearts and lives of people everywhere. Thus, our focus is bringing all this about through the formation of college campus prayer groups. Because the answer to bringing hope to America does not lie in the perception of politics, or the potential of programs, or even the prowess of people, but in the power of prayer.

Change the university, and you change the world.

The idea for reviving student based campus prayer groups stemmed from the action taken by a few students on Appalachian’s campus in the Fall semester of 2015. A handful of concerned students came together and formed a small prayer group off campus desiring to bring change to a troubled campus (Appalachian experienced 9 student deaths that year). Therefore, as a result of diligence, dedication, and a faithfulness in God’s timing, this weekly prayer group has since moved on campus, seen souls saved, and the campus strongly impacted through their efforts.


We can bring revival to America and restore her strength, and that is the aim of Campus Aflame. History reveals that nearly every major awakening or missionary movement since the 1500’s can trace its roots to a college campus. A close look into what caused these awakenings and movements is always found in the formation of a small prayer group. Prayer is asking God to do what we ourselves cannot do. We cannot bring revival or a change in America, but God can through the prayer of His people!!

At my core is a burden for America.

Hi, my name is Ethan Green, and I have been given the wonderful opportunity to be a part of Campus Aflame, a ministry which seeks to establish prayer groups on college campuses. I am a graduate of Appalachian State University, receiving my Bachelors in Political Science in 2016. I specialized in American Politics and received a Minor in Criminal Justice as well. While attending App State I began going to a Bible study called Collegians for Christ. Here, I served as Vice President, and watched as the Lord used this to grow my faith, and introduce me to new people and friends.


However, my love of politics, and involvement with a campus Bible study, is just an effect of something that goes much deeper. At my core is a burden for the United States of America, a passion for hope to be restored, and a heart that cries out for our land to be healed and made whole again. We all know II Chronicles 7:14, it has been recited so much by leaders, and made reference to so many times by organizations and churches, that it has almost become cliché. But how many of us actually believe it, or sincerely put forth the effort to see its ramifications? The core theme of that verse is conversation and communion with God, which is through prayer and repentance. Thus, this is the key basis for which Campus Aflame exists.

Prayer is asking God to do what we ourselves cannot do.

There are a few ways to get involved:


1. Establish a weekly prayer group on your campus.


It is important that a student or students, wishing to start a prayer group on their college campus understand that a day, a time, and a location need to be set for this new group being formed. There are many areas on a campus that can be used freely that would work great for a prayer meeting. A library will typically have study rooms that could be used, open rooms in student union buildings, or common areas in buildings and dorms would work great.

Establish a leader for this prayer group. It may work out well that the student wishing to start-up the group be the best one suited for this task, although it doesn’t necessarily matter. This person would be positioned to lead the group in areas such as notifications of details like cancellations, changes in meeting times, actual prayer meetings, etc.

It is crucial that interested students spread the word about the desire to start a prayer group on their college campus or about the newly formed prayer group. You will need to spread the word to help recruit other students, inform friends, and seek the guidance, help, participation, and most of all prayer, by other fellow Christians. Word of mouth, hand-out cards, posters, and social media area  a few ideas to get the word out.

It is a good idea to relay to the interested students that this is something that is specific to their campus and college students. Pray specifically for the needs of the campus, students, faculty, and for revival to come to your campus

Meet faithfully no matter who or how many show up each week. History shows that just a few faithful Christians seeking God in prayer have impacted the history of the world time and time again.

If you have a desire to start a prayer group on your campus but are just not sure how to begin please feel free to contact us. We will be more that glad to help you wth it.

2. Commit to pray for your campus weekly.


We employ pastors, church members, and fellow Christians to begin praying for your local college campus and about getting a prayer group started on that campus. We are asking Christians to pray at the specific time of 7:15 (7:15am or 7:15pm) each day to pray for your campus. We are asking churches to pick a service to pray for their local campus each week. Will you please to let us know what school you are praying for.

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A timeline of revivals

Revivals of 2016


Revivals have been reported occurring in multiple places around North Carolina. A revival broke out in Burlington in June 2016 that saw more than 5,000 people attending in one night. More than 700 people gave their life to Christ from young to old. The start of this can be traced to the host church meeting faithfully on Monday nights for prayer for ten years. Other Revivals have occurred in Yadkinville and Plumtree.


College Revivals of 1995


This year of revival found God’s footprint on approximately forty schools. Its roots are traced to a student at Howard Payne University at Coggin Avenue Baptist Church. During the service he felt compelled to meditate on Joel 2:12-13. After intense self-examination he felt led to share his testimony from the pulpit. An hour and a half later no less than twenty-two people had either found the Savior or embraced a call to ministry. This moving of God quickly spread to Howard Payne University and to other schools. (38) 


1970 Asbury College


What began as a routine morning chapel service on February 3 that year, continued uninterruptedly for 185 hours! (37)


1950’s University of California at Los Angeles


A Campus Christian Crusade, led by William Bright, had 150 professions of faith in Christ. The birth of Campus Crusade for Christ, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, and Navigators were born during this time of the 1950’s. New York times reported in October of 1955 that more than 1,200 of the nations 1,900 colleges and universities now have a “religious emphasis week of some sort” with interest doubling fro previous years. (36)


1950’s College Revivals


The collegiate awakenings of the 1950’s found their beginning in a small office in Minneapolis, late at night in April 1949, where four men found themselves compelled to pray for revival. Included Wheaton college, Asbury college in Kentucky, and Bethel College in Minnesota. (35)


1936 & 1943 Wheaton College

1930 Eastern Nazarene College


No classes were held for days as classrooms were turned into prayer rooms, at meal-time the dining room was often nearly empty as the students prayed and fasted. (34)


1906 Trinity College & University of Michigan


The “revival of very great power” which swept Trinity College in durham North Carolina left no more than twenty-five unconverted students at the entire school, while at the University of Michigan two-thirds of the male students-2,400 men no less- came to University Hall to hear the proclamation of the gospel. (33)


1905 Randolph-Macon, Henry College, and fork Union Acedemy

1905 University of Florida


An astonishing ninety percent of the students at the university of Florida were drawn to an evangelistic meeting during the Spring semester of 1905. Every campus fraternity organized Bible study meetings for their respective members. (32)


1904-1905 Welsh Revival

1858 Amherst

1858-1859 Prayer Meeting Revival


The Prayer Meeting Revival spread across the country. The 1858 revival has been traced to a prayer meeting that began in Manhattan in September of 1857.(18) Jeremiah Calvin Lanphier was an unknown name who was instrumental in beginning a prayer meeting that was the catalyst for the 1858 revival. He had a burden to reach the surrounding community of lower New York. He decided to enlist the prayers of others through a weekly noonday prayer meeting. A promotional leaflet was distributed widely. On September 23, 1857, Jeremiah met and prayed along until about 12:30pm at which about a half dozen others joined him. Next week twenty came. Within six months it was estimated that ten thousand business men throughout New York City were gathering for daily noonday prayer! Other cities in the United States such as, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati saw similar prayer meetings come into existence. It was referred to by a visitor at a Boston gathering as two thousand miles of prayer.(19) Again we see the close connection with prayer meetings and revival. The result of these meetings would be numerous revivals that reached and impacted towns and college campuses. 1858 Revivals at Yale, Amherst, Brown College, And Williams College “The revival in Yale College is probably without precedent, as far as numbers are concerned.” In fact, the scope of the mid-century awakening at Yale “is said to include nearly all the students; among the converts are some who have been very bitter scoffers, and who were tolerably well aroused with the philosophy of the infidel” At Amherst “a wonderful revival of religion that rested upon the campus like a cloud until the “entire collegiate community was brought under its influence.” Brown College saw “some of the most reckless and indifferent students” who embrace personal faith in Christ. At Williams College There are very few who are not interested in the subject of their soul’s salvation. (20)


1858 Revivals at Genesse College, Princeton, and Davidson College


240 students joined local churches as a result of the revival at Genesse. Princeton saw over one hundred converts fifty of who went into vocational ministry. Davidson saw eighty of the one hundred seniors become believers. (21) Students instituted a weekly prayer meeting that continued for eighteen months! (22)


1858 Revivals in North Carolina and Virginia


The university of North Carolina and Wake forest both felt a revival sweep across campus. The University of Virginia felt a revival a Christian zeal which resulted in a society there maintaining numerous prayer meetings. (23)


1858 University of Michigan


Observers on campus reported that there was a deep and solemn thoughtfulness among the students. The president gave lectures that the Holy Spirit used to banish the remains of skepticism. The Gospel replaced the broad, rational and natural foundation of thinking with the young men. (24)


1858 Revival Swept Across Other Campuses


including Wofford College, Emory University, Madison College, Baylor University, University of Michigan, Denison, Miami University, Kenyon college, Wilberforce university, and Ohio Wesleyan.(25) 1858 revival saw the YMCA expand its efforts into the college community. By 1884 the American YMCA had increased to over 180 college associations by 1884. These groups were born during a season of revival and were generally staffed by student leadership dedicated to evangelism as well as discipling new believers. (26)


1853 Williams College 

1852 Randolph-Macon College 

1851 Williams College 

1845-1855 Mid century 


Decline Between 1845-1855, there were several years in which the number of church accessions scarcely kept pace with severe losses. (17)


1841 New Haven College 

1839 Wesleyan College

1839 Mercer University


Mercer shut down classes and academic pursuits for several days when revival burst forth in 1839. (16)


1839 Cave Springs School


Students at Cave Springs bypassed exams for an entire week so that they might attend “exclusively to the soul’s interest”. (15)


1834 Randolph-Macon College


Nearly all the young men were affected by the awakening. (14)


1834 Wake Forest


Prior to the 1834 awakening at Wake Forest Institute, North Carolina, only a quarter of the student body professed personal faith in Christ. After the flames of the revival fires had softened to a warm glow, fully seventy-five percent of the student body were professing Christians, with half of those remaining “concerned about salvation”. (13)


1831 Yale


This revival is especially note worthy as it was said to be the most far-reaching in the history of Yale, in which there were seventy-four conversions on campus and nine hundred in the surrounding community of New Haven. (12)


1825 Bowdoin College 

1815 Princeton


Prior to this awakening in the winter of 1815, scarcely a dozen of the more than one hundred students on campus professed personal faith in Jesus Christ. The impact of the revival was recorded in the following description by one who was an eyewitness. there were, he wrote, “some seventy or eighty young men under the influence of deep religious feeling, about forty-five whom were rejoicing in Christ. According to the records, as many as thirty of those converted followed the lead of their brothers at Yale and embraced a call to vocational ministry. The revival came without any unusual occurrence in providence, without any alarming event, without any extraordinary preaching, without special instruction, or rather means that might be supposed peculiarly adapted to interest the mind. The divine influences seemed to descend liek the silent dew of heaven; and in about four weeks, there were very few individuals in the College edifice who were not deeply impressed with a sense of the importance of spiritual and eternal things. There was scarcely a room-perhaps not one-which was not a place of earnest devotion. (11)


1815 New Haven College 

1808 Yale


Had another visitation that saw no less than thirty converts. (10)


1802 Yale


A spiritual revival occurred that “shook the institution to its center” Out of the 230 students then in college, about one-third were powerfully converted with nearly half the new believers ultimately responding positively to a call to vocational ministry. And all this occurred in a period of less than six months. (9)


1787 Hampden-Sydney


The first of the series of college awakenings occurred as early as 1787. Hampden Sydney college in Virginia, a few students, none of them an active Christian but all of them concerned about the moral state of the college, met for prayer. They locked themselves in a room, for fear of other students. One of them said: ‘We tried to pray, but such prayer I never heard the like of.’ He added: ‘We tried to sing, but it was in the most suppressed manner, for we feared the other students.‘ // The ungodly students created a disturbance, and their President came to investigate. He rebuked the rowdies and invited the intercessors to his study for continued prayer. this continued in power, until an awakening was felt at last. within a short space of time, more than half the number of students professed conversion in a movement which stirred the local churches also. (7)


At Hampden Sydney College there was also a revival. The episode noted earlier in this chapter that illustrated the degenerate spiritual life at this college was, in fact, the very incident used by the Holy Spirit to spark the fires of revival at this eastern institution. Three students exercising their faith in the privacy of their dorm room were surrounded by agnostic peers who demanded they cease their personal acts of devotion. the disturbance grew so severe that the president, Dr. John Blair Smith, was called to investigate. when he realized that the charges against the young men were the “sins” of private worship and prayer, he replied with tears: “Oh, is there such a state of things in this college? Then God has come near to us. My dear young friends, you shall be protected. You shall hold your next prayer meeting in my parlour, and I will be one of your number.” Amazingly, half the college was at that meeting and what one nineteenth-century writer termed a “glorious revival” swept not only the college, but the surrounding countryside as well. (8)


Important Movements


Haystack Prayer Meeting – In 1806, while meeting for prayer, a thunderstorm caused 5 men to seek shelter near a haystack where they continued their meeting, asking God to send missionaries from their school to Asia; this prayer meeting took place on the campus of Williams College and was led by Samuel J. Mills. (27)


The Great Awakening – a religious awakening that took place in America during the 1730s and 1740s; led by men such as George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards; focused on inward changes of the heart, rather than the outward changes that had been so heavily stressed in the past; helped shape Christianity in America today. (28)


The Second Great Awakening – began in the 1790’s, and continued until about the 1820’s / 1840’s; The Second Great Awakening exercised a profound impact on American history. The numerical strength of the Baptists and Methodists rose relative to that of the denominations dominant in the colonial period – Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists. The growing differences within American Protestantism reflected the growth and diversity of an expanding nation. Furthermore, it provided for the present day camp meetings. (29)


Influential People


Samuel J. Mills - a member of the Haystack Prayer Meeting at Williams College; instrumental in founding the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions which was the first mission sending organization in the U.S.; helped create the American Bible Society. (30)


Timothy Dwight – grandson of Johnathan Edwards; assumed the position of President at Yale college in 1795; Upon taking the position, only 10% of the student body professed faith in Jesus Christ. However, after allowing students to mount a case against the Bible, he began to preach a weekly sermon for six months tearing down their case. These series of messages tore down the infidelity at Yale and within a year caused a number of students to found the “Moral Society of Yale”. Dwight’s messages and duties as President helped lead to the formation of prayer groups on campus, and full scale revival in 1802. (31)


Picture of College Campuses before Revivals of 1800


Yes, colleges and universities were founded upon Jesus Christ and were mostly church related in the 1700‘s-1800‘s. We would expect that these schools would consist of Christian students with the upmost character and morals, right? This would all depend and vary based upon the the school, the faculty, the staff, and the student leaders.


Yale at early 1800’s the college church was almost extinct (1) S.E. Morrison describes the typical student at Harvard at the the close of the 18th century as “an atheist in religion, and experimentalists in morals, and a rebel to authority.” (2)


Fred W. Hoffman refers to schools in the 1800’s – “the colleges of the land were seedbeds of infidelity. The teachings of deism with its rejection of Christianity were almost universally adopted.” (3)


Dartmouth College - only one member of the class of 1799 was known by his peers as a professing Christian. (4)


Joel Parker, pastor at West Hertford, Connecticut gives his view of this time “It seemed as if God had almost entirely withdrawn His gracious influences. We were left to mourn an absent God, barren ordinances, unsuccessful gospel and cold hearts.” (5)


Princeton prior to 1815 scarcely a dozen of 100 students professed personal faith in Jesus Christ. (6)


1 Michael E. Gleason, When God Walked on Campus (Dundas. Ontario, Canada: Joshua Press, 2002), 25


2 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 26


3 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 28


4 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 28


5 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 28


6 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 30


7 J. Edwinn Orr, Campus Aflame (Glendale, California: Regal Books 1971), 25


8 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 31


9 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 29


10 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 29


11 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 30


12 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 29


13 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 31


14 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 31-32


15 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 33


16 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 32


17 Orr, Campus Aflame, 49


18 Orr, Campus Aflame, 53


19 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 53


20 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 54


21 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 55


22 Orr, Campus Aflame, 61


23 Orr, Campus Aflame, 63


24 Orr, Campus Aflame, 64


25 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 55


26 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 55


27 www.thetravelingteam.org/articles/samuel-j-mills-jr & www.mwerickson.com/2007/07/29/students-who-changed-the-world-samuel-j-mills/ & www.internationalbulletin.org/issues/2014-04/2014-04-207-raymond.html


28 www.ushistory.org/us/7b.asp & www.great-awakening.com/the-great-awakening-2/basic-concepts-of-the-first-great-awakening/


29 www.ushistory.org/us/22c.asp & www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/4551


30 www.thetravelingteam.org/articles/samuel-j-mills-jr & www.bpnews.net/24037/firstperson-remembering-the-haystack-prayer-meeting


31 www.vancechristie.com/2015/03/12/revival-at-yale-timothy-dwight/


32 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 78-79


33 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 78


34 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 81


35 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 100


36 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 102


37 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 104


37 Gleason, When God Walked on Campus, 104-105

Ethan Green

828-606-3800

ethangreen777@yahoo.com


or


Kyle Austin

828-832-6505

austin@cfccampusministry.com

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