OneDay03 Impacts Collegiate Generation

by Julie Saffrin

This article appeared in Everything Christian.org

Over 50,000 college students from all over the world are expected to attend the Passion-sponsored OneDay03 worship gathering over Memorial Day weekend, May 24-27th on a private 400-acre ranch in Sherman, Texas. “We hope it will be the biggest gathering of students ever,” said Passion’s founder, Louie Giglio. The four-day event is designed to allow students commuting from across the country time to set up their tents, rest, fellowship and pray before the main event on May 26th, involving well-known worship leaders, bands and speakers. “Our desire is to see God’s name magnified in this generation. That simple heartbeat fuels the vision for OneDay03,” Giglio said.

Giglio’s ministry among the collegiate crowd began in 1985, where for ten years he worked in ministry at Baylor University in Texas. In the spring of 1995, he and his wife, Shelly, felt a call to move back to Atlanta to help care for his dying father. He left Baylor and just before they made the move, Giglio’s father passed away. When they arrived in Atlanta, God put a vision in his heart, of a mass of students, from all denominations, on their knees and faces, in real worship. “I loved Baylor and the students,” said Giglio, “but I felt the Lord say it was time to lift my focus from that campus to the campuses of the nation.” Shortly afterwards Giglio learned an astonishing statistic from a freshman survey. Of the quarter of a million students asked, “Do you consider yourself born again?” seventy-five percent of the students answered that they did not. With 13-16 million college students in the country, that percentage extrapolated translated to ten million students who claimed no personal relationship with God.

Giglio’s solution to this disturbing news was “not another new formula, not a new catchy idea, not a new slogan” to reach post-modern minds with the message of Jesus. Rather, Giglio stated, citing Joel 2, the answer laid in something old: Return to me with all your heart, fasting and weeping and mourning. Rend your hearts, not your garments. “That’s the crux for the devastation in the land. That’s God’s answer,” Giglio said. “OneDay is that. It’s calling a generation together not for a festival, not to hear bands play, not for people or personalities. But it’s calling people together to say, ‘Let’s put our faces to the ground, let’s return to Him with all our hearts and see what He does.”

Giglio believes reaching the college age is crucial. “If you spend twenty minutes on a college campus these days, you know how desperate students are and how lost they feel. College students are at the crossroads. They’re going to graduate and start leading this nation. They’re the future and the future with them is now.”

In 1995, Giglio formed Passion Conferences, running the first gathering in 1997, the intent to bring Christian college and university students together. Two thousand students attended. A subsequent gathering was held in 1998, culminating with 11,500 students from six continents filling Fort Worth Convention Center for four days of passion and renewal in 1999, who were spurred on in their faith and worship by Bill Bright, Beth Moore, John Piper, Chris Tomlin, the Dave Crowder Band, and Kristy Nockles of Watermark.

The Passion team wanted to host a gathering for students ages 18-25 to answer God’s call on their lives. Giglio formed a Campus Tour Band, which toured 128 colleges in nine months, to promote the event. In May of 2000 over 40,000 students came for the first OneDay gathering, held on Shelby Farms in Tennessee. Giglio attributes its success to two things. “We’re back to the Sixties again. If you drive on a college campus now you’ll see a lot of visibility for the peace movement. We’ve gone through the Eighties and materialism and the Nineties’ disillusionment. Kids are causal now and OneDay and Passion are rooted in a cause. That cause is spreading the fame of God to every person on this planet. It asks them to give their lives for the glory of His name.”

Giglio also believes students drove thousands of miles to OneDay because they sensed Passion’s objectives was not to form an organization but that Passion is a movement. “We’re just trying to serve them and encourage them. We want to be fluid and keep seeking the Lord, “Giglio said. “That’s why we didn’t know if there would be another OneDay. We did not want to build this into an enterprise. Kids don’t want any part of an enterprise. They want to be part of a movement and with Passion, they sense that our hearts are genuine and our motives are pure.”

The results have been amazing, with students leaving their Christian campuses and enrolling in secular campuses to bring others to Christ. A young woman who served in a OneDay prayer tent has become a missionary to China. Several other students have committed to spreading the fame of God in Turkey.

Many pastors have told Giglio that the transient, collegiate crowd is not worth investing in. “I think completely opposite of that,” Giglio said. “College students will take whatever you invest in them and deposit it in the whole world for free.” At his church in North Point Community Church in Atlanta, over 3,000 single adults attend Giglio’s weekly bible study. “If I want my church to impact the whole world, then I have to invest in these college students because in two years they’re going somewhere else with whatever I have invested in them.”

Giglio believes college ministry is not hard to do, it just takes a concerted effort. “Whenever the Word of God is just laid out there and put on a kid level, especially if they’re given an opportunity to connect musically with God in a style that’s relevant to them, college ministry is going to flourish. Kids just need to see that a church is willing to go into a campus and say, “I’m here for the long haul.”

For more information about the Passion Movement or to sign up to attend OneDay03, please visit their website at www.oneday03.com.

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