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Published on: 7/19/2007
Last Visited: 11/20/2007
NATCHITOCHES - The Baptist Collegiate Ministry at Northwestern State University provides students with an avenue for spiritual growth that complements their development during their college years, said Bill Collins, BCM director.
For more than 80 years, the BCM at NSU has been serving NSU students.Collins has been director for more than 18 of those years.
"What we try to do with BCM is provide services to college students that the university cannot legally provide," Collins said.
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One way the BCM tries to reach students for Christ is through a program called The Matrix, Collins continued.
"Students select a class they want to dedicate to God and then commit to pray for the eight students sitting around them," he said."They pray that God will open opportunities to share Christ and minister to those students."
Connecting students to the local churches is also part of the mission of NSU's BCM, Collins said.
"Students will have BCM for four or five years of their life, but they'll have the local church for the rest of their lives," he added."We try to make the programming of local churches more important than ours, and connect students to that programming so that when they leave us they step right into the world of the local church."
For instance, First Natchitoches has a Sunday night college worship service called Freedom Worship, he continued.
"We don't as an organization do worship services because First Natchitoches does a good job," Collins said."We send our students there and then take the time and energy we might have put into a worship service to do outreach ministry."
The BCM strengthens students' faith by providing small groups Bible studies that meet daily or monthly, Collins said.
These are organized primarily by his wife, Phyllis.
"We would not be as strong a BCM as we are without my wife's contribution," Collins said.
The BCM is also involved with missions on both the local and international levels, Collins said.
"We try to involve ourselves with the university community when there are service projects," he added.The BCM also sent four male students to Nepal to hike about 160 miles in elevations up to 12,000 feet, sharing the gospel with natives, while a group of young women worked with missionaries in Tanzania - in fact, former NSU BCM students - sharing Christ with Muslim women in market places.
"What's exciting is to be able to send current students to former students who are now serving on the mission field," Collins said.
This spring during Easter break the BCM is planning seven trips to Central American countries for mission work.
Since last year, the BCM has been meeting in a 60 square foot office in the basement of the Student Union as they await a new building, Collins said.The move-in date is tentatively set for Spring 2008, he added.
"It's been an incredible journey of faith to step out of a building we've been in more than 30 years and to work with the university [on this project]," Collins said.
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