Claim Your Campus
Big things are happening across the country as today’s youth are taking the gospel to their schools and friends, fueling new connections to Christ and his church.
Claim Your Campus, led by Olivia Williamson, is a national prayer movement that exists to call, train and sustain a movement of 1 million students praying in every middle and high school across America. Students join by downloading the app, inviting two or more friends to pray with them, and then they show up weekly to pray in their school for change—in their school, in their nation, and in their generation, all using daily prayer guides based in Scripture.
Claim Your Campus prayer groups are happening in at least 43 states today.
Williamson believes prayer is the start of personal and corporate revival.
“We must point students to the One who can turn things around, and who will sustain them for the rest of their lives,” she says.
HowToLife Movement
In 2015, Jordan Whitmer, at the time a 17-year-old junior in high school, mobilized his friends to put on a completely youth-led event designed to reach his generation for Christ. Only members of Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) took the stage for an evening marked by worship, dramas, shared testimonies and a clear presentation of the gospel. Some 750 young people attended and 75 made commitments to Christ.
That was the beginning of the HowToLife Movement, which is designed to disciple and mobilize Gen Z to reach their peers for Christ. Today, well over 100 events later across the United States and around the world, HowToLife mobilizes some of the sharpest Gen Z leaders and influencers by hosting youth-led outreach events, leadership retreats, online conferences and digital media content.
“The secret sauce is to significantly empower young people to take the lead,” Whitmer says. “I believe the key to reaching today’s rising generation is if they are turned loose as youth reaching youth, teens reaching teens, and Gen Z reaching Gen Z.”
Church partnerships, from prayer to finances to encouragement to sharing of platforms, are essential for these movements to thrive.
“God is raising up youth-evangelism movements for such a time as this,” observes Whitmer. “We need innovative, unique and missional ideas for the future of America, for the future of Gen Z, and also for the future of the church.”