Shannon Hughes said it felt purposeful to her that the Baptist Campus Ministries building at Auburn University is located about a block from one of the biggest bars in the Southeastern Conference.
“We feel like God placed us here for a reason,” said Hughes, who serves as Baptist campus minister there. “We started asking, ‘What would it look like if we reached students during the hours they’re at the bars?’”
The start of that answer was to revive an outreach they’d done years ago — making pancakes for students as they leave the bars. On Feb. 16, they started around 11 p.m. and made pancakes until around 3 a.m.
“Pancakes are easy, they’re cheap, and people love pancakes that early in the morning,” Hughes said.
Working together
About 25 students from Auburn’s BCM and the BCM groups at Tuskegee University and Alabama State University worked together to invite students in and serve pancakes. While they did those things, they had conversations with other students about spiritual things for hours overnight into Feb. 17.
Since January 2023, Auburn’s BCM has been partnering with the other two schools’ BCM groups, which are led by campus minister Zach Beasley, to do evangelism training together.
“We were with them in the fall, so we invited them over to join us for this,” Hughes said.
Starting at 9 p.m. on Friday, the students learned about some of the conversations they might encounter during the pancake outreach and how to walk someone through the 3 Circles method of evangelism. They also learned how to shift the conversation to invite someone to follow Christ.
“Some of the students stayed back and as people came in, they would sit at the tables with them and engage them with the gospel,” Hughes said. “A lot of them stayed for 30 minutes even and had conversations.”
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This article was originally published at TheAlabamaBaptist.org.
