As the academic year begins at the University of Toledo, the school’s students and staff will be the focus of prayer from a disparate group of Christians.
Toledo Campus Prays, a gathering of religious organizations, will take place from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday at University Bible Fellowship, 2841 Dorr St.
Besides the people in the host congregation, attendees will come from Active Christians Today, the Catholic Student Association and Corpus Christi University Parish, Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship, Pregnancy Center on Campus, Toledo Campus Ministry Fellowship, Water for Ishmael, Vineyard Church Perrysburg, and others, said Greg Lewis, a lay pastor with University Bible Fellowship.
“We’re all on the same team together,” Mr. Lewis, 41, said. “We had that effort the last two years; we would meet in my office at school [he is an associate lecturer in mathematics] and just share what’s going on and pray together, so this in some way is an offshoot of that. We got to know people in a more relational way, not just sending emails.”
The relationship building helps the bonding of Christians across campus, but it also gives more exposure to University Bible Fellowship, an international movement begun in South Korea that some say uses strong tactics in developing its religious recruits.
However, in planning Toledo Campus Prays, Mr. Lewis said, “Even in the content of the event it was hard, because the songs that we choose we wanted everyone to know them, and the way that we pray and the things we say in our prayer can also be borderline offensive to maybe some. So we tried to keep it more in a younger emerging generation kind of language, at the same time having Bible verses there that can unite the Christians. Surprisingly, the people that we kept talking to, they already had the vision and idea already in their heart.”
After a brief introduction on Thursday, Mr. Lewis said, there will be “some praise and worship, probably 15, 20 minutes, and then really actually pray together.” Some prayer will be based on readings of Bible verses, with the people giving “more declarative prayer statements,” he said.
“We pray for students, and we want to pray for the faculty, staff, and the administration, and we really want to pray for all the campus ministries and organizations and churches around campus. It’ll just be a prayer event, so we’re going to basically do praise and worship and then pray; praise and worship, pray; praise and worship, pray — and then just fellowship.”
Toledo Campus Prays is based on Merge prayer gatherings of pastors and other leaders in ministry coming together to pray for Toledo, Mr. Lewis said, but this is focused on the university. The University Bible Fellowship is across the street from the main campus.
Russell Kille, 47, another lay pastor at University Bible Fellowship, said there will be “prayer for freshmen, prayer for international students; there’s going to be some person from each ministry, whoever feels kind of led.”
The international students are especially important at University Bible Fellowship. “It started as, really, a student movement,” Mr. Kille said, in 1961, by the Rev. Samuel Lee and Sarah Barry, he a Presbyterian pastor in Korea and she a missionary from Mississippi. Miss Barry went to South Korea in 1955, after the Korean War.
“They really saw a need for student ministry, but for whatever reason, the church wasn’t very responsive to student ministry. So somehow they just kind of started praying for students and started studying Bible with them and teaching English,” using the Bible as the text for translation, Mr. Kille said.
In 91 nations, the University Bible Fellowship is an evangelical nondenominational religious entity that’s not quite a church, but it has all the characteristics of one, Mr. Kille said.
“We’ve struggled with our identity because we always called ourselves a student ministry, and our focus has always been campus mission throughout the world,” Mr. Kille said.
There is a practice of person-to-person Bible study and disciple development, and when University Bible Fellowship began in South Korea, the leaders encouraged the students to go to existing churches — but the students wanted their own services.
The Toledo fellowship began in 1975. Mr. Kille said it was started by “five women missionaries [from South Korea] who were nurses. They … were driving from New York to Chicago [where the fellowship headquarters in located] when their car broke down here in Toledo, and they met one student.
“Somehow they thought that was God’s will, and so they ended up staying in Toledo,” he said.
The Toledo group started meeting in houses — there is also a house-church fellowship connected to Owens Community College — and later acquired the property on Dorr Street, taking over a building that had been used for the glass industry and other purposes, Mr. Lewis said.
“The year that I came [as a first-year student in the late 1980s], they were just getting this facility, and this was an old crack house and laundromat and restaurant at one time,” Mr. Kille said, “and we’ve done a lot to change this facility over the years.”
“I came late,” Mr. Lewis said. “He came as a college student; I came because my brother had come. … I came more to see what my brother was doing, and he had changed so much by being part of this church. I was kind of a Grateful Dead, hippy kind of guy. … Gradually through his prayer and just living with him and studying the Bible with some leaders here, I kind of renewed my faith in Jesus that I had when I was in elementary school.”
The regular meetings at Toledo’s University Bible Fellowship are Sundays with a children’s service at 10:30 a.m., continuing when the adults start at 11. There are group Bible studies at 7 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays. And the student ministry, called the Well, meets Tuesdays in Mr. Lewis’ office, University Hall Room 4320, with a women’s meeting at 12:30 p.m. and one for all students at 5 p.m.
Originally closely student-oriented, University Bible Fellowship has grown into a wider age range, including in Toledo, as the fellowship members have aged and become families. Toledo’s fellowship has members with Korean roots, some of whom are U.S. citizens and others South Korean nationals, and they worship alongside other international and American followers of the Bible.
“That’s one of the unique things people usually observe,” Mr. Lewis said. “It’s not a typically segregated church.”
Contact TK Barger at tkbarger@theblade.com, 419-724-6278 or on Twitter @TK_Barger.
First Published August 27, 2016, 4:00 a.m.