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Redeemer Church recognizes the strategic impact of reaching college students. Church leaders know those young Christ-followers will plant churches, raise families, and strengthen congregations for generations to come.
“You’re affecting whole trajectories of future children and spouses,” said Dusty Thompson, Redeemer’s lead pastor. “It’s just so strategic for the kingdom of God to reach a college student today.”
Redeemer began in 2008 with a goal of leading college students to Jesus. Thompson estimates there has never been a time in the church’s history when less than 40% of the church has been college students. Last year, Redeemer baptized a record 60 people in that demographic.
“We try to tell our college students that we’d love to see them do one of three things,” Thompson said: be an “all-in” church member wherever they go, participate in a Redeemer church plant, or be an international missionary. “We’d love everybody to fit into one of those three buckets by the time they leave us.”
For the past five years, Redeemer—with about 2,200 in attendance on Sundays—has focused on planting churches in college towns, including Doxa Church in Tucson, Ariz., with more than 500 in attendance. In about a year, they plan to launch Sowers Church in Norman, Okla. The University of Oklahoma has more than 30,000 undergraduates in Norman, and the church planting team estimates only about 1,200 of them are involved in any church or campus ministry, Thompson said.
“You can’t just care about the campus. You have to care about the city that you live in, and that means you can’t just ignore adults.”
“That would be even more pressing at a school like the University of Texas,” he said. “You’ve just got incredible need on these campuses.”
To reach students in Austin, Redeemer sent a couple of its church planting residents and about 25 people as a core group to start New City Church, and in September one of Redeemer’s own, Mitchell Johnson, will launch The Way with a focus on young adults downtown.
Johnson accepted Jesus as a student at Texas Tech and got heavily involved in the college ministry at Redeemer, even serving as its director before leaving to work with another church in Austin.
“A Barna study found young adults are spiritually open but not religious,” Johnson said. “People are open to different forms of spirituality and spiritual experiences, but they are less likely to set foot in a church on Sunday. That’s why the mission of our church is that we’re sent to the heart of Austin to help every person find their way back to God.”
The Way is a hybrid plant of Redeemer, Send Network, and The Salt Company, Thompson said. Downtown Austin has a high percentage of young adults and college students drawn by the university and by large companies such as Google, Meta, and Deloitte.
Johnson and his core team recently started two prayer rooms, one on the UT campus and one at the top of a high-rise workplace. Their hope is that they can meet people where they are and offer an opportunity to “experience what it would mean to pray to God.”
Prayer rooms are useful evangelistic tools, Johnson said, given the spiritual openness among this generation. He feels particularly supported by Redeemer’s impact on his ministry.
“They believed in me even before I could believe in myself,” Johnson said. “Dusty is the type of pastor who sees the giftings in people and will call them out quickly, not for his benefit or any selfish gain, but for the kingdom.”
Focusing on college ministry can be a challenge, Thompson noted. Students and other young adults of that age often are not naturally inclined or able to financially participate in the ministry of the church. That challenge, however, provides an opportunity for discipleship.
“You just have to prioritize it like anything else,” he said, adding that the church is intentional about discipling people on generosity. “Our college students are learning to be generous with their funds, too.”
For a college ministry to be sustainable, a church must have committed adults who will give and serve faithfully. “You can’t just care about the campus,” Thompson said. “You have to care about the city that you live in, and that means you can’t just ignore adults.”
Redeemer has an advantage now of being “an established player” when a Christian student starts at Texas Tech. “We’re going to be one of two or three churches they’re going to hear about, just word of mouth,” he said. “We’re well-known. We weren’t well-known at the beginning.”
With a goal of continuously multiplying, Redeemer’s 12-year-old church planting residency has trained more than 10 men. The church guides in solid theology for the first year, and the second year moves to more practical application.
“The Redeemer Network has over 30 churches that have planted or replanted,” Thompson said. “Those are just multiplying churches from churches we planted that have now planted and replanted other ones.”
