Lo­cal Min­istry Or­ga­nizes Fun, Up­lift­ing Events for Stu­dents

MISHAWAKA—Every Tues­day, at 5 p.m., in Room 221 of the Miller-Moore Aca­d­e­mic Cen­ter, a group of stu­dents meets for a Bible study or­ga­nized by Tom Ney­hart.

Ney­hart is the lead cam­pus min­is­ter for Im­pact Cam­pus Min­istries’ team in South Bend. 

“Our vi­sion is: im­pact the U, im­pact the world,” said Ney­hart. 

Ney­hart went on to ex­plain that the “U” stands for “Uni­ver­sity”; the min­istry is de­signed to im­pact col­lege stu­dents. There are cur­rently nine teams serv­ing in eight dif­fer­ent states across Amer­ica, from Wash­ing­ton to  Florida.

Some teams con­nect with more than one cam­pus; the South Bend team min­is­ters to Bethel Col­lege, the Uni­ver­sity of Notre Dame, In­di­ana Uni­ver­sity South Bend, Saint Mary’s Col­lege and Holy Cross Col­lege. 

Events of­ten in­volve stu­dents from mul­ti­ple cam­puses, in­clud­ing the monthly game nights at the home of one of the cou­ples who helps run the min­istry. Joey Cuevas, a fresh­man psy­chol­ogy ma­jor here at Bethel, loves the fam­ily at­mos­phere.

“We just have game night, and there’s a whole bunch of food and some­times there’s movies,” said Cuevas. “I just re­ally feel com­fort­able and at home with them... it’s just like home away from home.”

The cur­rent com­mu­ni­ca­tions co­or­di­na­tor for Im­pact Cam­pus Min­istries is Sarah John­son, who grad­u­ated from Bethel with a de­gree in church mu­sic and mu­sic ed­u­ca­tion in 2004 and worked with the South Bend team from 2009 to 2013, when she was moved to Cal­i­for­nia to plant a new min­istry.

“One of the cool things is our de­f­i­n­i­tion of suc­cess,” said John­son. “We be­lieve that suc­cess is de­vel­op­ing... a re­la­tion­ship with Je­sus Christ, and so our de­sire is to pur­sue, model and teach Christ on Amer­i­can col­lege cam­puses... every­thing kind of stems out of that de­sire. We are pur­su­ing God.”

John­son added that the or­ga­ni­za­tion is cur­rently hir­ing. 

“Stu­dents who are in­ter­ested in do­ing min­istry or would be in­ter­ested more about what we do... there’s lots of in­for­ma­tion on our web­site,” said John­son.

If you’re in­ter­ested, the web­site is im­pact­cam­pus­min­istries.com. 

As for the South Bend team, Cuevas en­cour­aged her fel­low stu­dents to join in the ac­tiv­i­ties if they are able. 

“Def­i­nitely get in­volved,” said Cuevas. “Hav­ing some­where to go where you can ask ques­tions you have about your faith, and just hav­ing some­body to walk along­side you through your walk of life and the col­lege ex­pe­ri­ence def­i­nitely made some of the strug­gles that we go through a lit­tle bit eas­ier for me.”

Some of the up­com­ing events in­clude a Passover meal on April 5 and an end of the year party on May 26. If you are in­ter­ested in get­ting in­volved, you can ei­ther at­tend one of the Bible stud­ies or con­tact Ney­hart at (765) 376-7304.