BSU Students at the Statewide Spring Conference at Mississippi State University BSU in Starkville, MS (February 2023).

In 1923, Mississippi Baptist leaders met with other Southern Baptist Convention leaders at the Sunday School Board for the purpose of solidifying the strategy to meet what they considered to be the frontlines of ministry: the college campus. It was out of that meeting that Dr. J.D. Franks, Pastor-First Baptist Church in Columbus, MS, led to start the Baptist Student Union (BSU) ministry at Mississippi State College for Women which is now Mississippi University for Women (The W). Two land owners connected with the church and campus donated different parcels of land where the Baptist Workshop would be built. The old wooden workshop was best known for the front area having sawdust floors where members of local churches would come rake it out at the end of the semester. Longtime Ole Miss BSU Director, Marian Leavell, beginning in the 1930’s would keep heated bricks in the floorboard of her car to be able to have Bible study with students during the cold weather. Mississippi BSU in its infancy was about reaching and engaging students while trailblazing new pathways and connections for the gospel on the college campus.

After a quarter of a century, BSU prayerfully began to invest in the ministry of mobilizing students to engage in the Great Commission through summer missions. This story of Mississippi BSU summer missions began in 1947 when the BSUs of Mississippi and Louisiana partnered together to raise enough money to send one student, Corrinne Griffin (Blue Mountain College), to serve on a summer team to Hawaii. That marked the beginning of a movement of college students across our nation, and a commitment from Mississippi Baptists to mobilize BSU students to spend their summers serving on short-term missionary assignments.

Since that small beginning, Mississippi BSU has commissioned 5,662 students from 28 campuses to serve in dozens of countries on six continents and in nearly every U.S. state. While the assignments are diverse, summer missionaries all have the goal of building bridges to gospel conversations and discipleship relationships.

Why students? Because they are young, energetic, passionate, adaptable, and relational, and they want to do something to impact our world. Career missionaries and church planters love having students serve with them, as they can help breathe new life into their work.

“To Know Christ and To Make Him Known” is our mission and God is using Mississippi BSU on our campuses, across our state, and throughout the world to point others to the salvation that is only found through Jesus Christ.

“God used the BSU to feed the fire God had already started in my life to call me into ministry. I didn’t know what area of ministry God was leading, but I trusted God to lead me. Then, God used BSU mission trips to places like New Orleans, Panama City Beach, and Mission Arlington as well as serving a summer in Sacramento to show me exactly where God was calling me. God called me to be an international missionary. My family and I would later serve in SE Asia for 15 years.” –Chad McCord, Director of Missions Mobilization, Mississippi Baptist Convention Board.

“In the same year the Mississippi BSU was founded, the “Traffic signal” was invented. Much like the flashing beacons that help drivers navigate every bend and turn, Mississippi BSU in the same seeks to help college students at critical crossroads in their lives to choose Christ over the world. There are more than 160,000 college students in the state of Mississippi and as Jesus states in the gospel account of Matthew, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.’ Please join me in praying for our BSU Directors, local churches, and students as we seek To Know Christ and To Make Him Known in the century that lies ahead.” –Sam Ivy, Director of Collegiate Ministries, Mississippi Baptist Convention Board

Author(s): Sam Ivy, Director of Collegiate Ministries; Jennie Taylor, Associate Director of Collegiate Ministries.

To Know Christ & To Make Him Known… for 100 Years!