Apart from their recent college football successes and their former flashy and party-hard quarterback Johnny “Football” Manziel, Texas A&M University has had a different kind of success: a surprisingly rapid growth in its Christian ministry on-campus. The Breakaway Ministries holds a weekly worship and prayer service at the college’s basketball arena and special events center, the Reed Arena. From its launch with twelve students in a college dorm room in 1989 to nearly 12,000 weekly attendees today, it is impressive to learn about budding Christianity on a major college campus.
The director of Breakaway Ministries, Ben Stuart, was interviewed by the American Family Association Journal writer Stacy Long, and said, “It was just a couple of guys who wanted to seek the Lord together in Bible study and prayer.” He started at Breakaway Ministries in 2005, when attendance was around 2,500.
The threefold purpose of the ministry is to introduce students to Christ, connect them with a church and then to “inspire them and equip them to walk with Him for a lifetime.” The majority of students hadlittle-to-no spiritual background, and oftentimes quit going to church because they did not have a connection to local churches in the area. Stuart admitted that he was not the reason behind the growth in the ministry, and attributed it to God and humility.
Several major problems that Stuart and the ministry face are “sexual brokenness and scriptural illiteracy,” but all Breakaway Ministries offers is “genuine love” and “truth,” two things that the world “isn’t offering.”
The Christian Broadcasting Network also wrote about the Breakaway Ministries last year, and added that the ministry also does community service such as like raising $100,000 to help stop child sex trafficking and has an international outreach program known as the Shalom Project.
