Our Story

Paul had this vision. Clayton had this dream. During a long layover at the airport in New Orleans a plan was formed…

In 2009, Paul headed to Chico, CA to plant a campus ministry, Christian Challenge, at Chico State. Coming from under Max Barnett and the legacy at the University of Oklahoma, Paul had a clear picture of what evangelism, discipleship, and missions mobilization looked like. Starting from scratch and putting into place the building blocks of an evangelistic culture Paul’s ministry began to multiply as students came to Christ, were discipled, and began to share their faith. Over the past decade Paul and his family have built a thriving ministry that have seen 100s of students come to Christ. The next part of Paul’s vision was to see the gospel begin to be exported from Chico to other campuses.

About the same time that Paul landed in Chico, Clayton and his family moved to Stephenville, TX to relaunch the Baptist Student Ministry (BSM) at Tarleton State University. The first year they had three freshmen join the cause! After several years of investing in students, sharing the gospel, and developing leaders, Clayton realized the vast number of campuses with little to no gospel presence on them. In 2015, Tarleton BSM planted its first campus ministry on another campus. By Fall 2020 Tarleton BSM will have been a part of planting work on ten other campuses. The next step for Clayton was working through how to resource and train his team in a systematic and practical way.

Paul and Clayton have known each other and worked together on several projects through the past decade, but in the summer of 2019 they were in New Orleans at a team meeting preparing to launch CollegeMinistry.com. On the last day Paul asked Clayton, “Have you heard about my vision to create a network to train campus ministries to start evangelistic movements on college campus?” Clayton laughed and said, “I was about to ask you the same thing!” They spent the morning posted up at the Subway Restaurant in the New Orleans Airport (Clayton nearly missed his flight!) hashing out a game plan. They planned on starting with a few contacts as a pilot cohort that quickly blossomed into over 60 campus ministry leaders, so they quickly recruited some friends and mentors to help!