Bringing the Gospel to the 50 campuses with the least access
The story of the Forgotten50 begins in the city of New Orleans in June of 2016. A group of collegiate ministry leaders from all over North America gathered for a planning session connected to Baptist Collegiate Network (BCNet). Tasked with creating a strategy for impacting previously unengaged campuses with the gospel, the group quickly realized that they needed a systematic means for prioritizing campuses, based on their access to the gospel.
After determining that no comprehensive data on this subject existed within any organization, they decided that a large-scale, year-long research project needed to take place, a project that would utilize a professional research coordinator in three stages:
Step 1
Create a Database
Generate a comprehensive list of every college and university in North America.
The result: a list of 6,726 institutions of higher education!
Step 2
Identify Gospel Presence
Identify the campuses in North America with no on-campus gospel presence. For the purposes of the research project, gospel presence was determined by the following two criteria:
A group meeting on the campus.
An evangelical group of sound doctrine.
Step 3
Rank Campuses
Prioritize the campuses having no on-campus gospel presence with a gospel accessibility value utilizing the ratio:
The 50 campuses with the highest gospel accessibility value became the focus of the project.
They are the Forgotten50
and they need the gospel desperately