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:

    1. A group meeting on the campus.
    2. 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