College Students

Welcome!!! We are grateful that the Lord has led you to Tuscaloosa. Many students, undergraduate and graduate, have connected with our community of faith during their university days. We would love to have you join us.

Connecting with Campus Ministries

First of all, we want to encourage you to plug into one of the excellent campus ministries that serve students like you here in Tuscaloosa.  We presently have a number of the staff from the various campus ministries at Trinity Church.  We want you to get to know them and to find a place to connect and serve.

Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) Ryan Moore is the Campus Minister at Alabama, along with his wife, Ada. Ryan's email is rmoore@ruf.org.  RUF meets weekly on Tuesdays at 8:30 pm, on UA's campus in Shelby 107. You can look at their website for more information: www.bama.ruf.org

Campus Crusade for Christ  meets every Tuesday at 8pm at Capstone Church on University Blvd.  The CCC website is www.bamacrusade.com.  Jeff Norris is the Campus Director. Jeff's email is  Jeff.Norris@uscm.org. 

The Navigators meet on Tuesday evenings from 8:00-9:30 p.m. in Bibb Graves Hall.  Matt Latourneau is the Campus Director at Alabama.  You can check out their website www.bamanavs.com. For more information Matt's email is mattandjulienavs@gmail.com.

Are you interested in becoming an adopted student by a Trinity Church family?

Every year a number of students join our Adopt-A-Student ministry. If you would like to connect with a family from Trinity who will provide an occasional delicious meal, fellowship, and maybe even a place to do some laundry, then this is for you! 

If you have questions you can email Lisa Snead, our administrator.

Lastly, I would like to share with you a few ways that Trinity has benefited from the presence and participation of college students like you through the years:

1.             College students often make us more aware of the cultural trends of the times. They stimulate us to work on being relevant to the context of the current social trends and philosophies.

2.             College students are often called to interact and interface with the unbelieving world. Therefore, they can help us strive against isolationism and irrelevance.

3.             College students have a positive, Christ-honoring influence upon the younger kids in our church family. Our children have the unique opportunity to interact with college students and observe them living out authentic Christianity. Our college students serve as role models for the younger kids in our church community.

4.             College students often bring lots of energy and enthusiasm not just to the corporate worship of a local church, but to many other ministries such as ministries of mercy and outreach.

5.             College students help expand our church’s picture of the kingdom – who makes up the kingdom and how we live out our kingdom obligations.

6.             In the past, college students have often been used to bring revival and renewal to the church, especially in the area of advancing the cause of Christ in the world. One can think of the Student Volunteer Movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s in America as a clear example of this. Clarence Shedd makes a bold assertion in his book Two Centuries of Student Christian Movements: “At all ages the great creative religious ideas have been the achievement of the intellectual and spiritual insight of young men.  This is evidenced by such names as Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi, Loyola, Huss, Luther, Erasmus, Wesley, and Mott…Many of the most revolutionary ideas have been worked out by young men and women under 30 and frequently by youths between 18 and 25.”

Ways that You Can Benefit from Plugging into Trinity

If you are a new, incoming student, let me share with you a few ways that we have seen college students (grad and undergrad) benefit from plugging into life and relationships in a local church. You are in Tuscaloosa for a relatively short time, but you still can still benefit greatly from connected to a local church during your time in Tuscaloosa.

1.             Plugging into a church allows you to observe up close and personal the personal dynamics of the family life of believers (how husbands love, nurture, and care for their wives, how wives are to honor, respect and submit to their husbands, and how children are cared for and at times disciplined). This is crucial given that many students do not come from Christian homes.

2.             Plugging into a church offers you the benefit of connecting to the body of Christ and having a sense of home away from home.

3.             Plugging into a church helps you cultivate relationships in a particular church body that can bear much financial fruit when you sense God’s leading to personally engage in a missionary endeavor that requires financial and prayer support.

4.             Plugging into a church enables you to experience healthy church life. Through this process, hopefully your view of the church in the world and for the lost is biblically shaped.

5.             Plugging into a church and its ministries help to break the homogeneity of living exclusively among 18-22 year olds. In a church family, you have the privilege of experiencing a diversity of people at different physical and spiritual ages and stages.

6.             Plugging into a church facilitates relational connections with older believers that have potential to sharpen and mentor collegians in their spiritual journey. College students have the opportunity to build relationships with older, more experienced believers. To those who avail themselves of this, it is a source of immeasurable blessing and edification.

7.             Plugging into a church offers you the privilege and opportunity to serve and impact future generations. Involvement in a local church provides you with opportunities for serving others. Serving is an integral part of spiritual growth. College is a time for believing students to begin to discover and use their God-given capacities for serving Christ and others.

8.             Plugging into a church provides you with strong, biblical teaching that is not always centered on your own needs and your own stage in life.

9.             Plugging into a church during one’s collegiate years helps to promote a rhythm of church involvement throughout your life, especially in the early career period of one’s life when you are making life-impacting decisions like marriage and career. Those students who are exclusively involved in para-church ministries tend to struggle spiritually as they move into the corporate world when that support group is no longer present.

10.          Plugging into a church helps to liberate you from self-centeredness and self-absorption which all of us struggle with all of our lives. The act of being a vital member of a church requires a level of others-centeredness. Our sin nature, our culture, and the generational-segmented church culture all tend to promote an attitude of self-focus, which is the antithesis of Philippians 2:3-4.