When Jonathan Pokluda was preparing to speak at a college worship gathering at Auburn University in the fall of 2023, the Waco, Texas, pastor was expecting a respectable crowd: maybe 500 students. After all, it was smack in the middle of football season in Alabama, and the event had only been in the works six weeks.

In fact, Pokluda had initially declined on such short notice. Yet a small but burgeoning group of college coeds and a prayer-warring Bible study mentor named Tonya Prewett, wife of Auburn assistant basketball coach Chad Prewett, had been pleading with God to move on their campus.

Pokluda, who was a friend of Prewett’s son-in-law, was stunned when he walked into Neville Arena that evening. Instead of 500, some 5,000 students were waiting to hear Passion Music, Bible teacher Jennie Allen, and Pokluda. 

“There was just this palpable hunger and thirst for Christ and the sense that it was the prayers of other people that I was walking into, which was really humbling,” Pokluda recalled.

He preached a message from 1 Thessalonians 4 about sexual bondage and the freedom that Christ offers. After Pokluda finished and Allen had spoken, Allen wrapped up the meeting by reading text messages from students who had made decisions, including a student who wanted to be baptized right then. 

“Is there water nearby?” Pokluda recalled Allen asking. 

Within minutes, several thousand students were leaving the arena and walking a few blocks to a nearby landmark, the Red Barn, which sits adjacent to a pond.

“We ended up baptizing 350 college students,” Pokluda said. “And it wasn’t a line-up and dunk. Some of them were 20-minute Gospel conversations. … All of us knew at the end of that night that a movement had started.”

The event, called UNITE Auburn, drew national media attention.

“I prayed for a gathering at the arena and You had something even bigger in mind,” Prewett remembers telling the Lord.

“We started getting contacted by universities all over the nation saying, ‘We’re desperate. We have students on our campus committing suicide. We have students in deep depression. Will you bring UNITE to our campus?’” 

Since then, UNITE Auburn has become UNITE US and has held similar events on 11 college campuses—like Florida State, University of Georgia and Texas A&M—where a combined 70,000 students have heard a clear Gospel call and been challenged to follow Jesus Christ. According to Prewett, organizers have documented some 5,000 salvation decisions and 2,000 baptisms. The UNITE US team is working closely with local churches, encouraging students to plug in to a local congregation and become faithful followers of Christ.  

This spring semester, UNITE has events scheduled at Ohio State University, Purdue University, University of Kentucky, Georgetown University, West Virginia University and Southern Methodist University. 

And while UNITE has drawn mass crowds, a larger campus movement seems afoot. In spring 2023, a student-led revival at Asbury University in Kentucky that grew out of a chapel service lasted several weeks and spread to other campuses. Around that same time, Prewett was initiating a prayer gathering among the coeds she was mentoring. Six students praying over several weeks became 200 students. 

At Ohio State last August, a group of Buckeyes football players—including stars like running back TreVeyon Henderson and receiver Emeka Egbuka—took the lead in a worship service held on a campus lawn, testifying to how Christ had changed them. The crowd grew to more than 1,000 students. Dozens prayed to receive Christ and were baptized in livestock troughs. 

Meanwhile, the college football postseason offered a slew of bold, explicit Christian messages from players and coaches. Perhaps none were bolder than Boise State head coach Spencer Danielson, who told an ESPN sideline reporter after his team’s Mountain West championship that “Jesus deserves all the glory. I mean, we serve a champion. He died on the cross, but He rose again three days later. That’s the God I serve. Anything is possible.” Several other players, including All-America running back Ashton Jeanty, whom Danielson helped baptize last summer, echoed Danielson’s sentiments, giving effusive praise to Jesus Christ.

Is Revival Stirring?

Writing at the Gospel Coalition’s website in 2023, pastors Kyle Richter and Patrick Miller, who work closely with teens and college students at their church in Columbia, Missouri, said they began witnessing a sharp rise in participation among Gen Z students (roughly the generation of young people ages 12 to 27) after COVID.

“Our last meeting of the year was bigger than the first. We started with 300 students and ended with 400. That never happens,” Richter wrote. “Then in the fall of this year, it happened again: 500 students attended our first meeting; 600 showed up the next week. This doesn’t happen.”

They hear similar stories from colleagues across the nation: “Pervasive anxiety is creating a hunger for deep peace.” 

“Gen Z is hungry for the very things the empty, desiccated temples of secularism, consumerism and global digital media cannot provide, but which Jesus can,” Richter and Miller wrote.

Byron Paulus, founder and president of OneCry, an organization that seeks to be a catalyst for “repentance and unified prayer for revival and spiritual awakening,” said he believes the Asbury revival may have been the “ignition point” for a wider move of God. The Asbury chapel services in 2023 drew around 1 billion views on the social media app TikTok over several weeks.

“But did it begin with Asbury? Or, as with every great revival in the history of the world, did it begin in the cradle of prayer and was moved along by fervent prayer gatherings?” 

Will Garinger, one of the student leaders helping with the UNITE Ohio State event, told Decision that the football players’ boldness last August “lit a fire” among Christians on campus and in the city. The 20-year-old started a running club last fall in Columbus called Run With Christ. The club has grown to several hundred runners and has seen dozens of people receive Christ. At a worship event they hosted in December, about 60 people prayed to receive Christ and 15 were baptized. 

Garinger said Ohio State’s UNITE student team has enlisted some 40 local churches that are praying and supporting the event, scheduled for Feb. 18 at the 20,000-seat Schottenstein Center on campus.

“My biggest prayer for UNITE Ohio State is that every seat will be filled not just with a person and not just with emotion, but with a conviction that carries outside of that Tuesday night. And that they would feel a burden to go and carry on the Great Commission.” 

As Richter and Miller wrote: “This may sound impossible, but … ‘What is impossible with man is possible with God’ (Luke 18:27, ESV). Dry bones are rattling to life. The question is whether we’ll be attuned to the Spirit’s work and join Him.” ©2025 BGEA

Photo: Courtesy of UNITE US