College marketers love photos: students in class, students on the grass, maybe throwing a Frisbee, reading a book, or laughing with friends. For a Christian school, any image of someone singing or praying is good. They are always looking for compelling images that tell future students: It could have been you.
And the Asbury Revival – the “effusion» in February 2023, where students in Wilmore, Kentucky, felt led by the Holy Spirit to stay in the chapel and sing, pray, confess, testify and sing again for about two weeks – produced many photos fascinating.
But Jennifer McChord didn’t think she could use them.
When the revival began, the vice president for marketing and enrollment at Asbury University had been a year and a half engaged in an intensive digital advertising campaign aimed at raising the profile of the Wesleyan movement school’s brand . She was trying hard to get the attention of 15, 16 and 17 year olds who loved Jesus and wanted to be challenged in their faith while to study Biblical Theology, Biological Psychology, English, Health Communication, Equine Science, or any other major offered at Asbury. His team wanted to make sure area Christian high school students knew about the school and seriously considered applying to it.
But using the photos and videos of the revival for an advertising campaign seemed like a violation of something special. The administration decided not to do so.
“If it looks like we’re trying to cash in on the outpouring, that’s the check,” McChord told CT. “It wasn’t ours. And we don’t take credit for it.
From the outside, the news that Asbury saw record enrollment numbers this fall seems, kind of obviously, like an outpouring of the effusion. After all, the rebirth took place viral on social media and captured the attention of Christians across the country and the world, just as high school students were making decisions about college. It makes sense to think that Asbury got an increase in enrollment at Holy Spirit.
“I think people in our community will immediately say it was (the) outpouring,” President Kevin Brown said. said Asbury’s student newspaper.
Internally, however, administrators say the intervention of the Holy Spirit has presented the school with a particular marketing challenge. They were concerned about the real danger of misuse. Even celebrating what God has done could become cheap and crass, or even too directly commercial.
The marketing team, immersed in its efforts to increase registrations post-pandemic, had to stop and evaluate how it was going to represent the outpouring – if it wanted to – in advertising materials. How were they going to avoid hijacking? How were they going to integrate it into the story of Asbury’s mission and identity and talk about it with prospective students and their families?
Before they really decided what they were going to do, McChord told CT, they noticed that the student-led campus tours were starting to fill up more than usual. But it turned out that the “prospective students” weren’t potential students at all. Instead, these were visitors who could not enter the chapel because there were too many people to participate in the revival. They signed up for guided tours in the hope of accessing them another way. They were disappointed when they discovered that their groups would not be walking amidst all the prayer and singing.
The university community has done a lot of work to protect the outpouring of visitors who seemed to want to distract him. In doing so, they also embraced the idea that the outpouring did not belong to them. They were guards. It was a gift. Any attempt to appropriate it would be a mistake.
“We want to be faithful to the way the Holy Spirit has been manifested,” Vice President for Student Life Sarah Thomas Baldwin told CT at the time. “We see the Holy Spirit coming upon our students and we want to honor that. »
Marketing and Registration decided they needed to adopt the same layout. When the outpouring showed up in plans for promotional efforts, they wondered if they seemed to be trying to benefit from the work of the Holy Spirit. If the answer was yes, they shut it down.
“This has been a very careful and prayerful process,” spokeswoman Abby Laub said.
The results sometimes seemed counterintuitive. As they promoted the school, counselors and recruiters sometimes found themselves telling people that they should not enroll at Asbury in anticipation of the next burst of spiritual fervor.
“We’ve had to correct some people when they say, ‘I can’t wait for the next one,’ or ‘I’m excited to be able to be part of an outpouring,'” McChord said. “You can pray for that. Be expectant – it’s part of our theology. But we don’t plan it. It’s not on our schedule. We must have had a lot of these conversations.
At the same time, the marketing team’s big goal with the digital ad campaign and other awareness efforts was to make sure more people know about Asbury. They wanted to raise the school’s profile and make it known that it is a place where students can gain a good education while growing spiritually.
The revival sent this message. They just had to accept it as a gift.
“We’re holding it with both hands,” McChord told CT. “But really, open your hands.”
This momentum also encouraged the marketing and enrollment team to lean into conversations about spiritual life at the school.
While prospective students and their parents are understandably concerned about practicalities, from degree pathways to the quality of food to possible scholarships, they are also interested in Christian formation.
“From a marketing and enrollment standpoint, what this momentum has allowed us to do is focus on who we are in Asbury,” McChord said. “We can be very clear: this is an academically excellent school with spiritual vitality. You will meet Jesus here. You will learn more about God. It will be up to you to decide what you are going to do with it.