11

Student Empowerment

While serving in Northwest Arkansas as full-time evangelists, Ronnie and Dana Hoover lived in a cramped trailer with their two small children. Hoover preached revivals throughout the area, often traveling with church youth whom he trained, discipled, and mentored.

The pastors understood the vital need for university-bound students to connect with an Assemblies of God campus group. Through the years, they Hoovers saw far too many students study at the nearby University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and leave the faith. So in the late 1980s, six area AG pastors extended the Hoovers a request to restart UA's Chi Alpha, the U.S. Missions college ministry that since 1953 has spread to more than 300 campuses worldwide.

"I realized, wow, that's what I want to do," says Hoover, now a 55-year-old U.S. missionary. "I would never be fulfilled unless I had a chance to pour my life into a small group of people, just like Jesus did." 

In 1989 the couple moved to launch a fresh program on the 26,000-student campus. Since that initial gathering of 40, mostly from the six area churches, the UA Chi Alpha has produced more than 100 full-time vocational ministers. They include chaplains, world missionaries, youth pastors, parachurch ministers, music pastors, and senior pastors. Among them are Ronnie and Dana's own four children. And over the past 26 years, Hoover has helped launch eight Chi Alpha programs in Arkansas, 15 in other states, and seven in Bolivia.

Those who get involved with the University of Arkansas Chi Alpha come from a spectrum of backgrounds. "Hindus, atheists, agnostics hang around Chi Alpha because they have fun," Hoover says. "Sometimes it's students investigating the claims of Christ, sometimes investigating the Holy Spirit." Accepting newcomers whatever their spiritual beliefs, he notes, helped him in particular with the international students.

Hoover takes cues from Jesus' own life with his disciples.

"Jesus went on road trips with these guys, on fishing trips, hiking with these guys," he says. For the Hoovers, outdoor activities include caving, rappelling, and white-water canoeing. "In regular life, while Jesus was with them, He poured his life into them."

Hoover's philosophy is to encourage students to run with the spiritual equipping he provides them with to minister and allow the Holy Spirit to empower. "I want every student to see a miraculous move of God." In Arkansas vernacular, Christ's mandate is simple, Hoover says: "Y'all make disciples. The least that means is gathering a group of friends around you. Pour your life into the people. If you do that in some way, you're a Great Commission Christian."

Janelle Holloway arrived at the University of Arkansas in 1999 as the daughter of parents on staff with another campus ministry. That October, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, for which Holloway blamed God. Holloway plunged into angry rebellion, wanting nothing to do with the Church. But a friend invited her to a Chi Alpha Bible study. Through that study, she met Hoover.

"I'd debate him, and he'd go toe to toe with me," Holloway says.

Soon after, Holloway returned to Christ. Later she became a Chi Alpha leader. She joined an association of campus pagans and a religion study group. "Every week it turned into 'Quiz the Christian,' " Holloway says. "Ronnie believed we as students could do it, that the Holy Spirit's going to give you the answer."

She married U.S. missionary Joe Holloway, a member of the campus Chi Alpha staff. Together the couple has pioneered the Chi Alpha chapter at Clemson University in South Carolina, where they've employed Hoover's principles in launching and running the ministry.

"I wasn't on a good road before I crashed into Chi Alpha," Holloway says. "I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now without him."

A key part of the Great Commission is taking the gospel abroad. In the early 2000s, Hoover sensed a need for a different approach to planting new Chi Alpha chapters in other countries than the common "shotgun" outreach of going different places each year. Though he spoke no Spanish and had had no prior missionary contacts in Bolivia, Hoover decided to commit 10 years to establishing the college fellowship in that South American country.

Hoover says he found the key to connecting in the family of God.

"We're not starting something from nothing down there," Hoover says. "We visit the Assemblies of God to visit family, to talk to the pastors and share the vision." When he visits a church, he asks the pastor's permission to gather college students from the flock to help set up Chi Alpha on campus. He's found that the secular universities of Latin America are unreached people groups. These students become leaders in society.

U.S. missionary Kelly Brown, director of Chi Alpha at the University of Texas, says, "Ronnie is definitely a champion of the gifts of the Spirit and the power of the Holy Spirit, passionate and down-to-earth, an inspiration to many of us, particularly on a personal level."

Brown describes a challenge Hoover issued at the 2012 World Missions Summit inspired by the success the Hoovers' ministry had seen in its own decade-long outreach in Bolivia: focus missions outreach in a single country for at least five years, building relationships in one place to enhance the impact.