Last year, the Campus Ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ produced and distributed "Freshman Survival Kits," a unique strategy designed to reach incoming freshmen. Each kit included a free juice drink and a compact disc of 12 contemporary Christian songs, as well as Josh McDowell's evangelistic paperback More Than A Carpenter, a video featuring two college-age Christians dying of AIDS, and a New Testament.

Fifty-six thousand kits were distributed in 1997, and the Campus Ministry leadership hopes to give away 400,000 in the near future. In exchange for the box, marked "Real Life, Real Connections," students were often asked to complete a spiritual-interest questionnaire, which are then used to follow up each student personally.

"Students go nuts over them, they swarm our tables," said Roy Gerardi, staff member in Virginia. "Our church partners love them--it provides an 'in' to the college campus."

Since the boxes are free, students rarely turn them down, and in most cases, demand outpaced availability. At times the gifts even tamed hostility toward the message of Jesus. At the University of California at Berkeley, for instance, one coed opened the box and promptly started swearing, emptying the box item by item. "I don't want this," she said, throwing More than a Carpenter and the video to the ground. Grabbing the CD, she asked, "Is this Christian music?" She also threw it down. Even the free drink was tossed aside. But she held up the pen and the Bible included in the kit and said, "You know, I have an art history class, I can use this and I can always use a writing utensil."

Monique Matosian, a sophomore at Berkeley, retold the scenario to her campus director, Dan Curran and said confidently, "We won. She walked away with the Bible and the pen."

"The idea that a student can choose how they want to hear the gospel is amazing," says Dan Hardaway, director of marketing for the kits. "Here we are, giving them three to five pathways to the gospel, and they can decide how they want to pursue it. One student said it was like having a time bomb in their room; you never know when it is going to go off."

Many campuses reported back that those bombs detonated quickly. Staff members at Baylor University in Waco, TX, experienced a doubling in size of their weekly meetings--from 50 students to more than 100--and point to the kit distribution as one of the major causes. And at colleges and universities across the nation, students prayed to invite Jesus into their lives during follow-up appointments originating with the box distribution.

Cost is offset by donors enthusiastic about the successfulness of the strategy and by companies looking to reach this audience.

"Every company that wants to market something to a student could look at Campus Crusade as a resource to do that," explains Dan. "[But] the nature of partnership isn't that they use us or we use them," he says. "It's that we all win."

Especially the students.