PASSION 06 DRAWS 18,000 STUDENTS TO NASHVILLE

By Ginny McCabe

CINCINNATI, OH (ANS) -- Passion 06, an International college movement, opened Monday, January 2, and concluded on Thursday, January 5, at the Gaylord Entertainment Center (GEC) in downtown Nashville at full conference capacity with 18,000 college students in attendance, who represented all 50 states, as well as, 20 different countries.

“Passion is way bigger than Nashville, and is way bigger than us,” said founder and director Louie Giglio at Monday night’s opening session.

Giglio was already involved in campus ministry at Baylor University in Texas, prior to founding Passion in 1995. However, he had an even greater drive and passion to head up such an endeavor, after he found the results from a national survey of freshman students to be alarming.

“One of the questions on the survey was ‘Do you consider yourself to be a born-again Christian?’ and almost eight percent of the people who took the survey said ‘no,’ ” explained Giglio.

“Thirteen and a half-million of you will go to sleep again tonight, and will have no clue what life is really about,” Giglio continued. “...Everything else is being glorified, but we want to see God glorified, above everything else. It was that idea that set our hearts in motion, and we are going to continue until Your Name (God’s name) is heard about and worshiped all over, and on campuses around the world.”

Along with Louie Giglio and his wife, Shelley, the four-day event and indoor gathering for college students was led by renowned speakers John Piper and Beth Moore, among others, as well as artist-worshipers Chris Tomlin, David Crowder Band, Charlie Hall, Matt Redman, Shane and Shane, Nathan and Christy Nockels, and others.

Giglio and his team of leaders began the movement in 1995. Passion 97 drew about 2,000 students in Austin,Texas. Today, part of Passion’s vision is to hold gatherings in prominent college towns and cities, such as New York and Boston in the United States and abroad.

Since its beginning, Passion has expanded beyond the borders of the United and has long-term goals of gathering students in other countries. One of the first International gathering was recently held on November 22,2005 at the Ricoh Coliseum in Toronto, Canada.. Giglio said Toronto is one of the most vibrant and diverse cities in the world, with more than 300,000 college students in Toronto. The free event attracted 4,500 students.

The Nashville, Passion 06 gathering had to limit its attendance to 18,000 and actually had to turn potential pre-registrants away because the facility reached full capacity early in the registration process.

“The last person to register was from Washington State,” Giglio said. “That one person can change a campus and change history.”

The purpose of Passion is to gather college students from campuses and churches across the nation, uniting them across ministry and denominational lines to seek the face of God together in worship and prayer. Affirming and valuing the work of local churches and campus ministries, Passion seeks to foster unity and connectivity among them, encouraging them to draw strength and encouragement from each other, resulting in a louder anthem of God’s renown.

“God is greater than our wildest imagination. Can he change a campus, can he change a culture, can he change a nation? The answer is absolutely,” said Giglio. “We want to celebrate the bigness of God, and the smallness of you and the smallness of me. Our (Passion’s) theme has been and will be Isaiah 26:8. ‘Yes Lord, walking in the way of your truth, we wait eagerly for you, for Your Name and Your Renown are the desires of our souls.’”

Throughout the four-day event, student’s had a variety of different opportunities to celebrate the “Bigness of God.” Each evening there was a main general session where all of the attendees gathered for corporate worship, prayer and teaching. In addition, Passion 06 provided smaller sessions and more intimate gatherings through Community Groups, Family Groups and Late Night Concerts, which were held in various venues throughout the downtown Nashville area. These settings allow attendees to talk about what they learn, and to share what God is doing in each of their lives on a more personal level.

One such opportunity was Chris Tomlin’s Late Night concert at the Municipal Auditorium on Tuesday night. “We got to debut several new songs we have been working on. I felt a couple of them were written specifically for Passion. One of the songs was called "Party!” said Chris Tomlin. “Louie and I had been talking about creating an atmosphere of celebration. A celebration of the great truth that we were dead, but now we're alive. That God has made us alive in Him. And we needed a song to give voice to that....Passion was incredible. It was a reverent, holy party.”

During the closing session on Thursday, Giglio and his team encouraged students to return to their campuses and ‘let Passion begin.’

“We’re not sending you to Africa or on a summer mission adventure, because that’s not where you’re going when you leave Nashville today. We’re sending you back home today, and that’s where Passion starts, right then and there, where God can make a difference in your world.”

The mission of Passion is to send students to campuses, to see campuses come back to life, and Giglio encouraged each of the students to live an authentic, vibrant, real Christian life. “People living in darkness will be drawn to your light and ask, ‘What is your deal?’ It’s our heart that you can answer in a normal, conversational, relational way and you’re able to tell them the story of God,” he said.

Passion 07 is set for early January 2007, and will be held in Atlanta. More information on the gathering, as well as, all new music available from Passion 06 will soon be available at www.268generation.com.