Setting the Trajectory for Life: Beverly Skinner leads college ministry in Georgia to focus on making an impact for a lifetime

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Southwestern News.

Among the 350,000 students who populate the 35 campus classrooms and online learning environments that have active Baptist Collegiate Ministry in Georgia, Beverly Parrish Skinner (‘98), collegiate ministry catalyst with the Georgia Baptist Mission Board, knows one thing, “The future leaders of politics and medicine and education and agriculture, and churches – every area of society – the leaders of those segments of society are sitting in a college classroom today.”

Skinner, a 1998 Master of Divinity graduate of Southwestern Seminary, says college years are a “pivotal” time in a person’s life when students are “setting the course of their life.”

“For a young adult who comes to campus, as a Christ follower, almost every one of them is going to go through some crisis of faith while they are a student where they decide, ‘Will I continue walking forward in this faith or will I choose a different path in life?’” Skinner explains, adding that “for the Christ-following student, this is a critical time of solidifying their faith.”

However, she notes the college years also provide opportunities to share the Gospel with students who are not Christ-followers, describing the non-believing students as “open,” “seeking,” and “willing to engage in conversation.”

Whether it is termed Baptist Collegiate Ministry (BCM), Baptist Student Union (BSU), or Baptist Student Ministries (BSM), Skinner says college campus ministers “have an opportunity to share the truth of Jesus with thousands and thousands of young adults at probably the most formative time of their life.” She adds students are “making their own choices about their formation, and where they are the most receptive to listening and learning.”

For Skinner, who has served with Georgia Baptists in various capacities since 2014 before assuming her current ministry role in the summer of 2022, the lifetime formation that college students experience today is not unlike the same she experienced as a telecommunications undergraduate at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

Raised in Houston, Texas, Skinner grew up in a mission church or what is called a church plant in the current vernacular. She explains the church began with 70 people, including her parents, and watching the church grow “very much … influenced my understanding that church is not just something we go to, it is part of who we are, and we invest our lives in that.” Today the church, Bear Creek Baptist Church in Houston has more than 5,000 members.

Skinner, who prayed to receive Christ as a 13-year-old during a youth revival service, recalls that “being on mission and being a part of God’s work in my neighborhood and community was just a natural part of our life growing up.” She carried this same ministry mindset to Waco as a Baylor freshman who was “very involved in Baptist Student Union … from day one.”

Skinner says God used her experiences within the BSU, Baylor community and environment, and her church, and when she “was a junior, I began to sense that God might be calling me to collegiate ministry,” adding that her “call to ministry was pretty clear early on that it was a call to collegiate ministry.” She adds since the Lord called her to collegiate ministry slightly over 30 years ago her “passion for it has not waned” and “it has not changed.”

Through an internship with Baylor’s BSU during her senior year of college, Skinner had the opportunity to travel across the state of Texas to visit other colleges and universities and their BSU ministries. She recalls the experience was “part of the Lord clarifying that call” for her as it helped her determine “if BSU was different than my experience at Baylor that I still felt like that’s what God was calling me to do.” Skinner recalls campus ministers at Baylor Shawn Shannon (‘83) and George Loutherback (‘68) were “instrumental” in her calling.

Beverly Parrish Skinner, a 1998 Master of Divinity graduate of Southwestern Seminary, has served in collegiate ministry for almost 30 years after the Lord called her to ministry as a college student at Baylor University.

Following graduation, Skinner “didn’t yet have a strong sense or peace about going to seminary,” so for the next three years she continued to “explore” her calling with the Lord. During one of those years, as she served as the campus minister at two community college campuses just south of Houston, Alvin Community College and Brazosport College, she says the Lord confirmed “this is what I needed to invest the rest of my life in and that I needed to go to seminary in order to be properly prepared for that ministry career.”

A couple of months later, in the spring of 1995, Skinner joined a friend to sit in on a class at Southwestern Seminary when “the Lord really affirmed not only that seminary was the right path for me, but that this was the right school for me,” she recalls, adding that it “was one of those moments of just knowing that I know this is the right place.”

The theological training and “the ability to think in theological terms” she learned at Southwestern have aided Skinner in her ministry to college students because “many students ask really hard questions and really deep and insightful questions.”

“My degree made such a difference in feeling equipped to be able to answer questions, but even when I didn’t have answers, feeling equipped and knowing how to research and find answers,” Skinner explains, adding that even when she did not know the answer, she knew a professor or a resource that could assist.

Skinner says the relationships she formed with her peers and professors while at Southwestern are “one of the most valuable things” from her experience on the Fort Worth campus. The relationships with her seminary colleagues were a “lifeline during those years” as she and her friends “learned together,” “challenged each other,” and “encouraged each other not only in our walk with the Lord but in our pursuit of theological education” and today they are still “supporting and encouraging one another and seeing how God is working in one another’s lives and being used in the Kingdom today,” she says.

While the network of friends and colleagues were important during Skinner’s time at Southwestern, many professors influenced Skinner with skills she continues to use in ministry, including Grant Lovejoy (‘84, ‘90), associate professor of preaching, whom Skinner had for hermeneutics; the late Jack MacGorman, distinguished professor of New Testament; Dan Crawford (‘67, ‘73, ‘81), senior professor of evangelism and missions and chair of prayer emeritus; the late Calvin Miller, professor of communication and ministry studies; the late Burt Dominy, professor of theology; and Karen Bullock (‘87, ‘91), associate professor of church history, whom Skinner says “had the most impact on me personally.”

While she was working on her Master of Divinity degree, Skinner served with Texas Baptists in the BSM student missions office where she helped assign college students from Texas to summer missions opportunities. As a college student at Baylor, Skinner had the same opportunity when she served as a summer missionary in Germany.

Following graduation from Southwestern, Skinner moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where she began serving as the associate BSU director at Ole Miss. For the next three years, she ministered to students in the Magnolia State as she applied the theological lessons she learned in the classroom at Southwestern with the practical ministry experience she gained serving in Texas. In July 2002, the Lord moved Skinner back to Texas – this time to College Station and Aggieland where she served the next six years as the associate BSM director at Texas A&M University. However, in 2008 the Lord directed Skinner’s steps back to Mississippi where she served as the associate director of collegiate ministry for the Mississippi Baptist Convention located in Jackson.

Through the role with Mississippi Baptists, Skinner was responsible for the Mississippi BSU Summer Missions Program where she worked with Southern Baptist mission boards and missionaries, as well as with other organizations, to identify missions opportunities and place students from colleges and universities in summer missions positions. Through the role, Skinner met her husband, Warren, who was serving as the BSM director at Georgia Institute of Technology, more commonly known as Georgia Tech, in Atlanta. After they were married in December 2012, she moved to Georgia.

While living in the Peach State, the Lord opened an unexpected door of ministry that would ultimately lead to Skinner’s current ministry role. In February 2014, a position with Georgia Baptist Women became available. As the young women and women’s ministry consultant, where she served until January 2022, Skinner utilized her ministry skills and experience in reaching young women to equip women’s ministry leaders in the churches of the Georgia Baptist Mission Board to reach young women with the Gospel and begin to disciple them. However, at the beginning of last year, the Lord brought Skinner back to her original calling as an undergraduate student at Baylor: collegiate ministry.

Skinner has served in a variety of collegiate ministry roles in Texas, Mississippi, and now in Georgia where she serves as the collegiate ministry catalyst with the Georgia Baptist Mission Board.

Serving as the director of campus expansion for six months before being named the collegiate ministry catalyst, Skinner now oversees the work of all collegiate ministries on the campuses of 35 colleges and universities in Georgia. She adds there are “87 campuses in Georgia that are viable locations for BCM,” meaning they are “traditional schools or technical schools where we might be able to establish BCM.” While BCM is established on 35 of those 87 campuses, Skinner explains there are “another 29 campuses with BCM in process of some stage of development” that are “moving” in the direction of a “fully functioning BCM.”

As the collegiate ministry catalyst, Skinner gives “leadership” and “direction to all of our campus ministry in Georgia” as she provides “support” for the full-time, part-time, and volunteer campus ministers throughout the state.

“I help set the course for … our mission or values or priorities in BCM, our goals that we’re working toward every semester, or every school year in BCM, and leading our staff and volunteers, toward accomplishing those goals on our campuses,” she explains. A peripheral element of her ministry role includes helping churches that want to engage college students and BCM learn how to do so, she says.

Over the course of her lifetime serving through BSU, Skinner says she has a “general feel” that “across the country” the ministry is “far more focused on engaging campus rather than providing a refuge for Baptist students or Christian students on campus.”

“We are about training and equipping them to engage their culture and I think that’s a lifetime skill that we’re giving them that the Lord will use wherever they go,” she adds, citing the example of one of her students from Texas A&M who came from a Christian background and taught English to international students through the BSM in College Station. Today, the same student is an engineer in Houston who works with international colleagues “and she shares the Gospel with them in ways she learned as a student in BSM at Texas A&M,” Skinner says.

“That’s the kind of life change we like to see,” Skinner continues. “That’s a student that came to us as a Christian, but then to think about students who come to us that we meet on campus and we share the Gospel, and they become Christ followers, and they grow as disciples. And then they, in turn, … do the same thing. They become missionaries themselves because they heard the Gospel in college.”

For more than 30 years Skinner has been involved in collegiate ministry, but the passion she has in the daily aspects of the ministry continues to find its roots in “the life change that we see happen when students discover and embrace God’s love for them.”

“Seeing students come to know Him and live out the unique plan that He has for each one of them – that’s it for me,” Skinner reflects, while adding the passion continues as she knows “the incredible things that God can do in and through their lives for a lifetime. When they become fully devoted followers of Christ as college students their lives are changed, but the lives of everyone they impact for years to come are changed as well.”

In some ways, Skinner’s life has come full circle. As a college student who was impacted by BSM, she is now part of impacting the lives of college students who are now trying to figure out life, and that thought is met with gratitude.

“I really am very grateful for the opportunity to serve in collegiate ministry every day,” Skinner concludes. “I hope everybody believes this about the thing that they’re called to do, but I really believe this is really Kingdom work that is on the front edge, the leading edge of ministry, and it’s just really important.”

Ashley Allen (‘03, ‘09) is managing editor of Southwestern News.

Photos by Henry Durand of The Christian Index, and Krista Roe Photography.