NORMAN, Okla. (NewsNation) — The Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium at the University of Oklahoma is expected to be packed on Saturday, but not with football fans.
Instead, some college students are teaming up with Pulse Ministry to “Fill The Stadium” (FTS), hosting a faith-based concert featuring Grammy-award winner Chance the Rapper, Chandler Moore, Kari Jobe and Nick Hall.
FTS is a student-led mission to fill the Oklahoma Sooners’ stadium for a concert and gospel proclamation, according to the FTS website.
More than 86,000 people are expected to attend this event, making it the largest secular university faith-based event in American history, Pulse Ministry founder Nick Hall said.
In recent years, there have been faith “revivals” seen on campuses across the country, including at Asbury University, where thousands of people participated in a two-week-long ‘revival’ service.
“I’ve never heard of anything in the history of America that rivals this in terms of students leading the charge of thousands of people coming. Tons of people who are, you know, believers, but also lots of people who don’t know God, and maybe have misconceptions about who he is,” Hall said.
Malu Andrade, a University of Oklahoma sophomore, and Josh Robinson, a University of Oklahoma senior and co-director of FTS, led the charge behind the mission.
Andrade said when she was in high school, God told her that wherever he took her to school, he would cause a big outpouring to happen. At the time, she didn’t know where that was going to be, but when she got accepted into the University of Oklahoma, she knew it was meant to be.
“I just believe in a relationship with God,” she said. “He’s not this faraway, scary authority figure. He’s just my friend.”
Robinson agreed, saying this event wasn’t about religion but rather the relationship with Jesus.
“FTS really embodies what God can do when we’re willing to say yes,” Robinson said. “He wants to surprise people and use us to really shake up what people see as faith now.”
In the past year, research has revealed that more young adults have been searching for and embracing a higher power to get them through the major emotional challenges in the post-pandemic world.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a recent survey by the Springtide Research Institute found that one-third of 18- to 25-year-olds believe in — more than doubt — the existence of a higher power, attributed to the three years of loss, depression and anxiety resulting from the global pandemic. That number is up from about one-quarter in 2021, the WSJ report said.
However, since the early 1990s, the percentage of Americans who identify as “religiously unaffiliated” has skyrocketed. The number of people who consider themselves atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” is projected to grow in the coming years.