Greek InterVarsity is a strategic ministry of InterVarsity that exists to reach a unique and influential demographic of the campus. During the 2024-25 school year, InterVarsity saw a 43% increase in participation in Greek InterVarsity across the United States. The number of students participating in InterVarsity’s Greek campus ministry now surpasses pre-COVID-19 numbers. InterVarsity believes that it is possible for students to be both faith leaders on their campuses and participate in fraternities and sororities.
Brian Mann, the National Director of Greek InterVarsity, shares the dramatic and unparalleled growth in Christian faith among students in fraternities and sororities on U.S. college campuses.
“I've been working with Greek InterVarsity for nearly 25 years and the national director for 15, and these last few years have been one in which the scope of reach and the rate of growth is kind of unparalleled in what we've seen in any of the preceding years, the last three to four years. In particular Greek InterVarsity as one part of InterVarsity's ministry on campuses across the country. We've seen tripling in the number of students that we're working with over the last four years,” explains Brian.
(Richard) The vision statement I saw online said in part, "Every Greek is one friend away from Jesus." Tell us about that.
Brian: "Yeah, so that network of a fraternity or sorority and the fraternity or sorority system, one of the negative consequences of that is the network effect that one person's actions can spread quickly or have damage. But on the other hand, the opportunity of the network is that there's a lot of interconnectedness. And so, when one student living with their friends decides that they're going to partner actively with what God is doing in word and deed, it means that the 100 or 200 friends that they are living in proximity to are really now just one friend away from knowing Jesus, that they are brushing their teeth alongside and they're eating daily and they're studying, and they're doing life with someone who is actively partnering and seeing with God's eyes what he might be up to in their friends' lives. And so, one of the things that we invite students to do is to see how they are placed uniquely and specifically in the spot they are with intention to say yes to God's invitation, that they would be not just a friend but a spiritual presence in their friends' lives, and by doing so that their friends would experience Jesus in their midst."
(Richard) Looking at what we talked about before, with the increased interest in Christ that you're seeing, what do you think young people are looking for when it comes to faith and life? What's driving this?
Brian: "Well, there's a lot of pressure on students to have it all figured out and to be perfectly assembling the life that they want to live. They feel like they have the tools and everything's at their fingertips, and the pressure is in making the choices to optimize life and to have the fulfillment that they feel like is on their responsibility to create. I think what that leads to is a gap between what they're experiencing out of life and what they could be experiencing out of life. Because of that, there's a lot of internal pressure to get it right out of the gates, and then there's a lot of self-frustration or blame or missed expectations around what they're lacking. And for a lot of students, an increasing number who don't grow up with any sort of faith background, who haven't had any sort of rooted framework of the difference that following God makes in life and the ways in which setting your life on a trajectory of following Jesus for the long haul can root resonate and establish all of those elements."
Brian adds, "I would say that students, when they come across friends who have found that following Jesus really is good and true and makes a difference, they are interested in knowing 'what would that look like for me and could this be the antidote to the gap that I'm feeling?' And so, for Greek InterVarsity, that's part of why the being one friend away is so central is the idea of students being able to express this in their life, experiencing Jesus in ways that are true and deep and profound, not just perfunctory or walking through the motions, but that they would experience it as real and true so that they can speak out of that place of this truly being good news for their friends and these friends that are trying to figure this out. Trying to piece this together and have very little access to the sort of resources of knowing the opportunity of what it means to follow Jesus, that they would have someone guide them as a friend walking with them, helping them discover what that looks like."
With God's guidance, just one person, Ava, has made an incredible inroad into sharing faith and friendship at a single university
"I was just on campus two weeks ago at Purdue University in Indiana, and I met Ava, who's a Delta Gamma there, and she was telling me a little bit about her story and when she was a freshman and she first came to campus, she was nervous. She said that when you come to college, you don't know if your faith is going to take a terrible turn, 'but for me it was the exact opposite because of Greek IV.'
And the reason for that is that she quickly got connected to the community of Greek IV that we had on campus and started coming to some of the weekly gatherings that spanned all the different fraternities and sororities. And because she got plugged in with a discipleship group, meeting with a staff member, she could grow in her faith and build some deeper relationships. And she said that in that space, her faith deepened and she really began to grow and mature. And because she was feeling the effect of what that community and engaging deeply with scripture and having friends who could encourage her in her faith, what that was creating in her, she realized that she didn't just want that for herself, but she also wanted that for all of her sisters in Delta Gamma. And so, she started a chapter ministry or her sorority, and that quickly grew to over 60 women in the sorority involved on a weekly basis.
There's multiple different studies and groups now happening within the sorority, and as she then became the president of the sorority, she handed off that leadership to the next leader coming behind her that she's developed. But because of her outreach, the women that joined Delta Gamma now aren't asking the same question that she did of, 'can I hold onto my faith? Is this something that's congruent with being in this sorority?' Instead, the majority of them think that it's completely natural to follow Jesus in this environment, and in fact, this would be the very place that they would grow in their faith the most."
Interest in Jesus seems unstoppable
"I mean, what is happening at the university, well at Purdue, is extraordinary from what I've seen happen over the years when I was there last week, there's over a hundred students like Ava that are leaders taking risks in word and deed across the Greek system there. That means that out of the 6,500 students that are in a fraternity or sorority at Purdue, one out of six of them are actively involved on a weekly basis in a Bible study in one of the fraternities or sororities on campus connected to Greek InterVarsity. It's gotten to the point that they can no longer meet in fraternities or sororities for the Greek IV all campus gatherings because they're starting to break fire code and they've become the largest student group on the campus. So much so that the president of the university is going to come to one of the next meetings in order to see exactly what's happening."
InterVarsity is active on around 650 campuses across the United States, of which Greek InterVarsity is working on about 50 of those.
You can hear our complete compelling podcast interview with Brian Mann just below:
