PennforJesus History
PennforJesus roots can be found in the very first Jesus Week in the Spring of 1996, when two students, Samuel Kwon and Titi Alailima met to talk about an idea of doing some united events among all the fellowships during the Easter holiday with the purpose of building up the Body of Christ and being a witness to the Penn Community. The planners of that first Jesus Week, and the Jesus Weeks to follow drew together students who had a heart and vision for unity, and it was amongst that core group and core vision that PennforJesus found its beginnings.
In the years immediately following that first Jesus Week, the students meeting together to plan Jesus Week felt a need for more than just a once a year demonstration of unity amongst the believers. Led at the time by Art Canning (for more on Art's life and story, see www.artcanning.com), those planning Jesus Week began to meet to pray and seek God for His vision and heart for unity. The Jesus Week Planning team became the "Umbrella Organization for Christian Fellowship at Penn."
In 2000, after attending The Call DC, a gathering of 500,000 on the mall of DC fasting and praying for 12 hours for God to return to the nation, a student named Luke Stokes was gripped with a passion to see revival at Penn. He used his talent and skills as a webdesigner to create a website called "pennforjesus.com" to be an online vehicle for Christians to communicate and pray for one another. Fully equipped with forums, fellowship listings, calendar events, and a prayer wall, excitement about this new site spread quickly and students rallied around it, sharing testimonies, prayer requests and upcoming fellowship events.
Shortly after the World Trade Center attacks on September 11 in 2001, Penn held its largest campus-wide worship event, with over 300 attendees from both undergraduate and graduate circles. Titled "You Alone," the event focused soley on God. No speaker, no performances... Just worship and prayer to God alone. The organizers felt that God was leading them to focus the event to specifically pray for unity on Penn's campus.
Right after this amazing time of worship and prayer, the leaders of the umbrella organization, the worship night, and pennforjesus.com gathered together. As leaders all with a heart of unity for Penn, they decided to merge their efforts under one banner, and adopt the website's name as the name for their group. Thus PennforJesus was officially established in the Fall of 2001 with the purpose to bring unity the campus fellowships.
In 2003 its leaders came in contact with Campus Renewal Ministries (CRM) and discovered they were part of something God was stirring on many campuses across the nation. Through CRM’s guidance and mentorship PennforJesus refocused its vision to working towards the transformation of the campus on a foundation of unity and united prayer.
In 2007, PennforJesus became part of Campus Renewal Ministries when its leader at the time, Michael Hu, joined staff with CRM to work full-time at UPenn and schools in the surrounding region for the hope and goal of seeing transformation come to their campuses and to our nation by working toward establishing unity and united prayer movements the campus.