Logan Bryant had just experienced Freshman Retreat—an overnight getaway to Shocco Springs where around 900 Samford University newcomers mixed praise and worship with rock climbing and spikeball. As 18 charter buses loaded up for the 45-minute ride back to campus, Bryant needed to phone home to Clinton, Mississippi.

“Mom,” he said, “I cannot wait to tell you about this weekend.”

The retreat’s impact penetrated so deeply he couldn’t delay reporting back to his family. Bryant needed to convey how the small-group discussions compelled classmates to share about God, and how comforted all the freshmen felt in their new surroundings.

“If your parents went to college, they know what it’s like to feel alone for the first time and feel isolated,” Bryant said. “But hearing that I had found a community, and that I had an absolute blast getting to know people, my mom could feel my excitement through the phone.”

Such outcomes are exactly what Bobby Gatlin envisioned when he became Samford’s campus pastor in 2019. Back then the retreat was drawing about 200 freshmen, and Gatlin aspired to grow appeal by repackaging the event to make it something more freshmen would want to attend, especially more of the male students.

“I have been working with students my entire career,” Gatlin said, “with tons of opportunities to create retreats and experiences for large groups, so I felt confident in what would attract these 18-year-olds to participate. I wanted the retreat to be a place where students could get excited about their faith and being at Samford while also having space to connect with others and continue finding community. So, we designed an environment and picked a location where students can actually have a good time.”

Now the retreat has grown four-fold, fueled in part by the Shocco Springs recreational amenities that include an aqua park, water slides, basketball and putt-putt golf. The play-and-pray vibe is yielding results. With most of the freshman class attending the past two years, Gatlin is witnessing the retreat become “pretty much a mass movement,” where students kick off their college careers with spiritual momentum.

Another aspect of attendance growth involves older students volunteering to serve as small-group leaders, which Gatlin calls “the secret in the sauce.” The 100 or so upperclassmen undergo training that prepares them to guide discussions at the retreat, but it’s their intrinsic ability to build trust—often through sharing about their own struggles—that makes them crucial. They become built-in mentors for the freshmen with the ability to forge long-term connections.

“When the small-group leader sees those freshmen in sorority and fraternity recruitment, or when they see them at the Caf, they can ask, ‘How are you doing?’ And they can sit down and talk about some things,” Gatlin said. “It’s creating relational pathways that, in the best-case scenario, help freshmen acclimate and gives them someone to talk to, because you feel like fish out of water when you first get here.”

Because Gatlin’s own children attended Samford, he understands the importance of older students pouring into freshmen.

 “You want your kids to meet the caliber of student that you hope they will look up to,” he said. “These are individuals you want freshmen to emulate. You want your child to have a Samford story like theirs, a faith walk like theirs, and an involvement pattern like theirs.”

Electric Environment

Gatlin could envision expanding to a two-day retreat, though for now his team is content packing a revelatory experience into 24 hours. Amid the sermons, testimonials, and the student worship band performing, students feel galvanized from the outset.  

“There’s something really electric about 8 o'clock that Friday night,” Gatlin said. “The leaders are excited, the band is excited, and the freshmen come in really energetic about that first worship environment of their college time at Samford. They’re at this university that they’ve been looking forward to, and now they see the heartbeat behind the place.”

The retreat typically lands one week after the start of fall semester classes, a purposeful date aimed at helping newcomers make immediate connections.

“It's exciting for us as a team to see that this is the start of a new year, and we’re going to ask God to really move, to really speak, and to really help create relational opportunities,”  he said.

The retreat offers students an out-of-the-gate reminder that faith needn’t be compartmentalized at Samford.

 “It begins the process of normalizing that at Samford, it’s OK to talk about your faith and to be outspoken about how things are going,” Gatlin said. “It's a new experience for students coming from public high schools to see that we pray in our classrooms. They’re adjusting to this new environment, where it’s OK to talk about God and Jesus.”

 Among the most touching moments are when students undergo a salvation experience or a recommitment. Small-group leaders frequently host one-on-one conversations late into the night with freshmen who are wrestling with turmoil or facing deep questions. Some students take the opportunity to share personally how they’re seeing God work.

“It’s not always beautiful. Some of the stories are tragic and painful, yet God has redeemed and healed some of that,” Gatlin said. “We all need to realize that God is still working in all of us. He’s in the process of bringing us to a place that he wants us to be and working the good into our lives that He has planned. It’s not always the easy path, but He’s always faithful. He’s always there. As we talk about those things out loud, it’s helpful for students who have a preconceived notion that they’re supposed to put on this shell of Christianity to show that everything’s great in my life. We’re here to be honest, to be vulnerable, and to put some people into your life that you can look up to.”

Faith on Fire

Bryant, the freshman from Mississippi, not only marveled at the soul-stirring nature of the retreat, but at the circumstances that steered him to Samford in the first place.

As part of a soccer family—his father founded the Billa soccer ministry and his older brother was a standout midfielder for Davidson College—Bryant grew up dreaming of playing in college.

His grandparents had attended Samford, but the school wasn’t initially on Bryant’s radar because Samford doesn’t field a men’s soccer team. 

“Then I woke up one morning last year and literally felt the Lord tell me, ‘You're not supposed to play college soccer.’ That felt so weird, because that’s all I ever wanted to do,” Bryant said.

Over the following week, when a series of people randomly mentioned Samford’s sports marketing and data analytics program, it didn’t seem random at all. Bryant realized he could use his degree to grow the ministry as a business, and Samford became his top choice. Paying for Samford became his next obstacle.

“Quite honestly, my family could not afford this place without the financial generosity of the school,” he said. “I just felt the Lord telling me, ‘It’s OK, I'm calling you there.’ But I wondered how it would happen.”

When his first scholarship package last December was nowhere near enough money to attend, Bryant tried to stay faithful. In January he missed out on a series of business scholarships, and Bryant wondered, “God, is this where I’m supposed to be?" Still, he felt at peace.

Then came February, when his home church conducted a daily prayer initiative called “P28”—praying for one thing for one minute at 1 p.m. every day during the month. Bryant focused his prayers on Samford and on Feb. 28 he received text from his admissions counselor. 

“She said to check your application status page, and there it was: four scholarships I had no idea I was in the running for. I jumped up and down for joy,” he said.

On Feb. 29, came the icing, as Bryant was accepted into the sports marketing program. In March, more leftover scholarship money found Bryant. “It was down to literally the last cent that I needed to be able to come to school here without taking out a loan,” he said.

By the time Bryant joined his freshman classmates at the retreat, waves of gratitude engulfed him. “I looked up during worship and saw a campus that was going to be on fire for the Lord,” he said, “and I was so excited I get to be here for the next four years with these people.”

Bryant estimated he shared his testimony more during the first four weeks on campus than he had done in his time at home. The Lord is moving here in deep, intentional conversations.

“I think it's easy to get caught up in cultural Christianity, like putting a quote on a website or your Instagram bio or on a T-shirt,” he said. “But when you walk the walk and get together as a freshman class, you start off with the mindset of, ‘Hey, we're all in this together.’ We all want to get to know each other better, and then walk together in in our faith journey. Every morning I wake up feeling beyond blessed, and I know there are a lot of those Samford stories.”