Since 2023, Vineyard USA has been cultivating a multifaceted partnership with InterVarsity, one of the largest college campus ministries in the US. One of the highlights of our partnership has been the Ambition conference. In January 2025, members of the Vineyard USA National Team coordinated the gathering of Vineyard pastors and leaders from around the country to attend InterVarsity’s Ambition conference to do one simple thing: pray for students. While the Lord moved in really beautiful ways during conference sessions, he also planted seeds for the future. This story is shared with permission from Ambition staff.
At Ambition, staff Kalena Young was deeply moved by a late-night session of prayer over students. She noticed something in particular – Vineyard pastors were right in the middle of it — praying, serving, fully present. After Ambition, she was intrigued and started attending a Vineyard church in Fort Collins, CO. What she found was a congregation with InterVarsity in its DNA.
Jeff and Natalie – the Vineyard pastors – had been student leaders in InterVarsity during college. They were insistent from the beginning that they wanted to serve IV- “Any way we can be a resource to you, we want to be that resource.” They meant it.
By spring semester, Kalena and her staff colleague in Fort Collins – Cullen – were having similar discipleship conversations on their separate campuses — students wrestling with singleness, relationships, and surrender. The topics kept coming up. But something was missing. “I feel like I’m speaking into these things,” Kalena told Cullen, “but it doesn’t have an oomph to it.” Cullen was experiencing the same thing. What their students needed, they realized, wasn’t just another staff conversation. They needed to hear from someone who had walked the road — a voice with pastoral weight and lived experience.
So they asked Jeff and Natalie to lead an event together.
Three InterVarsity chapters across Northern Colorado came together on a single night. Jeff and Natalie spoke on surrender and lordship in the areas of relationships and singleness. Students listened. The room got quiet in the way rooms do when something true is being said.
Then came the invitation. Five students responded to a call to faith. Afterward, InterVarsity staff and Vineyard volunteers lined the walls of the room, ready to pray. Students who had held things close all year — the vulnerable, the stuck, the quietly struggling — started walking toward them. Kalena found herself praying with students she’d never seen open up before.
“There was significant breakthrough,” she said afterward, “for quite a few students who were stuck in some things.” The night ended with pizza, a Q&A, and a room full of students who didn’t want to leave. That event didn’t come out of a formal partnership agreement or a strategic plan. It came out of Kalena showing up to a church, noticing something, and following the thread. It came out of two pastors who never forgot what it meant to be an InterVarsity student. It came out of staff workers honest enough to say, we need help with this.
The partnership is growing. Kalena is joining Vineyard’s prayer team. Natalie is meeting with her this summer to read and discuss prayer together. The campuses are already talking about what comes next. Sometimes the Church shows up for our students in ways we didn’t plan for — and it changes everything.