If downtown Chattanooga seems to have been populated by more young adults than usual the past five days, it actually has been.
Some 5,000 college students and leaders have been here to attend the national conference of Campus Outreach, a network of interdenominational Christian organizations which focus on relationally based evangelizing and discipling college students worldwide.
"The state of Tennessee was a good rallying point for our ministry," said Dave Russell, a Washington, D.C.-based regional director for the organization. "The city of Chattanooga and the [Convention and] Visitors Bureau wanted to work with us and were excited to work with us. Chattanooga is the right fit."
Jennye Miller, director of religious accounts for the Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the gathering is the largest convention of college students here in her 30 years with the organization.
The 5,000 students and staff members, she said, are spread among 10 hotels and will generate an economic impact of $3.6 million.
Campus Outreach, which began in Birmingham in 1978, is now located in 19 states and globally in Australia, South Africa and Brazil.
It has not been established in any Chattanooga area college but has ministries at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee Technological University and the University of Memphis.
Unlike other campus outreach organizations, it is a decentralized ministry with no formal headquarters but is grouped into 24 regional franchises, according to Russell.
Its ministries are primarily located in smaller colleges and universities, with each ministry autonomous but under the authority of a local church, he said.
Although this is Campus Outreach's first national conference since 2000, a New Year's conference in which several regions come together is held every year, Kyle Mercer, campus director for the organization at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, said prior to the conference.
"I'm excited for its global impact in the sense that all of our staff will be together," he said. "I'm also excited every time college students can come together for five days to get away from the distractions of life."
The year-end conferences of 300 to 600 people often foster not only faith decisions, said Mercer, who has 103 students here this week, but also decisions about upcoming mission opportunities and career choices.
"A lot of decisions are made this week," he said. "We set the course for them to happen at this conference. They are some very, very fruitful times."
Attendees at the conference, which began on Wednesday, were to have heard from speakers that included John Piper, a Chattanooga native who is pastor for preaching and vision at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis; Matt Chandler, lead pastor of The Village Church in Highland Village, Texas; J.D. Greear, lead pastor at the Summit Church of Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; and Harry Reeder, senior pastor of Briarwood Presbyterian Church.
Piper, according to Mercer, spoke at the 2000 national conference, embraced Campus Outreach and helped challenge it to expand its ministries. Chandler, he said, grew a church of 150 people into a megachurch and has become "one of the most gifted teachers and preachers in the world" despite challenges that have included a brain tumor.
Greear, he said, pastors a church of more than 6,000 people, and Reeder, he said, is credited with bringing Campus Outreach to North Carolina before he moved to the Birmingham church, where the Presbyterian Church in America denomination was organized in 1973.
"They've brought in some of the best preachers in the world," he said.
Russell said the national conference is an investment for those who attend.
"It's an opportunity to invest in their relationship with Jesus Christ," he said. For those who are not believers in Christ, "it's an experience to make a change or transition in their life from the power of the Gospel."
To see live streaming of the last day of the conference, visit conationalconference.org.