He started Reformed University Fellowship with a vision of students ministering to students and learning to love the local church.
Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) founder Mark Lowrey choked back tears as he described the vision that inspired his ministry at The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) in the early 1970s.
“We were gonna impact the world with the gospel, and people were gonna understand who Christ was, and they were gonna come to him, and they were gonna be part of his church,” he said in a 2023 video celebrating the 50th anniversary of RUF.
Lowrey died on Christmas Eve at age 78, but not before seeing RUF spread to 177 university campuses in 43 states, employing 160 ordained ministers, 57 women in staff roles, and 157 interns. Lowrey also spent more than 25 years with Great Commission Publications, a curriculum ministry jointly supported by the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC).
Born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on September 27, 1945, Lowrey earned his undergraduate degree from USM and served one tour in Vietnam with the army before enrolling at Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) in Jackson, Mississippi.
In 1971 Lowrey was approached by leaders from three Presbyterian churches in Hattiesburg and asked to lead the college ministry at USM. Called “Westminster Fellowship,” the campus ministry had begun in the 1950s as a ministry supported jointly by the three churches and carried out by ordained ministers. But by the early 1970s, the ministry had stalled: It had no USM students. The churches hoped a first-year seminarian would revive the ministry.
“I had been deeply impressed by a speaker at RTS who drove home the church’s unique role in carrying out Christ’s commission to make disciples of all nations,” Lowrey later explained in an essay commemorating …
