History and Vision

Super Summer Texas began in 1974 as a training opportunity for Christian young people who wanted to know more about how to share Christ with others. God impressed Dr. George Worrell to begin training young people through the Super Summer schools of evangelism. Originally begun as a cooperative effort for several churches in Texas, groups met for school sessions in Dallas area church buildings. Students were housed in the homes of volunteer church members and bused to their school locations each day. They met in their separate locations for schools until evening, when they were transported to a central location for an evening worship service, which came to be known as Rainbow Celebration.

Since that early beginning, interest in Super Summer has grown. The Evangelism Division of the Baptist General Convention of Texas undertook the challenge of meeting the changing needs and demands for this exciting but disciplined week of evangelism training. Super Summer was moved to the Baylor University campus where all students could stay in the dorms, participate in recreational activities together and join again each evening for Rainbow Celebration.

Under the direction of Gil Stricklin, during his tenure as Youth Evangelism Associate at the Baptist General Convention of Texas, Super Summer continued to experience an exciting growth. As Stricklin once observed, “There is difficulty in putting summer sounds and spiritual insights on paper with ink. How do you show the convicting certainty of the Holy Spirit, yielding of a stubborn individual young person’s will, blossoming of a new friendship, mastering of material that prepares you to witness to a school peer and discover God’s will for you, plus laughter, tears, deep thoughts, pain, questioning, love and other important intangibles? You cannot.” Super Summer includes all these things.

Super Summer is now hosted by other Texas Baptist universities, offering a choice of locations for student ministries from Texas and neighboring states. God continues to bless the perseverance towards the goal of teaching students to know and share the gospel. The success of Super Summer is not measured by the 150,000 plus students who have attended over the years, but by the countless times that those students shared the gospel.