By: Madelynn Brower
A decade ago, Pastor Reginald Horton and his wife, LeShawn, began building a team for a student-led church service: Merge Worship. This year, Merge is celebrating its 10-year anniversary with current students and alumni in attendance.
In 2015, LeShawn Horton had only recently begun teaching at Southern’s School of Nursing, where she is now the director of the Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program.
The couple had just moved from California and were visiting local churches in the area when they came across Orchard Park Seventh-day Adventist Church, an African American congregation. The amount of student involvement at Orchard Park inspired Horton to build a similar worship service closer to Southern’s campus with a gospel-inspired worship style. Since then, Merge has become a multicultural gathering for students from many different ethnic backgrounds.
“We’re very student-focused and student-led at the same time,” said Caleb Hoffman, a senior computer science major and Merge worship coordinator. “We try to reach out to students with students, and we’re very passionate and focused on building a solid, consistent community of people who just want to worship God.” According to Horton, students who serve at Merge have the opportunity to develop their individual gifts through service and leadership. Different teams of students are put together to lead in various areas, something that Horton started when he began to develop Merge’s student leadership.
“One of the objectives was to invite students to lead out in various ministries in the church, and what he did was really genius in that he looked at the gifts of everybody that he invited to be on the team [and then] he asked if they would be in charge of that particular area of ministry,” said LeShawn Horton.
Horton is one of the Collegedale Church of Seventh-day Adventists’ collegiate pastors, whose specific role is to oversee Merge, which is under the jurisdiction of the church.
Merge Worship has moved locations several times. It originally met in Talge chapel, then moved to Lynn Wood Hall auditorium and finally set up in the former Collegedale Academy Elementary gym, which serves as its current meeting place.
While Merge is very student-oriented, it also focuses on community outreach. Lorena Horton, who graduated from Southern in 2025 and has worked with Merge for the past two years, spoke about some of the outreach efforts.
“A main point going forward for Merge is definitely community outreach and actually being the hands and feet of Jesus,” she said. “[To] be doers of the Word, and not merely hearers.”
Over the past 10 years, Merge has grown from a small group of 20 students to between 200 and 300 attendees every week.
“On average, we have about 10 [students] a semester who get baptized,” said Horton. “So, we’re not just a worship service, per se, but we’re also an ongoing evangelistic meeting. If you had to really ask me what’s the most powerful thing about Merge, it would be to give students the opportunity to serve God and to accept Him as their Lord and Savior.”
