J.D. Griffith walked off the subway and onto the bustling streets of midtown Manhattan. It was an April evening, cold and rainy, and he was a long way from home.

As he stepped into a church on Columbus Avenue, the din of the city — the honking cabs, the clattering of trains underground, the screech of brake lines on city buses — receded into silence.

Griffith had come to a special meeting at the LDS chapel with an unusual message. BYU-Idaho, the LDS Church's second largest university, was expanding its reach to students who had never considered college a real option.