Servant Evangelism Mississippi style

This weekend our town was home to Showfest, a minitruck competition. The show brought in about 750 cars and trucsk from across the country and a population increase of about 10,000 people. God blessed our church by placing our campus about 400 yards from this event. For the past three years we have reached out to the participants and the spectators at Showfest. This year we passed out 3000 bottles of water, 500 Relevant magazines, 500 Radiant magazines, 144 bibles, and 40(ish) Purpose Driven Life books. When doing the math, I assumed that probably half of the magazines were given out with a bottle of water so I figure we touched about 3500 people with the love of God. We also cleaned the port-o-potties. We put up tents at three port-o-potty stations and focused on those, but we had some hardcore folks who walked around to clean the other stations.

Sunday morning we were buying tickets for our workers to get in and when the admissions
people heard what were doing they let us come in for free (that saved us alot of cash!). They
were super shocked that anyone would want to clean port-o-potties.

I want to share two stories from this weekend. When we set up our tents on Friday, none
of the participants had arrived yet. Saturday morning was a shock for some of our participants.
I sent them to their tents and within a few minutes one of golf carts (oh yea, we had free taxies
to shuttle people around the event) was back at the main tent with some an update. It seems
that the Girls Gone Wild tent was right beside ours!! That did not daunt our crew. We gave
them water and talked to them all day. At some point of the camera man came over to apologize. It seems that he is a Christian whose company got contracted by GGW. We saw these guys again on Sunday morning when we took free sausage and biscuits to the hotels in town. I think it is great for Christ followers to simply befriend people and be there to support Christians who find themselves in strange situations.

Another one of our tents we privileged to meet Paul. Paul is a young man in the military who
happen to be at the show. Paul was shocked to find someone who actually wished him a
good day. He was even more blown away when one of our girls offered to pray for him. Paul ended up having an extended conversation with one of our ministry leaders and made a commitment to follow God. He gave us his contact information, and our leadership has made a commitment to disciple this man no matter what part of the world he goes to.

On Sunday night, after Showfest, we did out first church wide out reach to our city. We passed out another 1000 bottles of water and washed windshields in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

In just two day our church touched at least 4500 people with God's practical love.