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BARBARA DENMAN & VANESSA RODRIGUEZ
Florida Baptist Convention
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| Matt Holtsclaw, youth minister at Mt. Nebo Baptist Church in Bell, prays with an Ocala man after sharing the plan of salvation with him. FBC photo by Vanessa Rodriguez |
OCALA (FBC)—Seated in the pews of Wyomina Baptist Church, 160 youth from 12 churches across Florida listened intently, training to take the Gospel to Ocala’s communities. When their activity was complete, 11 spiritually lost souls would be won for Christ during the Nov. 12 “Student Jesus Project.”
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The event was part of the “Celebrate Jesus” evangelistic outreach held prior to the annual Florida Baptist State Convention meeting Nov. 14-15 at Ocala’s First Baptist Church. Other witness training events were held simultaneously at First Baptist Church of Belleview, College Road Baptist Church and Primera Iglesia Bautista de Marion Oaks. The day of intensive training involved 276 persons and resulted in 35 professions of faith.
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| Justin Lowery, 12, of Jacksonville, visited Ocala neighborhoods as part of Celebrate Jesus. FBC photo |
“God is looking for leaders on your campus and in your youth ministries who are serious about Him and serious about leading their peers to Christ,” Jeff Hessinger, director of the Florida Baptist Convention’s Personal Evangelism Department, told the students.
“It is not by church attendance or by works that we come to faith in Christ, but through a relationship with Christ that we are saved,” he said repeatedly.
Determined to stir a sense of urgency within the youth to share the Gospel throughout the day and every day of their lives, Hessinger asked the students: “How well do you know God? How well do you know the Word of God? And how is your soul winning?”
For 15-year-old Brittany Jennings, a member of the host church, the evangelistically driven event was a first time experience.
Following a morning of witness training, Jennings partnered with an adult counselor and went door-to-door in a newly developed community near the church to conduct surveys and engage community residents in spiritual conversations.
As she and her partner walked the streets they met two boys from Jennings’s school.
“I was nervous and scared but also excited,” said the tenth grader. “People in school know that I am a Christian, but I never had the guts to talk about my faith like this.”
The team asked the students if they knew God and proceeded to use the “EvangeCube,” an illustrated evangelistic tool, to share the Gospel. The young men accepted Christ and committed to attending a rally held in conjunction with the day’s events.
“Their accepting Christ was exciting for me,” Jennings said. “After talking to them and others who were complete strangers and asking if people wanted to talk about God, I am more open to the idea of talking about Jesus and my faith.”
During the evening Student Jesus Rally, also held at Wyomina, Ashley Green, 16, was among the 15 people who received Christ as their personal savior.
Green attended the event with First Baptist Church, Ocala, youth group, participating in the day-long evangelistic activities that took the students into the community.
She had visited First Baptist in Ocala over the past month as a “casual participant” of various events and service projects. But when she repeatedly heard the message that salvation is a matter of faith, not works, she decided to follow Christ, said youth minister Scott Clark.
Hearing this message at both the evangelism training and the rally helped her realize she needed to be saved, said Clark, who baptized Green in the next day’s worship service.
The event benefited the students and his ministry, Clark added.
“With most evangelistic techniques, training occurs over the course of several weeks. Through this event and using the E-cube, students are able to go out and share right away and that kind of reinforcement is key,” Clark said. “Seeing people come to know Christ outside the church walls is also great.”
In all, 26 young people came to know Christ through the Student Jesus Project evangelistic outreach, 386 surveys were attempted and 97 Gospel presentations were made.
“No one has a story like yours,” John Long, associate pastor at First Baptist Church of Belleview, told the 35 persons from four Florida Baptist churches that participated in the training event at his church. “And no one can tell your story. Our objective here is to help you tell your story.”
Long told participants: “I can’t find anywhere in the Scripture where there is a gift of evangelism. All of us have the mandate to practice evangelism.”
Don McCutcheon, director of the Convention’s Evangelism Strategy Department who led the training explained: “There are multiple ways to share your faith. The electrician doesn’t carry the same tool as the plumber, the plumber does not carry the same tools as the repairman, but there are some basic tools that each of them use.”
After McCutcheon demonstrated the use of the EvangeCube, the hand method, life and death cards, and the Marked New Testament, the participants practiced with each other to find with which method each was most comfortable.
McCutcheon shared with them that even before they gathered at the church, “God was opening hearts” in anticipation of their visits. “When you are on mission with and for God, He goes ahead of you to prepare hearts,” he said.
After the training, four teams were dispatched into the surrounding neighborhoods charged with visiting prospects. Two divine appointments resulted.
Sarah Fitzgerald and her team knocked on the door of one house and learned that the prospect they were visiting no longer lived there. So they began to talk to a 41-year-old man outside painting his new house.
The man said he recently moved to the area from Vermont where he was employed by Anheuser-Busch. Remembering a recent article in the Florida Baptist Witness, Fitzgerald began telling the man that the beer company had distributed canned water to hurricane victims in South Florida.
The connection led to the presentation of the Gospel and the newcomer prayed to receive Christ. “I’ve always had difficulty making the transition from getting acquainted with someone to sharing the Gospel,” Fitzgerald recalled. “This was the first visit I have ever [been] where it was just easy.”
Belleview Pastor Ronnie Walker and his team were about to give up after finding no one home during their visits. Returning to the church, they decided to go back out another time.
On their last visit they discovered an elderly woman whose husband had recently died. After hearing about his death, they began to talk to the woman about her own spiritual life, Walker reported. After she said she thought she was a Christian, “We told her we wanted her to be sure,” Walker said. The team walked her through the EvangeCube and she “prayed to receive the Lord.”
The pastor’s wife, Alice Walker, said she planned to call the woman and visit her within 48 hours of her salvation experience, a tip shared in the training. “She needs that cultivation as she deals with her grief.”
“I wish every church in the Florida Baptist State Convention would do this once a year,” said David Burton, director of the Convention’s Evangelism Division. “Most won’t and then we wonder why baptisms are down. You don’t have to be an evangelist to share Christ. You are commanded to share and serve.”