‘Gentlemen, start your engines’

More than 4,500 attended the 20th “Bring-a-Kid” rally in May.

Hundreds of dads, sons, mothers and daughters gathered on a large grassy lot with little shade to hear gospel choruses and testimonies about how Christ can change lives and to celebrate a ministry. But this is anything but a typical church service. It’s a pre-race rally held at the local track.

More than 4,500 race fans attended the 20th “Bring-A-Kid” pre-race rally May 12 at the Darlington Raceway, just prior to the Diamond Hill Plywood 200. The event also marked the 30th anniversary of Raceway Ministries, a nationwide ministry that originated with Welsh Neck Baptist Association.

Morgan Shepherd

The “Bring-A-Kid” rally featured race car driver Morgan Shepherd, a pit crew member for the ACDelco team, and the “Noisy Joy” ensemble of Black Creek Baptist Church, Darlington.

Shepherd, whose #89 car displays the name “Jesus,” told the crowd that while he wants to be competitive as a racer, his main focus is “educating as many people as we can about salvation and God’s plan for them.”

Acknowledging that his life has been plagued with drinking problems and failed marriages, Shepherd told how his life changed after he accepted Christ as his savior. “My life was a mess,” he said, but “if you just turn things over to Jesus, things will change.”

After attending his first Bring-A-Kid event as South Carolina Baptist’s state evangelism director, Marshall Fagg called the Darlington rally “kingdom evangelism at its best.”

Tommy DeWitt, left, expresses appreciation to race track president Chris Browning.

“While intentional, the presentation of the gospel gives countless numbers of people, who seldom, if ever, hear the message in church, the opportunity to be exposed to the good news of Jesus Christ,” Fagg noted.

“It also helps unchurched people understand Christians enjoy NASCAR events as much as they do. That alone may draw some to the savior,” he said.

“It’s a miraculous ministry,” agrees Welsh Neck’s director of missions David Dinkins. “The church is truly getting outside the walls through this ministry to reach the world for Christ.”

Attendance at the rally grew from about 800 in 1987 to a peak of 11,600 in 2001. When the race was shifted to a nighttime start, attendance waned because of the distance for some upstate church groups, according to Linda DeWitt, a member of Welsh Neck’s raceway ministry team. However, “attendance is increasing again,” she noted, emphasizing that more than 4,500 turned out for this year’s rally.

The “Bring-A-Kid to the Race” event is the brainchild of her husband Tommy, a Darlington-area ambulance driver and member of West Hartsville Baptist Church. Knowing that NASCAR’s popularity was on the rise, he approached racetrack officials with the rally idea as “a great way to reach men and boys with the gospel.”

30 Years – David Dinkins, left, and Marshall Fagg, right, congratulate Ed Quattlebaum on the Darlington Raceway Ministries’ three decades of outreach during this year’s “Bring-a-Kid” rally, which featured driver Morgan Shepherd.

Raceway Ministries, which sponsors the rally, was begun in 1976 after Ed Quattlebaum, then director of missions for Welsh Neck Baptists, attended a conference for state directors of missions at which a speaker suggested that one place where Baptists needed to begin an outreach ministry was at the Darlington racetrack. “Wow, that’s in my association,” Quattlebaum thought.

Quattlebaum could not get away from the vision of starting a ministry to race fans. “It hit me like a ton of bricks right between the eyes,” he said. While some initially objected, Quattlebaum was convinced there was a real need for the ministry.

“We felt so strongly that God wanted us to do this ministry, we launched out on faith, believing that he would supply what we needed, and he did,” Quattlebaum said.

In the first of many tracts developed by the fledgling raceway ministry, leaders urged race fans, “The greatest race of all cannot be run in a Ford, Chevrolet or Plymouth, but it can be won by giving your life to Jesus Christ.”

About a year later, a Darlington-area pastor encountered a man at a North Carolina mall who had found the Lord through one of those tracts, and whose family was now involved in church. That affirmed what Quattlebaum had believed all along: The ministry is an effective means of sharing the plan of salvation.

At a South Carolina Baptist Convention annual meeting, a former sportswriter shared how she had found the Lord through the Darlington ministry. She had interviewed Quattlebaum about the ministry, and the next spring, she wrote to him that she had given her heart to the Lord and had joined a church.

That spring when she came by the Raceway Ministries booth during the race, “she had a big smile on her face and was excited about being baptized on the following Sunday,” he recalled.

Raceway Ministries has since expanded from the Darlington track to include at least seven NASCAR tracks nationwide, as other directors of missions have caught the vision.

While it is difficult to gauge the full impact of the ministry, Quattlebaum maintains, “God has blessed our work beyond my fondest dreams. He will bring joy to our hearts and to the hearts we reach if we will dare to share the good news in unusual places.”