“I am more alive outdoors than anywhere else,” says Chuck McAlister.
Chuck McAlister“The outdoors draws us because that is where we can get in touch with something, or Someone, much bigger than ourselves,” McAlister writes in “Adventures in God’s Country” (Bardin & Marsee, 2007).
The South Carolina native is best known around Hot Springs, Ark., as the longtime pastor of The Church at Crossgate Center. To thousands of hunting enthusiasts across the country, however, he is the familiar host of “Adventure Bound Outdoors,” a popular cable TV hunting show he helped launch in 1996.
McAlister traces his love of all things outdoors to his boyhood, when he hunted rabbits and quail with his dad and granddad in the soybean fields around Batesburg. Today, the arc of his life – a geology degree from Clemson University, a U.S. Army commission and service in Korea, seminary training, church pastoring and Southern Baptist denominational leadership – has circled back to his first love: the outdoors. After much soul-searching and prayer, the 56-year-old McAlister has decided to narrow the focus of his calling to concentrate on a ministry designed to introduce the gospel of Jesus to a fraternity he knows well: outdoorsmen.
In a self-described “process of dramatic change,” McAlister resigned his church recently to devote himself full-time to a rebooted version of “Adventure Bound Outdoors,” one that will be offered directly to churches across the country as an evangelism tool to reach men.
It was a difficult decision for McAlister and his wife Janice, who had served Crossgate for 17 years. But there were two “catalysts” that convinced McAlister he was “busier than I wanted to be” in his life. The first was a spectacular wreck in 2008 that happened when the couple was driving home after speaking at a wild game dinner in Frankfort, Ky. After crossing multiple lanes of oncoming traffic and going airborne for 200 feet before crashing back to the ground, McAlister and his wife walked away without serious injury. “I’m not a mystic,” said McAlister, “but I heard God say, ‘I’m not through with you, or you’d be dead. Step up, son.’?”
A second – and, for McAlister, confirming – event occurred earlier this year, when he learned that a home-construction company for which he served as a director was being sued. The company was started by a businessman in McAlister’s church as a ministry to build houses for area pastors at contractor’s cost. McAlister believes the lawsuit is without merit, but said it was “extremely embarrassing” when the story of the civil suit ran in a local newspaper. He viewed the episode as another indication he should “wake up and do things that are most significant and start simplifying my life.”
“The Lord used it as an opportunity to say to us it was time to get on with what we needed to do,” and what he felt he needed to do was take a well-branded television show about hunting and outdoors and develop it as a resource for churches. McAlister and his business partners will offer “Adventure Bound Outdoors” at no cost to churches for airing in their own television markets, and the content can be tailored to fit the church’s needs. Churches can sell local advertising to help pay for the air time.
What always separated “Adventure Bound Outdoors” from the 400-or-so other hunting programs that can be found across the dial of cable and satellite TV was its evangelistic emphasis – the “truth segment,” as McAlister describes it – in which the host wraps up the hunt by sharing the the gospel. That’s the beauty of the show, McAlister said, something he calls “ambush evangelism.”
“We want to catch Bubba sitting at home, burping on his beer,” McAlister said. “Before he realizes it, we have dumped the gospel in his lap and he’s got to do something with it.”
McAlister is convinced that evangelism aimed at outdoorsmen is ripe with opportunity. For several years he has organized and spoken at wild game dinners across the country where, typically, about 10 percent of the men who attend make “salvation decisions.” He also is working with the Canadian National Baptist Convention to incorporate wild game dinners as church-launching events.
Whether hosting a TV show, or preaching Christ at a wild game dinner, or leading wounded Iraq and Afghanistan veterans on a deer hunt, McAlister, a lifelong outdoorsman, is using something he has in common with many others in order to present the gospel. “It’s love for the outdoors,” he said. “That’s the common ground we meet them on, and they can come from there into a relationship with Jesus Christ.”
The message McAlister would share with an outdoorsman, one that might resonate with a man who would pause to gaze at a sunrise from the quiet sanctuary of a deer stand, might best be summarized at the end of the devotional, “Getting Outdoors,” from McAlister’s book:
“I’m convinced that creation gives us a taste of the experience of having a relationship with God through his Son, Jesus Christ. When I experience God’s creation as a believer in Christ and one who knows him intimately, I have an opportunity, through His majesty, to know His personal touch. And, after all, that’s why God made what He made – so that we could know Him personally.”