When the city’s parks and recreation manager shows up at your evangelistic block party, it could be bad – you might be reprimanded for noise, crowds, lack of appropriate permits, being “too” evangelistic, or any number of offenses, real or perceived.
Bobby Spires and Luke Beasley, youth leaders from Gaston First, witness to a young man from the neighborhood.Or you could be told, as the pastor of First Church, Gaston, relates: “?’This week has done more for this community for breaking down barriers, rivalries, than anything we’ve done. If we’d known the impact you were going to have, we would have gotten more involved. Would you please come back and give us another chance?’ “
Larry Harrison recalls hearing exactly that from a city official at his church’s June 17 block party in the Hyatt Park area of downtown Columbia. Such a response, he says, is one of numerous reasons he employs the block party as an evangelism tool.
“It energizes me, just as when a little second grade boy leans against a tree and asks me, ‘Preacher, what are we doing tomorrow? When are you coming back?’?” he said, launching into a lengthy list of other grateful responses he’s heard at block parties just in 2011.
“It’s not about bringing in 2,000 or even 6,000 people. It’s about their stories, their lives, and, especially, their salvation,” said Harrison, who, along with his wife Debbie, began utilizing block parties six years ago when he was pastor of Sisk Memorial Church in Fort Mill.
Harrison is referring to real numbers: the 2,000-plus at a block party in Columbia, the 6,000-plus at one in Gaston in March, and the expected 5,000 at one planned for Orangeburg in September. The professions of faith: more than 200 in Columbia, 175 in Gaston.
The Hyatt Park area of Columbia, like the Lorick Park area next door to it, is one of the highest crime zones in the capital city. According to Harrison, one apartment complex in the neighborhood has 763 children living in 200 units, and 80 percent of the parents are unemployed.
Child Evangelism Fellowship, in conjunction with Columbia International University and volunteers from Gaston First Church, held an afternoon party June 13-16 in Lorick Park and then a large end-of-week party at Hyatt Park that Friday.
Columbia International University, which was training 96 summer missionaries that week, had requested the block parties as a means for hands-on evangelism practice. A representative from Child Evangelism Fellowship had had a booth at Gaston First’s block party in Gaston in March and requested to be involved in their next event. Between those two groups and the volunteers from Gaston First, almost 150 people served at the week’s events.
The Friday block party included inflatables, food (from snow cones to hot dogs with side dishes), a mechanical swing, displays from community groups and ministries, a petting zoo, McGruff the Crime Dog, and more. The Monday-through-Thursday events included the same, though on a smaller scale.
“On Friday, after we’d gotten everything set up, we just stepped aside and let those summer missionaries basically run the party,” said Harrison, “and it was so exciting to have one after another come up to me and tell me how they’d just led someone to Christ.”
He said his church chose the Hyatt and Lorick park areas precisely because they are “kind of a forgotten area. I could go in places everybody else is going, but what about these people no one wants?”
Cindy Furtick, a member of First Church, Gaston, who volunteered each day along with her two elementary-school children, echoed her pastor’s thoughts: “What was really sad was some churches in that neighborhood had said to some of the adults that they didn’t want their kids in their church. What if God said that to us? None of us would be worthy enough.”
One afternoon Furtick and Harrison talked with a neighborhood resident, Ms. Linda, who sat in her wheelchair observing the block party. “She said she’d been living there 11 years, that she really appreciated our coming out there, and that it was really good to see their children playing with each other instead of fighting each other,” Furtick said. “That really helped me and my girls grasp what it was like to live in that neighborhood. It was a very humbling, very tiring, very wonderful experience.”
Not least among the week’s highlights: a 21-year-old neighborhood resident who, unprompted, helped the volunteers set up and breakdown each day. When told about the gospel, he responded that “these people” – the volunteers – had no idea who he was or how he lived, that God could never forgive or save a person like him.
“Then, on Friday,” Harrison said, “this young man comes up and says to me, ‘This guy from that biker church just led me to Jesus.’ That’s what it’s all about.” – SCBC