Winter Jam / Downtown Chattanooga

Friday evening, Kevin and I met up with our evangelism team and went to the UTC Arena where Winter Jam, a Christian concert, was being held. There were hundreds of people lined up outside waiting to go in so it was the perfect opportunity to hand out tracts.

Here is a video of Ty Cooper talking to some of the people that were in line:


The highlight of the evening for me was getting to see a visiting team member open air preach. I have only seen videos of people open air preaching so to witness it live and in person was a real treat! When we arrived at the arena Ty introduced us to Keith who had come up from Atlanta to help us out. He said that Keith had just finished preaching. I was disappointed that we had missed it so I asked if he would be doing it again. I meant sometime before the night was over but he said sure and walked up the sidewalk and started preaching.

Here are a couple of short videos of Keith's OA. They are not the best quality because they were recorded on my cell phone but they actually turned out better than I thought they would.




After the lines went down, we moved downtown to continue our outreach. After we finally found a place to park, we set out to catch up with the rest of the group. As we made our way down the sidewalk, I was handing out John Piper’s Ten Reasons Jesus Came To Die tracts. I gave one to a man who when he looked down and realized what it was, turned around and stopped us and asked if we could help him. He said that he was out of job and had been looking everywhere for one…he even had a pocket full of job applications. He said he just wanted something to eat. I told him that we might could help him but I wanted to ask him a few questions first. He smiled and said “go for it”. I asked him what he believes happens to people when they die. That was all I had to say…from that point on he began sharing his testimony and ended up preaching. There were people all along the sidewalk listening to what he was saying to. I honestly cannot tell you everything this man said because I was floored but it was Biblical and covered all the bases. The only thing that I did not hear him say specifically was the word repentance so I asked him if he felt that repentance was necessary and he said “oh yes ma’am…you have to repent…do a 180 turn” and then he kept going again. I asked him what his name was so we could pray for him and he held both his hands out…one to me and one to Kevin…and said when people want to pray for me I ask them to pray right now, don’t wait. So we were going to pray for him and before either one of us could get a word out, he started praying. He thanked God for us and what we were doing. He prayed for our families and for our ministry and that God would protect us as we shared the gospel with people. Now I realize that he could have been just be telling us what we wanted to hear but I will give him the benefit of the doubt because he was telling me what I wanted to hear and it was sound and seemed sincere. We gave him some money to get something to eat. That was by far the most interesting conversation of the evening. The rest of the evening went well. We did have quite