On September 5, 2009, the first college football game was played at the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington, Texas between the University of Oklahoma Sooners and the Brigham Young Cougars. A group of eight of us from Bezeugen Ministries and The Lost Cause Ministries met at the game for open air preaching, tract distribution and one on one witnessing. The new stadium is an impressive site. It is state of the art in every way. We arrived four ours before kickoff and had my wife drop us off just west of the stadium. As we walked to the stadium we got our first close up view of it. We handed out a few tracts at the intersection, even to the policeman who was directing traffic. We proceeded across the street. As you can see from the picture, there were a lot of people tailgating. We set up shop on the sidewalk in that area. There was a steady flow of people coming. We handed out a number of Gospel tracts and then decided to try some open air. I went first and tried some dollar trivia using 2008 statistics for each team. The people had fun trying to gu
ess the name of BYU’s running back, the pass completion percentage of OU’s Heismen winning quarterback and so forth. I gave a dollar for each correct answer. Then the big question! Would someone prove they are a good person for FIVE dollars? I got a taker from the group that was tailgating. I walked through the good test with him and allowed him to examine himself to see how he had broken God’s law. Once I got him to agree that he was not good, I took him to the cross and shared the Gospel of Jesus with him. I told him how Jesus being fully man and fully God was the only acceptible sacrifice for our sins so that His death on the cross made full atonement for us. Then I shared that he must repent and trust Christ to be saved. Afterwards I had a long talk with Hunter and Tyler. Tyler told me he was a believer already and that he was trying to share the Gospel with some atheist friends. I gave him a copy of Ray Comfort’s CD “God doesn’t believe in Atheists”. As we talked more he was looking for a deeper relationship with Christ. So I offered him a copy of Mark Cahill’s book, “One thing you can’t do in heaven”. He said he would read it.
We continued doing open air, one on one conversations and tract distribution at this location with two people while two others from our group went further down the sidewalk and handed out tracts there as well. One ma
n I talked too guaranteed he knew everything there was to know about Oklahoma football. Then looking at the tract he was stumped by the first question about the name of the leading receiver on Oklahoma’s the 1985 National Championship team. After several hints, his wife got tired of waiting for him to guess and gave him the answer from the back. He said, “I was just about to say Keith Jackson!” He and his wife were both believers. I gave them some information about our tract club and then moved on to talk with some other people. After about an hour we moved slightly to the west and continued the same thing for another 30 minutes. Finally we noticed that the bulk of the people were on the North side of the road going down to the east and then crossing over to where our other group was handing out tracts. So we packed up the box, cooler of water and tracts and moved to that location. At about the same time Jon Speed and his group from The Lost Cause Ministries arrived to meet us. After some short fellowship, they proceeded to go a block further east and set up there.
We preached at that cross walk for another two and a half hours. The crowd finally slowed down a bit about fifteen minutes before the game was to kick off. We stayed until kickoff. Thne my wife came back and picked us up. The drop off and pick up worked great. I am very thankful for my wife and youngest son to hang out for the afternoon and save us the money on parking.
A couple of things that we noticed. First, the Oklahoma Trivia tracts were a big hit! The OU fans
would snatch them up, some people even came back to us to get one or to get an extra one to give to a friend. Second, the BYU fans were leary of “Oklahoma Trivia” but we would say, “hey, you need to know your enemy, right?” and then many of them would take one too. Our friends from TLC were giving the BYU fans others tracts, which was a very good idea. We had a number of other tracts with us as well, but we did not tend to give out many of them. The phrase “know your enemy” has a spiritual truth too. Jesus is the savior of the world. Satan is the enemy! By reading the tract or listening to the open air preaching, a person could truly know who their enemy is, satan! We will definitely be making some more trivia tracts specific for certain events or teams.
Third, this stadium is a great place to open air preach and witness. The Arlington police did a great job of traffic and crowd control. We thanked them. And they never questioned our right to be expressing our first amendment rights. When one man came over to me while I was on the box and threatened bodily harm because he did not like what I was saying and stood with his backto the PA to block the sound, I turned slightly back towards the road. At that point, I think he saw the police office standing about 50 feet away and decided to head to the game instead of mess with me! Another thing about the stadium is that the walls of the building deflect the sound from the PA. So if we stood on the sidewalk and pointed the PA towards the building, it was actually possible to hear the preaching all the way up at the building and throughout the parking lot.
The above picture was taken just before we headed home. My estimate is that we distributed over 7,000 Gospel tracts. Given that it seemed like about somewhere around every 1 out of 2 two 1 out of 4 people were getting tracts as they went by then I would estimate that somewhere betwee 14,000 and 25,000 people heard the Gospel message!
It makes me wonder, how long would it take the average church to share the Gospel with that many people?
