Rangers Outreach

On Saturday, April 7th, as part of the Major League Baseball outreach, we took a group of over 40 people to the Texas Rangers game to share the Gospel. We were blessed to have a group of students from the Gospel for Asia School of Discipleship join us.

We divided the group into five and split up around the stadium. Each group was able to preach the Gospel open air, hand out tracts and talk to people one on one. We had three tracts for the outreach: a Back to back american League Champion bookmark featuring the Rangers home schedule, a Rangers trivia tract and a generic baseball trivia tract. With 5,000 of each of these tracts (15,000 of them in all) we optimistically thought “what if we were able to hand them all out.” The stadium holds over 45,000 people so that would be about 1 in 3 people. Even though we did not think we could hand out that many tracts, we brought a couple thousand extra tracts too!

We arrived at the game about two hours before the game started. We set up on each corner of the stadium. As people walked to the stadium they were greeted by members of our team and received tracts and heard the Gospel preached.

With any event like this it is important to pray. We prayed with members of the whole nation wide outreach three days before. We prayed before we drove to the stadium. And we had people praying for us while we were there. The outreach went extremely smooth. One security guard challenged the use of the bookmark tract. He called me telling me we could not solicit and asking who gave permission to use it. I told him what corner I was at and said if we wanted to discuss it he was welcome to come talk to me. I then asked a couple people to pray. By the time he arrived and asked if I was Carl, I said yes. He said that he had talked to his supervisor and found there was no issue.

We continued handing out tracts until the game started. Group by gruop we ran out of the baseball tracts. We pulled out the other tracts we had brought. As the crowds dwindled, we wrapped up. We realized that we had handed out over 15,000 Gospel tracts. That means that nearly 1 in 3 people received a Gospel tract from us.

Then as a group we walked back to the cars stopping at Subway for dinner and fellowship.