"Open Air Preaching"

In the book, "Lectures to my Students", Charles Spurgeon devotes two chapters to "open air preaching". I won't lie when I was reading through this book and as I crept closer and closer to these chapters, I was somewhat dreading them because it seemed like the subject matter would be a little on the dry side to say the least...but boy was I wrong! It's funny because in America, we don't really get or look for opportunities to do ministry outside of our church buildings or property. If anything, we do something like street witnessing which is all well and good, but if someone doesn't want to be asked the typical ice breaker questions of, "so where do you think you'll go if you die?" or "Have you ever stolen something?", you're kind of out of luck. Spurgeon says a lot of common sense sort of stuff, yet I think it's stuff we need to be reminded of in this day and age especially. He wrote, "Not only must something be done to evangelize the millions, but everything must be done, and perhaps amid variety of effort the best thing would be discovered, 'If by any means I may save some' must be our motto..." We get so caught in our box of, "This is how we do things" that I think there is a large some of people who miss out on hearing the Good News of what Christ went through because of His love for us. That's where my excitement with this open air preaching concept comes.

As I am in the midst of reading these chapters, it was decided that our youth group would go on location and do our normal youth service in a place called Loco. It's only a couple of blocks away from the church, but there are so many kids who live there who would not come to church and so it was awesome thinking of the 70+ kids who were there listening to the youth pastor, Richard, lay out the Gospel for them...but I think that almost even more that comes the thought of the people who maybe were just listening from their houses or passing by, and the seeds that could be planted with them as well. I've come to find that the seeds sown by "accident" sometimes produce the most fruit. So it was just so cool to play a VERY small part in getting to see the opportunities getting outside of our comfort zones can bring. Now, each month our goal is to do at least one event like this so that truly, "If by any means I (we) may save some".