June 12, 2000
SBC Crossover effort bore fruit in 1,153 lives
___By James Dotson
___North American Mission Board
___ORLANDO, Fla. (BP)--Some people heard the gospel of Jesus Christ through a massive International Festival at the Central Florida Fairgrounds, while others heard it over hot dogs and chips at neighborhood block parties. Many heard it on doorsteps and in living rooms, while still others responded during late-night encounters on city streets.
___Southern Baptists engaged in a variety of methods of meeting their evangelistic mission during Crossover Orlando 2000, a faith-sharing emphasis held before and during the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting June 13-14.
___Much of the effort focused on "planting seeds" of awareness and conviction among people, building relationships that would lead to later evangelistic opportunities. Nonetheless, at least 1,153 individual commitments to a life-changing faith in Jesus Christ were recorded.
___Thirteen Texas Baptists participated in this year's Crossover, according to a list released by the SBC North American Mission Board, which coordinates the event.
___ "Overall, I would rate the entire effort somewhere between outstanding and phenomenal," said James Fortinberry, executive director of the Greater Orlando Baptist Association. "The cooperation we had with our local churches--and especially with the language churches--and the people that came to help us was unusually good."
___ Crossover has been a fixture of Southern Baptist Convention annual meetings since 1989. NAMB President Bob Reccord said the emphasis extends beyond "strategies, organization and focus" that characterize most convention meetings.
___ Crossover is the part of each convention that says, "How can we give ourselves away to the city to which we've come?" Reccord said.
___ Much of the giving came on Saturday, June 10, during the citywide International Festival that attracted 3,500-4,000 participants.
___ Held under the livestock pavilion at the Central Florida Fairgrounds, the festival included representatives of Haitian, Brazilian, Hispanic, Korean and Vietnamese groups. Participants sampled food from each of the groups and allowed their children to take part in games and activities, including five "moon walk" attractions.
___ Crossover volunteers also presented the gospel message to participants, and more than 200 of them committed their lives to Christ. The long-term benefit, however, came through the relationships that were formed and the names that have been forwarded to the various language groups for follow-up by local churches.
___ Jason Kim, a NAMB staff member and one of the festival coordinators, said pastors often have difficulty locating members of particular ethnic groups who could be reached by their congregations.
___ "It is really hard to find them in mixed populations," Kim said. "But by doing this, color-coded registration cards will be used to separate them by language groups."
___ The Greater Orlando Baptist Association hopes to start 18 churches through the overall Crossover effort. Eleven already are in some stage of development.
___ The block parties sponsored by area churches followed a theme similar to the International Festival, offering entertainment, food and drink to guests as a way of building relationships and sharing the story of Christ.
___ Cecil Seagle, director of the Florida Baptist Convention's missions division, described the philosophy of churches while he was attending a block party adjacent to Downtown Baptist Church in Orlando. The immediate goal, he said, is for individuals to respond to the gospel. But positive long-term contacts also are important.
___ "We need to leave them in such wonderful condition that when someone comes along and shares Christ with them later ... they would respond and say yes somewhere along the way. It's a principle of Jesus--some cultivate, some plant, some water and some get in on the harvest."
___ At Riverside Baptist Church, several guests said they regularly attend other churches but applauded the block party approach as a means of strengthening communities as well as sharing Christ with others.
___ "It's been fantastic. It's what people seem to have forgotten. They've forgotten the love and forgotten to bring people together as a family," said neighborhood resident Ida Gainey, who learned of the event through a flyer at a local nursing home.
___ At Plymouth Baptist Church, the block party represented an effort "to let people know we're in the community for them, that we love them and care about them," said church member Lilian Cleghorn.
___ Elsewhere, volunteers worked with about 12 churches conducting door-to-door visits, usually utilizing spiritual opinion surveys. It was the culmination of a four-week effort for many of the churches and part of a long-term statewide initiative known as "Through Every Door."
___In one instance, more than 60 volunteers had contacted 710 homes in preparation for a new church. They identified 43 prospects while recording 13 professions of faith in Christ and conducting 135 surveys.
___ Seven of those professions of faith came from a single visit. Darrell Robinson, who retired earlier this year from his post with the evangelism department at the North American Mission Board, and his wife, Kathy, led a Hispanic family through a gospel tract as they stood in their crowded house for about 20 minutes.
___ "It was so refreshing just to see the simple trust of those sweet people," Robinson said. "God just really blessed, and it was a divine appointment for sure."
___ Another group of specially trained volunteers worked with King's Way Baptist Church in sharing the gospel with residents in several low-income neighborhoods in inner-city Orlando.
___The inner-city evangelism team typically conducts training conferences and leads hundreds of individuals to Christ in cities across the country, directly asking people they meet on the streets or on doorsteps about their spiritual condition. The group reported nearly 400 professions of faith in their first two days. Their efforts typically results in a large percentage of immediate Crossover decisions.
___ Michael West, a member of Central Baptist Church in Hixson, Tenn., told of one instance in which 10 people were led to faith in Christ in one area as they directed witnesses to friends who needed to hear the gospel message they had heard.
___"As they came out to receive Christ, they would say, 'You need to see this one' or 'You have to see that one,'" West said as he walked through a public housing development.
___ Another man had been antagonistic toward a volunteer evangelist, saying he "didn't want to hear a thing about God." Later, his defenses broke down, and the man prayed to receive Christ as his Savior. "He just changed right in front of us," West said.
___ A few minutes after he told these stories, West shared his faith with another man who, after about 10 minutes of discussion, prayed to make Christ Lord of his life.
___ "We're letting the lost down … because we're not doing this as often as we should," he said of his excitement over the response to the gospel in the inner city. "You'll see 50 people saved out here in two hours."
___ Elsewhere, a variety of other efforts also were part of Crossover:
___\One group of women operating under the local association's ongoing "Ladies of the Night" ministry shared Christ with and befriended prostitutes on Orlando's Orange Blossom Trail.
___ About 140 students and their leaders participated in all the venues. The students spent about a week in Orlando rotating through different activities, including immediate follow-up with people who had accepted Christ and conducting sports clinics sponsored by several local churches.
___ Additionally, two large groups of high school teenagers shared their faith door-to-door during the week as part of Frontliners crusades, sponsored by local churches. In the crusades, students receive training in discipleship and evangelism in the mornings, followed by witnessing visits in the afternoons.
___ Shari Schubert & Lee Weeks contributed to this article.
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