Fall Festival in Evansville Indiana - 2001

Below are some pictures of the Fall Festival Evangelism efforts in October 2001

This is Franklin Street in Evansville Indiana where the Fall Festival is held every year in October. This Festival is the second largest Street Festival in the country, next to the Mardi Gras.

This street has booths down both sides for 5 blocks and over 25,000 people each day pass through this Festival and a total of 100,000 to 150,000 in a week's time.

This is Sam Owen who has brought this cross to the Festival for over 20 years. He has faithfully witnessed to people at this festival every year with no support from his local church

During our witnessing adventures we came across these symbols of the average Christians that operate the booths on this street. Even though there are over 30 booths that belong to churches none of them evangelize during this Festival. They are more concerned with making money than winning the lost. It amazes me that the call of the church is to reach the lost yet these churches in this Festival seem to think it is more important to make money off of these people than be concerned with their eternal destiny. Hebrews 5:12 clearly describes most churches in America.

The booth in the background happens to be one of the churches that personally told me that evangelism of this type was not effective. This is the problem with the churches today; the focus is on pleasing people instead of telling them the truth. Evangelism has taken a back seat in most churches. We purposely stood in front of this booth to prove to them that this type of evangelism is not only effective but also needed.

This is a perfect example that the Word will not come back void as the church above indicated it would. Notice this young boy sitting and reading this tract, and he did read the entire tract.

These are great examples of how as Christians we can, and should take advantage of witnessing opportunities. We are told to redeem the time and even more as we see the day approaching. I spoke to this lady for about 20 minutes and she had a lot of questions about her spiritual state.

As you can see there were a lot of people that passed by any given location. We could stand in one spot on the street and see literally thousands pass by in a few hours. It is one of the greatest opportunities to witness to this amount of people in this city of the year. It is a sad commentary on the churches in this city when they could not take the time to pass out tracts at their booths. These people came right to their door and they could not take advantage of it. They did not even so much as have a tract lying on the ledge of their windows for someone to take if they wanted. After all, we wouldn't want to offend anyone and therefore lose that $SALE$

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