We paraded around like we owned the place

It was an honor to be asked over the summer to launch an evangelism team at my church, Berean Bible Church of Pottstown. After a few months of planning, we formally launched the Hit The Streets evangelism team with an evangelism training seminar two weekends ago.

Then this past weekend, Hit The Streets hit the streets for the first time. We zeroed in on the Reading Holiday Parade for our first event. I had never attended this parade before. In fact, this may surprise you, but I had never gone witnessing at a parade before at all. I knew most evangelists talked about parades as being great places to hand out tracts, but for whatever reason, I had never gotten around to trying one until this event in Reading.

I'm glad I finally did it, because the results were sort of spectacular.

We got there a little early, so there were parade goers scattered around, although not a ton of them just yet. Then over the next 30 minutes, people really started to fill in the gaps, lining the streets with their tailgating chairs.

Reading itself looked as good as I've ever seen it. For a city that doesn't get thought of as one of Pennsylvania's top destinations, I saw the potential of what the town could be.

Before long, there were many people downtown and the tracts really started to fly. I brought 1600 tracts with me (1500 of which were Santa tracts), thinking that was more than enough for the event we were attending. But once people saw them, they took them from us eagerly. I have no doubt we could have handed out hundreds more.

Our team of 8 included some people who were new to handing out tracts. They took to it naturally, like they'd done it a thousand times. Afterwards, one woman exclaimed, "I was made to do this!" The next morning, another woman told me she thought about our outing the rest of the day. Images from the event kept playing in her mind, even as she went to bed.

By far, my favorite moment was when one guy realized he could walk in the street like he was part of the parade route, so I joined him. Before long we were walking right along with the parade route as if we belonged there, handing tracts to the people who lined the streets, as well as to some of the parade participants themselves. I even reached in the windows and gave tracts to the guys who were driving the floats. Every time they drove by, I said, "You look like you could use a raise," and they took the tracts every time.

As an extra blessing, one of our guys found half a package of unused tracts in his pockets when he got home, so he gave them back to me the next morning at church. We were able to hand them off to another guy who was going to share the gospel at a jail and at a retirement home that afternoon. Seeds being planted all around.

-JDM-