Thousands of people flock to the Mississippi State Fair each year to eat fun food, hear live music, and enjoy time with loved ones. This year, fairgoers also got the opportunity to hear the Gospel preached, and nearly 400 people gave their lives to the Lord as a result.
Churches like First Baptist Church in Senotobia make Mississippi Baptist fair evangelism effort possible.
“One of FBC’s members, who is named Mae, began praying that she would be able to tell someone about Jesus,” First Baptist Senotobia Pastor David Haynes told the Baptist Press.
“Mae was able to talk and pray with a young man as he placed faith in Jesus. During our four-hour session at the state fair, we had 160 Gospel conversations and 15 of those resulted in salvation.”
Mae was one of 195 volunteers with the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board (MBCB) who attended the multi-day state fair earlier this month.
Last year, the MBCB had 2,524 recorded gospel conversations, and 269 people made a profession of faith in Jesus at the Mississippi Fairgrounds.
This year at the 165th Mississippi State Fair, volunteers had 2,824 Gospel conversations, resulting in 373 decisions for Christ, BP reports. But not all conversions were immediate.
“We had a young lady come in the tent with her family,” Don Lum, MBCB director of evangelism, told BP. “There were three teenagers and a mom and dad. This young lady was holding back.
She was kind of not really engaged. I was talking to the guy that had shared with them, and he came back in the tent the next day and said, ‘Look, you’ll never guess what happened last night. At 1 a.m. this morning, the young lady got up, went into her mom and dad’s bedroom and said, ‘I need Jesus.'”
MBCB spokesperson Linda Burris recently shared that the experience also has an impact on the volunteers who gain confidence in sharing their faith.
“They discover that they can do it and it’s not that hard,” she told the Christian Post. “It is rewarding to hear the stories of other believers at the fair and to share with someone hungry to hear the good news of hope.”
Haynes shares how the experience often encourages the volunteers to grow in confidence in their faith.
“Once a person gains confidence in their ability to rely upon the Holy Spirit to guide them in Gospel conversations, then he or she will be more confident when talking with friends and family members about Jesus,” he said.
Burris says although people have made the decision to follow Christ in the tent at the fair, the work of ministry is far from over.
“Our volunteers are assigned a number that they put on the cards of those they share with. A copy of the cards of the ones who received Christ are mailed back to the volunteer who shared with them.
They are then able to make contact with them,” she explained. “We sort the cards according to city and town and mail the information to a local pastor so that they can be contacted by a church in their area.”
