A year of planning and praying by Indiana Southern Baptists combined with volunteer support from across the country resulted in 1,932 professions of faith during Crossover Indiana, an evangelistic blitz accompanying the mid-June Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting in Indianapolis.
With the final numbers now out, John Rogers, director of evangelism and prayer with the State Convention of Baptists in Indiana, said the professions of faith were recorded through revival crusades, evangelistic block parties, prayer walking, street evangelism, door-to-door spiritual opinion surveys and other initiatives.
“Only heaven will reveal how many more will get saved out of Crossover because of the burden these new Christians have to see their family and friends come to Christ,” Rogers said.
More than 120 of Indiana’s 430 Southern Baptist churches and missions participated in the Crossover effort, which included 70 evangelistic block parties and 97 weekend revivals statewide. And nearly 1,000 volunteers — about half from out of state — joined the Crossover outreach conducted largely on June 12.
Rogers said 80 professions of faith were recorded during the weekend revivals held across the state before and following the SBC annual meeting.
An estimated 70 percent of Indiana’s 6.2 million people don’t profess to be Christians while Southern Baptists across the state number nearly 100,000.
Dick Church, manager of personal evangelism for the North American Mission Board (NAMB) which sponsors the annual Crossover effort nationally, said local churches are encouraged to connect with new Christians 10 times over the next four weeks following their decisions for Christ to begin discipling them in the faith and involve them in the church.
Rogers said the work of NAMB’s Inner City Evangelism (ICE) teams largely in black communities resulted in more than 850 professions of faith.
Rogers also reported that 1,499 phone calls from across the state were received by NAMB’s Evangelism Response Center in response to an evangelistic television advertising campaign. Thirty-seven professions of faith were recorded by phone and about 1,000 requests were taken for a free DVD of the film, “The Hope,” which outlines the gospel as revealed in Scripture from Genesis to the rise of the early church. The DVDs will be hand-delivered as part of the local church follow-up response.
Rogers said the Crossover experience for churches in Indiana has created a healthy sense of interdependence unprecedented in the convention’s history.
“God blesses obedience and commitment,” he said. “Where people took serious the matter of prayer, there were God-sized results.”
Nashville is the host city for the 2005 SBC meeting scheduled for June 21–22, with Crossover slated for June 17–19.
(BP)
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