“And also if one competes as an athlete, he does not win the prize unless he competes according to the rules.” II Tim 2:5 (NASB)
When we went into Houston we chose the worst possible areas to work in. The fourth ward. The third ward. The Heights. I had certainly never seen anybody shot before. Soon I would.
Until we started winning souls and harvesting people from our ministry, we were primarily white middle class kids in the Agape Force. A lot of us came out of white middle class American Churches, but we knew what God had told us to do so we went to minister in the very worst parts of town.
We had one means of support called Service Corp., where we would do yard work and clean houses for the wealthy people who lived in the North side of town. It was funny. We were real vocal about our ministry and people would hire us because it was the way that we supported the other arms of ministry in that city. The people that hired us were amazed. They couldn’t believe that we would even go into those other parts of town. We were going on Friday nights and having street rallies in the middle of the night in the middle of town where most folks wouldn’t go in broad daylight.
I remember that it took several months to gain any kind of acceptance from the people we were trying to minister to. People would shun us. They thought, “What do you people want?” They didn’t trust us and thought we were narcotics agents; that we had some ulterior motive for being there. At first when we tried to talk to people they wouldn’t answer back. They wouldn’t even make eye contact. It took a long time to gain a platform to be able to communicate with people in that place.
So, we got creative. We had to. No one said “Let’s be creative.”...It was just “Let’s try this or that and see if it works.” We knew that we had to find some way to reach them.
One of the strange things that ended being real effective was the basketball ministry. A bunch of us would go down to the parks. It always amazed me how many young kids were down in the parks and not in school. You’d have these kids that were great, great basketball players, but they weren’t in school so they didn’t have any hope of going on to college or using that skill to gain anything. We’d go down and play basketball with these guys. We were fortunate to have Chico and a few other guys who could play pretty well and we gained some acceptance into people’s lives by just “hanging” with them, shooting hoops.
Then we’d say, “You know, we’ve got a Saturday night coffee house. We’re going to be doing some music. Why don’t you come out and hear us?” It was a little step at a time, gaining trust by going into their world rather than saying “Here’s what you gotta do. If you want to be a Christian you’ve got to dress up and go to Church and sing songs you don’t relate to.” We didn’t do any of that. We went to them.
The truth was, if you could keep up with a guy on the basketball court then he would listen to you. He could respect you - even if you were white.
I developed a good outside shot down there, but it wasn’t easy and it wasn’t always safe.
I will never forget one day when we were down on the courts playing with a bunch of guys. At one point two guys we were trying to reach started arguing over who fouled who. The argument got heated. They started to shout. Then, out of nowhere, one of them walked over to his bag, pulled out a gun, turned and fired. Just like that. Shot the other guy in the leg. The two of them ran off before the Police arrived.
Yes, we were naïve. And yes, it was a shock to us middle class white Americans. But God had called us to work on the streets, and we weren’t going to let anything keep us from obeying Him. Not even the fear that next time it might be us taking a bullet. God calls, we obey. That’s all there is to it.
Jim Berrier