Street Evangelization – March 2025

Last Friday, March 28th, I made it out for street evangelization in downtown Lewisburg. Once again, my friend CJ was able to join me. The weather was beautiful and lots of people were out to enjoy the town and one another.

I’ve found that it’s nice to have a non-threatening “draw” for street evangelization. Sometimes it’s my cool truck. Sometimes it’s a guy with his banjo. Friday it was coin rings.

With the right tools (which I can fit on a child’s wagon), I can turn a regular quarter into a coin ring–all in about five minutes.

And the outside of the ring will say, “LIBERTY.”

Over the course of that five minute, we might get the opportunity to share some of the words of Jesus quoting Isaiah the prophet.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captive and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord. (Luke 4:18-19)

The coin rings are wildly popular. As was the case the other times we’ve done this, we have a line of people pretty much the whole three hours we were there. The Bucknell girls field hockey team was out to we had a nice long chat with many of them and most of them took prayer cards. The last three to leave were seniors who were about to graduate, and we got to pray with them to ask God’s blessing on their futures.

There were three students visiting Lewisburg from Susquehanna University. I got the impression that they were wary of Christianity and they politely declined prayer cards, but we had enjoyable conversations for the 15 minutes that it took to make three rings. Perhaps they had bad experiences with Christianity in the past, but I feel certain that the experience they had on Friday was a positive one.

Twice people stopped who I discovered were co-workers of parishioners. Each time, the response was, “Oh they are so wonderful!” It’s heartening, but not surprising, to hear my fellow parishioners are such lovely people in the workplace.

Christ is surely at work in our community. I love it.