The Lord opened up this opportunity for our team to work with Central Baptist Church in Ocala, FL, home of Ocala Christian Academy. We worked with Chase Basinger, the church’s Music Pastor, who is a very sweet and godly man. While we adjusted the schedule a bit to accommodate their VBS schedule, but it seems now that God was behind it all. What an incredible week!
We arrived on Saturday afternoon around 2PM just in time to go out for our first round of recruiting. Saturday evening, Ocala was crawling with teens. We found them everywhere we turned! On top of that, it seemed as if God was working in hearts before we even opened our mouths. Nearly every person we talked to was entirely open to our event, knew where the church was located, and was excited about attending. After three days of recruiting, we signed up over 500 people who were interested in attending The War.
The first night, our crowd was fairly well-attended to start, but by time our second competition was under way we had a very good crowd. Reports were differing, but the official count of teens present was exactly 100. The Pastor told us that only 25 of the 100 were teens from the youth group! The Navy team started off strong, winning Big Ball Volleyball. However, the Army team returned in Tube Tug and dominated that competition, at least. Throughout the whole night, the competition remained fierce and close. By time the final score was posted. the Army team only lead by 1,100 points.
While there were moments of battle during the evening, when the invitation came along, we had a gully-washer. We had so many teens come back, we had to enlist workers from children’s VBS to help with the counseling. Even then, we had workers dealing with 2 or 3 people at the same time. After the evening was over, 22 trusted Christ. What a night!
The final night, the Army dominated the evening, winning both of the outside competitions, most of the trivia inside, and the cheering contest. With this final surge, the score ended up being 35,800 for Army and 27,000 for Navy. We had 35 visitors the final night and a good crowd otherwise. However, there were several large distractions during the preaching that showed us that Satan was raging. Nevertheless, after the gospel was preached, 13 trusted Christ to the glory of God! By the end of the week, we had preached to 135 teens and 35 of them had trusted Christ. Praise the Lord for a good week!
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