Post by messengermicah on Feb 6, 2006 22:52:43 GMT -5
We were privileged to be able to work with Brother Jed Smock last Tuesday at the FIU campus. Brother Jed has been preaching full time on the college and university campuses for the last 32 years.
Jed told me he had preached here a few times before, but had not been to this campus for a number of years. This campus requires you to get a permit with several signatures on it before they allow you to preach (an unconstitutional practice). My wife was able to get the signatures on the permit so Jed could come and preach.
Elizabeth and I arrived on campus a little before 11:00 AM. It was pretty dead as there were not many students walking around. I assembled one of our banners and stood in the free speech area. As students would walk by I would preach a few lines to them.
After a few minutes I began to preach. I put down the banner and put on the sandwich board sign. Although there still were not many students around, I had a few engage me in conversation, and several groups of about 8-10 stopped to listen from afar. Occasionally they would make comments or ask questions.
I preached from about 11:00 until 11:50 AM when Brother Jed arrived, and then turned the preaching over to him.
Jed began preaching to the small group of students who were gathered afar off. They began to move in closer and some sat around the steps in the fountain area. Jed was preaching very generally and calmly at first. More students began to stop and listen.
The students began to ask Brother Jed questions and he was answering their questions very patiently and being very straightforward with them. The crowd slowly built up from around 20 to about 40 or 50. I continued to stand with one banner and around 12:30, brothers Doug and John arrived. They set up the other banner and one of them wore the sandwich board sign.
Several students made poster boards to protest our banners and us and stood in between us. Jed continued dialoging with the students and by now the crowd was up to about 60 and they were getting just a little unruly. A few of the students were beginning to get upset and were talking a lot and not really listening as Jed would answer and refute their arguments. Jed was still being very patient with them.
Around 1:20 PM, Jed called on me to preach. I had been sitting there all that time listening to Jed patiently answer and refute their arguments and they did not want to hear it. I started preaching and went right for the jugular vein. I did not make any wild statements or insult anyone but just straight preached the Word, but the crowd really got hot and went from about 60 to the mid 200?s.
They wanted to ask all kinds of questions, but I kept hammering them with the Word. After a while I took a few of their questions and then would hammer them again with the Word. One American looking girl dressed in Muslim garb asked me something about the war and I told her she needed to stop her war with God and that she was a rebel against God. The crowd did not take kindly to that and thought I was hateful. I am hateful as far as Psalm 97:10, Proverbs 8:13, and Hebrews 1:9 define.
A few guys were down in the circle area where I was preaching about to fight each other, and I heard one of them take God?s name in vain and I told him he could not do that in my speech area. He then acted like he was going to attack me, but I did not flinch or budge.
The crowd was pretty rowdy by now and yelling all sorts of things. Around 1:50 PM Jed came in behind me to calm things down and get things under control. Some of the students were complaining to Jed that I was hateful, but he said, ?But he has always seemed like such a loving person to me.?
At this point I did not get to observe or listen to Jed much, because the crowd was pretty loud, and the woman who is in charge of giving the permits had come out with a police officer and was complaining. She told my wife and I that we had permission to come out and preach the gospel which was a message of love, but we were insulting the students (of course this means pointing out their sin and telling them it is wrong and they will go to hell for it if they don?t repent is what they mean by insulting the students).
The students who were complaining the most were the ones with the signs who were mostly lesbians, feminists, and anti war sinners. Since I had to get a permit to be in that area, it was not right for them to bring their signs into our reserved area and try to block us. I had police remove them.
The woman asked me to tell Jed he needed to stop for a while and let the students calm down. She also said what he was doing was not acceptable but it was ok if we talked to the students individually. I told her we did not get a permit to talk to students individually. She kept threatening to shut us down if Jed did not stop and let the students calm down (at this point the students were somewhat rowdy but it was not nearly the way she was making it out to be. Jed had them reasonably under control).
I told Jed what the woman was saying and that I did not care whether he stopped then or not. Jed continued for another 5-10 minutes and handed the crowd over to Doug.
Doug came in there with the ?good guy?, ?I am more reasonable than them?, ?I just want to share a short message with you?, ?I know where you are coming from?, approach and at first they kind of bought into it and calmed down some. After a while though they began to treat him as bad as the rest of us and got rowdy again. I thought Doug did a great job of handling the unruly crowd and answering their questions.
The crowd size never dwindled from the 1:30 to 2:00 PM hour but maintained its size of about 250 to 300 students all afternoon long.
Jed called on John to preach after Doug, and John also did a great job of handling the large unruly crowd and answering their questions, especially since it was his first time in a campus-preaching situation. John maintained a crowd of about 300 until around 4:00 PM. While John was preaching one angry student grabbed our sandwich board sign and slammed it on the ground and cracked it. He immediately took off running.
Around 4:00 PM Jed took over the preaching again, but I had no idea what was going on, because I was on one side of Jed holding a banner, and students kept talking to me and asking me questions. I kept trying not to talk to them or answer them, or to move further away as to not distract from the preaching, but I ended up being surrounded. The angry lesbians, feminists, muslims, and anti war people were all debating and arguing with me. The crowd surrounding me was probably 50 to 60 people. One of the hot topics of the day was the conditional love of God. This continued being a hot topic with the angry lesbians and feminists surrounding me.
At 5:00 PM our permit was up and Jed indicated he was ready to go, so we all went to dinner and had a time of fellowship. Jed said FIU was a ?hot? campus.