Southern Baptists will take the gospel door-to-door in Birmingham June 8 as part of Crossover, the annual evangelism and outreach event on the Saturday preceding the Southern Baptist Convention.
Over three decades, Crossover has included a variety of large-scale outreach projects, including city-wide evangelistic crusades the last two years. This year’s effort is focused on talking to people one-on-one about Jesus. Teams will spread out across the metro area, knocking on doors and sharing their faith with those who answer.
“This year we have a really simplified approach that will help us make as big of a concentrated push as we can make in one day,” said Joel Southerland of the North American Mission Board (NAMB), the national Southern Baptist Convention entity responsible for domestic missions.
NAMB and the Alabama State Board of Missions (the state’s Baptist convention) will mobilize 400 teams of volunteers from across the country to knock on 20,000 doors June 8. They’ll be seeking to have gospel conversations that point people to what it means to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. If they’re met with no answer, they’ll leave information about local churches and an invitation to attend, plus a tract that explains the gospel.
“While we have a lot of churches—3,280 in Alabama Baptist life—there are a lot of people, a huge population in metro Birmingham, that are not connected to any church,” said Sammy Gilbreath, Alabama Baptists’ state director of evangelism. The Birmingham metro area has a million people, Gilbreath said, with 2 million living within 30 minutes of the city.
On Wednesday, June 5, Birmingham’s Church at Brook Hills will host an evangelism training rally featuring Johnny Hunt, NAMB vice president of evangelism and a former SBC president, and Bill Fay, author of “Share Jesus without Fear.” The rally will be simulcast at other local churches that evening and also will be turned into Saturday morning video training for volunteers before they go out with their teams.
Crossover will also include outreach to Birmingham’s inner city, including mobile health and dental clinics where volunteers will share the gospel with visitors.
For more information or to register for Crossover, go to namb.net/events/cross over/birmingham.