Carbondale | As eclipse-watchers turned their eyes to the skies Monday, Aug. 21, much of the attention in Illinois was focused on the southern part of the state, where several communities were in the eclipse’s “path of totality.” In Carbondale, just north of the point of longest duration for the total eclipse, churches worked together to share the gospel with thousands of people who traveled to the region for the event.
“As we see this amazing event today that God has made, let’s point people to see the Son who paid for our sin so that we can have eternal life!” Pastor Scott Foshie posted on Facebook. Foshie, pastor of Steeleville Baptist Church and an IBSA zone consultant in southern Illinois, helped facilitate an area-wide evangelistic effort to hand out 50,000 eclipse-themed gospel tracts.
The churches of Nine Mile Baptist Association, working in partnership with IBSA, had the tracts printed and mobilized volunteers to get them into the hands of eclipse-viewers in a multi-day outreach effort. The tract was designed to serve as a souvenir of the eclipse experience. “This is going to be the easiest thing you’ve ever passed out in your life,” Lakeland Baptist Church Pastor Phil Nelson said in a video promoting the outreach.
“They’re coming to see this eclipse, but God wants them to meet his son Jesus…I can’t think of an easier way to tell somebody about Jesus,” Foshie said. “All you’ve got to do is smile, walk up to them, and say, ‘Would you like to have this souvenir? God bless you.’ I mean, it’s that simple, and then we’ve planted a gospel seed.”
In addition to the tracts, pray-ers planned to be at four points in Carbondale—Lakeland Church, Murdale Baptist Church, FBC Elkville, and the Baptist Student Center at Southern Illinois University. The volunteers, standing next to six-foot crosses, prayed for cars as they entered the city. It was estimated around 90,000 people would be in Carbondale for the eclipse.
Ken Wilson was in the Goreville area passing out tracts in the hours before the eclipse. The IBSA church planting catalyst encountered people from multiple states including California, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and places as far away as Australia, Europe, and Japan.
Wilson was working with volunteers from the church plant, Southern Illinois Country Church. One of the volunteers giving tracts out at a local gas station encountered a woman from Kansas who asked for more copies of the tract to give to her friends and hand out where she was staying.
Wilson was distributing tracts at a campground when he gave a tract to a young Asian woman. They talked and she prayed to receive Christ as her Savior. He saw her again later, taking pictures of the tract. “I asked what she was doing,” he said. “She told me, ‘This tract changed my life. I’m taking pictures of both sides and sharing it on Facebook. I want to share it with all my Facebook friends.’”