street preaching

Along with the changing leaves and chill in the air, a sure herald of fall is the official opening of the "preaching corridor" by Wells Hall. I'm always interested to see who is out each year. In the 90s when I was a student, there was a guy who called everyone fornicators. I got called a fornicator once and thought it was funny. Glutton, liar, prideful, lustful, sure.... but despite being in college I was not actually a fornicator. There are usually several groups out, and each has a slightly different approach - from huge signs, to tracts, to a flannel-graph looking board to illustrate the Bridge (although this picture has the earth and the clouds, not two sides of a chasm that some of us are used to.) One thing that they have in common is that they are all very loud, and it can be quite the cacophony - especially when a campus atheist comes along to shout them down.
Through the years I've heard many different approaches by Wells. One of the best, most honest dialogues I've ever heard was between an open-air evangelist that the Navs sponsored to bring to campus and some students who had gathered around. He spoke only loud enough to be heard by the group, and he answered every question he was asked. He was starkly honest with some guys who asked him about specific sins in his life. It was the first time I'd ever see someone be completely vulnerable and bare their soul, stains and all, for the sake of ministering to another person. I'll never forget that. He also handled an angry, red-faced professor with grace and wit. The prof was insisting that an obscure Old Testament passage disqualified Jesus from being the Messiah. The evangelist handed the prof his Bible and asked him to find the passage so they could discuss it. Of course the prof had no idea where it was, so he threw down the Bible in disgust and walked away.
Today as I was passing through the new crop of preachers, I noticed something different. The guy with the big sign was speaking loudly still, but he was not yelling. He also wasn't listing off sins like the guy at the flannel-graph was. As I walked by, he was saying "All these things won't satisfy. You'll get a degree, get a husband or wife, get a great job, kids... but you'll still have an emptiness inside. Those things won't fill that hole." His words grabbed me because they were true. He was speaking to something that the students would feel - if not at that moment - maybe after waking up in a strange place after partying all night, maybe after realizing that they've given up something precious to a stranger, maybe after a disastrous grade report. I prayed that his words would stay in people's hearts as they walked by, and that they wouldn't scoff at Jesus as the answer just because the "nutty" folks at Wells said so.