Laredo evangelism event adds 727 salvation decisions to four-week effort

LAREDO—An evangelistic event featuring the

strength feats of Team Impact at the

Laredo Energy Arena capped a month-long outreach with 727 recorded salvation decisions added to nearly 300 in the previous four weeks.

The event on April 17 drew 4,800 people, most of whom were not “church people,” said Chuy Avila, missionary planter with the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention.

“Forty-eight-hundred people is not a lot in some of the bigger cities, but in Laredo this was God’s miracle,” Avila said.

Since spring break week in mid-March, volunteers from SBTC churches distributed door hangers containing the gospel message in Spanish and English on 39,000 of the 50,000 front doors in Laredo. Additionally, each household received an invitation to the April 17 Team Impact arena rally and information on a local Southern Baptist church.

During the event, Avila introduced four new church planters who will be launching five new works in Laredo and the nearby town of Rio Bravo.

“Everybody is going to receive at least 200 names of people who made professions of faith and they are going to follow up on them,” Avila said.

The week previous to the arena event, Team Impact, based in the Dallas area, visited dozens of schools, performing power demonstrations and presenting character talks.

“Those assemblies played a key role in gathering the kind of people who came to the event,” Avila said. “We got city people, not church people, who showed up. Most of that came as a result of the 39,000 homes that we visited and the school assemblies.”

Avila said volunteers are continuing their effort to contact the remaining 11,000 households in Laredo.