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SOUTH PADRE ISLAND—For many college students, spring break is a week to catch up on homework, on sleep or just have a week of fun.
But the more than 750 young adults from 37 churches and ministries across Texas who spent their spring break on South Padre Island had a deeper aim: Sharing the gospel among 60,000 students who came to the Texas Gulf Coast to party.
Trevor Williams, the college minister at First Baptist Church of Cooper, said this is the third year his church participated. He brought 12 students—two for the first time.
“When you throw them out in the thick of darkness it’s a culture shock,” Williams said. “There are kids everywhere partying it up.”
Buddy Young, now the Baptist Student Ministry director of West Texas A&M University, started the ministry 33 years ago when he and some friends went to South Padre, staying on the beach in tents, and sharing the gospel and giving first aid to students.
That ministry grew to include free pancake breakfasts and free van rides to places around the island and a sand sculpture created on the beach each day.
But Young said that serving the students on spring break is not their only purpose.
“We’re not here just to give pancakes and to give rides,” Young said in the Sunday morning service of Beach Reach. “That’s a means to an end.”
The “Beach Reachers” used each assignment as an opportunity to share the gospel with the “beach goers.”
Many of the students who participated in Beach Reach came with their college’s Christian organizations, but a few churches brought groups, including First Baptist Cooper and Birchman Baptist Church of Fort Worth.
Birchman participated in Beach Reach for the first time and sent 36 people—the largest church group. Joey Tombrella, the minister to young adults at Birchman, said others he spoke with were surprised that a church sent so many.
“I loved the fact that we got to go as a local church,” Tombrella said.
Jonathan McGraw of FBC Cooper has participated in Beach Reach each of the three years with his church and said sharing the gospel with those who rode on the vans was his favorite way to minister.
“They had to be on the van,” Dillon Stegall, also of FBC Cooper and a junior at Texas A&M Commerce, said of those students. “So they had to give you the time of day.”
But Stegall and McGraw said their favorite part of this year’s trip came the very first night before the breakfasts and van rides even started.
After all the Beach Reachers arrived on a Saturday, March 9, they prayed together in the parking lot of the host church, Island Baptist Church.
A student approached Stegall and McGraw, but instead of asking to pray with them he asked what was going on.
“We thought he was just another Beach Reacher,” Stegall said.
Stegall and McGraw used that as an opportunity to share the gospel and the young man on spring break prayed to receive Christ.
“It was amazing,” Stegall said. “Especially since it hadn’t technically started. But God was already working.”
Stegall said originally he had not planned on going on the mission trip, but he said this first time was worth it even though at first he didn’t know what to expect.
McGraw said Beach Reach helped in his decision to leave the college he had been studying kinesiology at to go to Criswell College with the goal of entering the ministry.
Young said the success of Beach Reach is not just counted by the number of people participating or saved, although that entered the thousands over 30 years.
“When students can be trained to share their faith and actively share their faith,” Young said, “then it has been a successful week.
“When I see hundreds of students actively sharing their faith, I see hope for the next generation,” Young said. “There is a legacy going to be left.”
