Outdoor expo leads to soul harvest

AMARILLO?During their first-ever Wild Game Expo and Dinner on Sept. 29, The Church at Quail Creek in Amarillo found out what happens when you combine Texans’ love of the outdoors with focused prayer, advance planning and an appealing purpose.

Executive Pastor Michael Pinkston said more than 5,000 people from the Panhandle region turned out for the expo during the day, and more than 420 men, most unchurched, attended a wild game dinner that evening to hear the gospel presented by evangelist Jay Lowder of Harvest Ministries based in Wichita Falls. Pinkston, following the vision cast by Senior Pastor Stan Coffey, oversaw and directed the events.

Best of all, Pinkston said, 176 people accepted Christ that weekend; 95 of them were saved at the dinner.

“We had the Wild Game Expo from 10 to 4 on Saturday,” Pinkston said. “Then what we did was we sold and/or gave away tickets to the steak and wild game dinner that night … It was the largest number of individuals at a men’s event in the church’s history.”

Prayer was a key part of the planning process. Church members had a seven-day prayer guide that led them to pray every week for different aspects. There was a church-wide prayer gathering the week
before the event.

“Prayer was huge,” Pinkston said.

The event also launched Care 4 Kids, a new foundation established by The Church at Quail Creek.
Care 4 Kids will minister to underprivileged children in the Amarillo area by providing school supplies, college scholarships, and other financial assistance administered by the church through the foundation.

The expo took more than a year in planning. The church sponsored ads in the local newspaper, distributed flyers, hung posters, put out signage, and generally talked up the event whenever they could.

But Pinkston said the Care 4 Kids foundation really appealed to local merchants, the media and civic officials and generated free publicity. He said the local newspaper ran advance stories promoting the expo, local television network affiliates featured it on their news shows, and the school district distributed flyers announcing the expo to every child in the public schools.

“We had great community support,” Pinkston said. “We just had incredible people in the church working on public relations and the promotional parts of it ? Church members were serving their hearts out.”

At the expo, Quail Creek church members manned 15 food booths, 15 Kids’ Zone games, and organized up to 12 kids fishing at any one time in a catfish tank sponsored by Mel Phillips’ Southwest Outdoors talk radio show. Their volunteer efforts helped the new Care 4 Kids foundation benefit from the sale of souvenirs and tickets purchased for door prizes awarded at the dinner.

A 240-item silent auction included a pair of custom-made boots in a choice of elephant or ostrich leather; a gun safe that retailed for $1,500; a new fishing boat; and four signed prints contributed by artist Larry Dyke of Friendswood. All the funds raised went to the Care 4 Kids foundation.

The expo also had a live stage. Throughout the day there was music, an Old West fast-draw demonstration, a Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission show called “Bob and the Texas Critters,” a Wildcat Bluff animal show, cowboy poets, Bunkhouse Boys, bluegrass music, and an alligator ranch show.

“From 9:30 in the morning to 4:15 in the afternoon that live stage was just hopping, beating out music,” Pinkston said.

Child Evangelism Fellowship had a tent for children in the Kids’ Zone.

“We saw the gospel presented in that tent to 132 people that day and 11 kids and parents got saved in that tent that day,” Pinkston said.

Hank Hough’s Kingdom Dog Ministries set up in the church auditorium and an estimated 150-200 people at a time watched him present the gospel using his trained dogs. Based out of Spring, near Houston, Kingdom Dog Ministries uses prize-winning, obedience-trained Labrador retrievers to teach biblical truths to unbelievers about the gospel of salvation and to demonstrate to believers their need to submit their lives to God’s will.

“It was awesome,” Pinkston said of Hough’s birddog show. “It really set the stage for people getting saved that night. So many people got the gospel really clearly explained.”

As much as possible, Pinkston said they wanted to get men to come to the wild game banquet after the expo on Saturday evening. Church members who bought tickets to the dinner had to buy a ticket to bring at least one unchurched friend. Tickets were given to the expo exhibitors as a value-added bonus for buying booth space.

The dinner was designed for men, but some brought their wives. The church planned to seat 420 for dinner; every seat was taken and some church members ate standing up in the back of the banquet room. Evangelist Lowder presented the dinner message.

“Out of the 95 that were saved at the dinner there were eight ladies saved that night,” Pinkston said. On Sunday, Pinkston said there were 26 families enrolled in the church’s four-week discipleship course titled “Fast Track to Success in Life,” all as a result of the wild game outreach.

He said the church built many positive relationships in the community in promoting and planning the event. The excitement of the outdoors theme combined with the good works of the Care 4 Kids foundation made for “healthy, constructive relationships within the community,” Pinkston said.

Pinkston said the whole church is particularly excited about the lives changed and the great number of men won to faith in Christ.

“Their first introduction to the church was masculine,” he said about the men who attended the expo and dinner. “It was a great introduction for a guy who might think, ‘Hey, I might want to go to church here.’ It was hugely effective towards men.”

Pinkston said the church has already started planning toward a second wild game expo and dinner next year. He thinks other churches around the state could successfully do this kind of outreach. His advice is simple: “Pray hard, work hard, and you can’t start planning and organizing too early.”