About a year and a half ago I went with Answers in Genesis on an outreach to the people attending the Vancouver Olympics. I kept a brief journal at the time on my phone but the notes didn't fit exactly on my website and I hadn't started this blog yet so just kept them on my phone. Recently I was thinking about those notes and realized duh, I should put the highlights here.
Eighty of us from 13 states and 3 other countries stayed at Stillwood Christian Camp (map), almost two hours east of Vancouver. It was a very nice campground with a beautiful lodge and really nice cabins, not far from a lake and mountains. Each morning the staff there made us breakfast and prepared a sack lunch for us and made dinner. It was great food and I'd be stuffed each meal (and I'm not one to normally say that).
I arrived Saturday evening and left 8 days later. That first day after we arrived we got to hear Ken Ham speak in person at a local Penticostal church in Abbotsford. This was where I recorded the quote "You may not believe the Bible but I do... I don't use evidence to prove the Bible, I'm going to use the Bible as a starting point and show the evidence fits." Each day we drove into town on two charter buses and handed out tracts that were custom made for this event. The tracts gave a history of the Olympics, the gold metals, the gold rush in western North America a hundred years ago, the streets of gold in heaven mentioned in the Bible, and the gift Jesus gave by coming to earth, dying and resurrecting, with links to the Answers in Genesis (AiG) website (no local contact info was needed since we'd be giving these out to people from all over the world.) We had these tracts in 6 different languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Japanese.)
The first couple days I walked the streets with a nice guy from Ohio named Sherman. We started out on Granville Island and then moved into downtown Vancouver, Robson Road specifically. We discovered hundreds of "inuits" (the little stone statues like the Olympic symbol that year) lining the bay out back behind BC Place Stadium (map). So I stopped and offered to take people's photos for them and then offered tracts. I gave out about 125 tracts these two days.
Wednesday I took a 3 hour bus ride up to Whistler (map), where the downhill skiing was. I walked up and down the street (there was basically one main pedestrian walkway with a few spinoffs) and said hi to people, took their pictures for them, handed out tracts, telling people God loves them. I gave out about 120 tracts this day.
The next three days were spent out front of Canada Place (map) which is where the hockey games were held, and we were a half block east of where the Olympic torch was being kept. I had thought about walking down to the steam clock (map) since I had been there 11 years before with my family on our way to Alaska, but if I did that then I'd be leaving three teenagers to pass out tracts alone so I stayed back at the Canada Place. (You never know when you'll want an adult around when you're doing something as controversial as passing out tracts that tell people God loves them.) I didn't write their names down but I think the kids' names were Isaiah, Silas and Avery. Thursday the four of us handed out 500 tracts.
The location was really a great intersection between those two landmarks and also triangulated by being a major intersection for people coming from or going to downtown, so it worked out beautifully. Not only that, but we had a concrete awning over our head in case it rained and a huge curb to put all our boxes of tracts on so they'd be easily accessible. The next day since it worked out so well we returned to the same spot. This day we passed out 2,400 between the four of us. We ran out of English tracts twice and had someone go get us more from the bus, because like hikers in the mountains we had to cary everything we had with us, lunch, tracts, rain gear and all. I should make note that AiG prides itself that their tracts don't get thrown around as garbage by the people who take them and they don't become litter in the streets of the Olympic host city. (This was not the first Olympics they had sent volunteer missionaries to.) All week whenever we saw our tracts on the ground we'd immediately pick them up and either throw them away or redistribute them, but by the end of the week I think I had picked up maybe 30 (and I even went up and down the streets at least twice a day looking for them.) Of the 80 of us there, some where good at striking up deep converstaions with people and would spend 30-90 minutes with someone. I'm not good at discussing anything on the spot, but would never hand a tract and run. I always said what it was, gave it to them if they wanted it and paid close attention to their reaction. In the very rare occasion that someone wanted to discuss it with me I did, but usually people didn't even stop when taking it.
At the end of the day the organizers came by to say it's time to go but we wouldn't have been able to hand out those tracts faster if they had diamonds taped to them so they just let us keep going. In those last 30 minutes two of us broke open and emptied a case of 480 tracts EACH. I estimated my personal total for the week was 3,000 and the group of 80 of us handed out a grand total of 91,460 tracts in the name of "encouraging people that the Bible is true and God can be trusted."
Interesting trivia: we had been living in our current town for about a year now and it wasn't until I was on this mission trip in Canada that I met a guy (named Helmet) who lived in the next town over from us and had his own creation appologetics ministry. Not only that, but he works for the same company as me! Small world.
With 80 people fighting spiritual warfare in the middle of a few million people you can imagine there were plenty of stories to tell each night. But the one that stood out the most to me was actually as much related to the previous mission trip to the London Olympics as it was to this one. Some people can understandably be skeptical about tracts really being of any value at all. But the AiG office got an email from their website just a couple weeks before the Olympics started. It was from an athlete who had gotten one of the tracts four years prior and never looked at it and stuck it in their bag of souvenirs. As they were getting ready to come to this one they emptied out that bag and skimmed through the contents. The AIG tract stood out to him and he read it and God spoke to him in that moment. The man was not a believer but after reading the tract and hearing God speaking to him then, he read the prayer of salvation at the end and promised God he wanted to live for Him in gratitude for His love. Praise God, and thank you Answers in Genesis for standing up for the uncompromised authority of the word of God.
I arrived Saturday evening and left 8 days later. That first day after we arrived we got to hear Ken Ham speak in person at a local Penticostal church in Abbotsford. This was where I recorded the quote "You may not believe the Bible but I do... I don't use evidence to prove the Bible, I'm going to use the Bible as a starting point and show the evidence fits." Each day we drove into town on two charter buses and handed out tracts that were custom made for this event. The tracts gave a history of the Olympics, the gold metals, the gold rush in western North America a hundred years ago, the streets of gold in heaven mentioned in the Bible, and the gift Jesus gave by coming to earth, dying and resurrecting, with links to the Answers in Genesis (AiG) website (no local contact info was needed since we'd be giving these out to people from all over the world.) We had these tracts in 6 different languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Japanese.)
The next three days were spent out front of Canada Place (map) which is where the hockey games were held, and we were a half block east of where the Olympic torch was being kept. I had thought about walking down to the steam clock (map) since I had been there 11 years before with my family on our way to Alaska, but if I did that then I'd be leaving three teenagers to pass out tracts alone so I stayed back at the Canada Place. (You never know when you'll want an adult around when you're doing something as controversial as passing out tracts that tell people God loves them.) I didn't write their names down but I think the kids' names were Isaiah, Silas and Avery. Thursday the four of us handed out 500 tracts.
The last day for distribution was Saturday, which was also the last day of any official events. So it was a big day. We returned to the same spot again with so many boxes of tracts that our arms ached by the time we walked from the bus drop zone to our spot. Most of the last couple days I had been standing in the crowds of people proclaiming in a decently loud voice, but not shouting "Free souvenir, gold metals of the Olympics, gold rush in this country 100 years ago, the city of gold described in the Bible, the good news of Jesus." This had to be said very quickly as people would only be in earshot for 3-5 seconds before they'd pass you by as they're rushing to their next destination. By Saturday I heard God give me another idea and I started adding a second sentence: "God loves us and sent His Son to prove it, He has a wonderful plan for your life and wants a personal relationship with each of us." This was a little more bold and perhaps less politically correct but I really thought it was an idea planted by God and I figured, if anyone's going to raise a stink about this new sentence they'd probably raise a stink about my original sentence anyway so why not. By now I was spending half the day literally in a crowd of fastly moving people. There wasn't even time for lunch we had so many "customers." I estimated that I said my short little commercial at least 5 or 6,000 times this day alone. As I spoke I was paying attention to the reaction I got, compared to when I just smiled, and when exactly in my speach people decided they were interested in taking the tract from me. As the day progressed I was amazed that it was the second, more explicitly love related sentence that got dramatically more people to take what I had to offer. By the late afternoon I was skipping the part about the gold and just telling them the part about God loving them. By the end of this last day, and on just this last day, in just this one 20 by 20 foot spot, in 6 hours the 4 of us passed out a full 4,900 tracts. That was an average of one every 4 seconds.
Interesting trivia: we had been living in our current town for about a year now and it wasn't until I was on this mission trip in Canada that I met a guy (named Helmet) who lived in the next town over from us and had his own creation appologetics ministry. Not only that, but he works for the same company as me! Small world.
With 80 people fighting spiritual warfare in the middle of a few million people you can imagine there were plenty of stories to tell each night. But the one that stood out the most to me was actually as much related to the previous mission trip to the London Olympics as it was to this one. Some people can understandably be skeptical about tracts really being of any value at all. But the AiG office got an email from their website just a couple weeks before the Olympics started. It was from an athlete who had gotten one of the tracts four years prior and never looked at it and stuck it in their bag of souvenirs. As they were getting ready to come to this one they emptied out that bag and skimmed through the contents. The AIG tract stood out to him and he read it and God spoke to him in that moment. The man was not a believer but after reading the tract and hearing God speaking to him then, he read the prayer of salvation at the end and promised God he wanted to live for Him in gratitude for His love. Praise God, and thank you Answers in Genesis for standing up for the uncompromised authority of the word of God.