Episode 6: Taking the Gospel to the County Fair

The Rural Church Podcast. Two point up. Just a couple of pastors discussing life, ministry, theology, and the gospel from a local church perspective. Eddie, what's it time for? The Rural Church Podcast.

Podcast Introduction and Guest Banter

The Rural Church Podcast, episode six. I'm Alan Nelson, pastor at Perryville Second Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas, and with me is my friend, co-host, fellow brother in Christ, fellow co-labor in the gospel, Eddie Ragsdale.

Hello, Eddie. Hello, everybody. Hello, Quatro. How are you, man? I'm doing good, brother. How are you? Refreshed and not having preached Sunday. You must feel refreshed. Well, I'll tell you, you know, it is good to get a little break.

I am ready to get back at it. You know, I normally teach several different times a week, and yesterday when I was teaching, I teach a couple of times on Tuesdays, and I realized that it had been nine days since I had stood before a group of people and taught, other than, I guess, I taught my Sunday school class on Sunday.

So, it's good to get back at it, and I know I'm probably like many other pastors and speakers and preachers. It usually takes me through the person who's preaching in my place's first point to be ready to preach again.

Amen. Tell us where you were the world-renowned chuckwagon races. What in the world is that? That's right. So, I live in Van Buren County. I live in Shirley, and Shirley is a suburb of the metropolis of Clinton where you used to live, and Clinton is host to the Bar O .F. Ranch, and the O .F. Ranch is host to the National Championship Chuckwagon Races.

This was the 37th annual National Championship Chuckwagon Races, and the way I would describe chuckwagon racing, it is it is like NASCAR and like the tractor pools, but with horses and mules. And so, it is dirt track racing, but with horses and mules and wagons.

Wild. What kind of crowds out there? So, there'll usually be, you know, tens of thousand people and then five or six thousand horses and mules. So, there'll be 15 to 20 ,000 people. Were they wearing masks?

I did not see a mask at all this year. There were a few masks in 2020. There weren't really any masks last year or this year. There were a lot of people in 2020 wearing bandanas around their neck, and so they could pull them up like a bandit when they needed to.

So, did you have a good time? Had a great time. You know, I always enjoy the Chuckwagon Races. You know, I hear a lot of people, they'll say, well, isn't it wild? Isn't there a lot of partying? There's a lot of drinking, and yes, there is all those things, but I would say, you know, I was just having a discussion with a brother in our church just before we got started this morning, and I told him, I said, really, it's like, it is just like normal life.

You can be involved in whatever you want to be involved in, and so me and my sons, we like to go on the trail rides. We like to watch the wagon races. We like to enjoy the cowboy and the western atmosphere, and so we take our horses in the morning.

We don't camp there. We don't stay there. We take our horses in the morning. We go on the rides. We participate in the cowboy kind of stuff, and in the evening, we load our horses and go home, and we really enjoy it, have a lot of fun.

It was great. Wonderful, so Harold Smith, our friend, did he go with you to the chuck wagon races, or did he just preach for you? No, he preached for me and went to the chuck wagon races. This is the second time he's done that, and I think he and I have decided that until the church says they've had all they can stand of him, we're just gonna keep this up as an annual tradition, so yeah.

We need to get Harold on the podcast. Yeah, and let him tell us about his impressions of the chuck wagon races. I'll tell you, Harold did a great job. He preached on the holy spirit as the power of the church, and it was really impactful, helpful to us as a congregation, and then we did go together to the chuck wagon races, I think.

I'll put in a little plug for Harold here. He's gonna have a video up on his YouTube channel, which is the preacher's day off, so go to preacher's day off, and you'll see a YouTube video from last year's chuck wagon races, and soon he will have up a video from this year's chuck wagon races.

County Fair as a Rural Ministry Opportunity

Good deal, so this week is fair week in Searcy County. It is. If you read the book Charlotte's Web, who's it by? Uh, Charlotte's Web. What is the lady's name that wrote that? Anyway, Charlotte's Web, most people are familiar with a county fair who've read Charlotte's Web just by reading Charlotte's Web, but county fairs are something that a whole lot of people are familiar with, particularly if you live in a little bit bigger area.

A county fair is not that big a deal, but for Searcy County and for Perry County, it's still kind of a big deal. Tell me about Searcy County Fair. Yeah, well, the Searcy County Fair, you know, I grew up in our local county fair, and I think the Searcy County Fair used to always have a carnival.

For the last several years, they've had trouble booking the carnival, so like this year, there is no carnival, but the county fair really is kind of the traditional county fair everybody kind of throws in.

It is about people bringing their crafts, people bringing their produce that they've grown in their gardens, or the things they've canned in their homes, or their animals, and so the next three days, today, tomorrow, and Friday, will be heavily invested in, you know, showing pigs and chickens and cows and hogs and all those kinds of things, and then Friday night and Saturday, they'll have a rodeo, and the rodeo in Searcy County is always well attended, and so it'll be a big week, and as far as ministry in the context of the rural church, in the context of a place like Marshall, I look at it like, look, we don't have large groups of people gathering just all the time in the rural areas like where we live, and so I look at the opportunity like the fair is a great opportunity to get out among people, so today, when we get off of this recording, I'll probably head over to the fair for a couple of hours just to kind of meal around and see people and watch some of the kids show their animals, and the way that the Searcy County Fair does it, the show is in the daytime, so over the next three days, I'll spend quite a bit of time over at the fair because it is an opportunity, you know, to get out in the community and to be around both people in our church and then also people who aren't a part of our church, maybe aren't even believers.

I need to apologize to E .B. White, that is the author of Charlotte's Web. He's not a girl. It's a boy. I guess in my mind, I was thinking E .B. I was thinking Elizabeth or something like that, but anyway, so what we're talking about in this episode is we're talking about how rural churches can be involved in events strategically like a county fair.

How can you be involved in those strategically to further the advancement of the gospel, to strengthen the church, these things, and I don't know who wants to go first, but I tell you, last night, we had a fair parade in our town, and so there's some things that we did, and then there's some things that we're actually going to be doing tonight.

I'm going to talk about those. Sounds like you have some ideas of some things that you have going on as well, but let's talk a little bit first, lay the foundation, you know, as rural churches in the 21st century, I should say, there aren't a whole lot of events per se in our towns.

I was talking to my buddy Michael Coughlin, and I was talking to him about, you know, in a big city, there's stuff all the time, seems like going on. In rural areas, you know, not necessarily. I mean, there's the Friday night football games, I guess, stuff like that we try to go to, but you know, this is kind of an event that is yearly.

It's annual. People expect it, and I think that churches are unwise if they don't take the opportunity in events like this to further the cause of Christ, so you want to go first? You want me? What are you thinking?

Working with Other Churches Without Compromising Doctrine

Yeah, well, I was going to ask you to kind of share about what you guys are doing this evening. I seen that advertised just a day or two ago, and I happen to be the president of the Searcy County Ministerial Alliance, and when I seen advertised what you guys are doing, I went, we should have done that.

I wish I had thought of that sooner because, or had heard about that sooner, because we should have done that here, so can you kind of tell us about what you guys are doing in Perry County? It wasn't my idea, so I can't take credit for it, but a person on the fair board reached out to me, and we're having the same problem as you in our fair.

It used to be not the greatest, but they would have carnival rides, and the last few years, they haven't because I don't know what happened. My thought is, I guess in 2020, it just must have absolutely obliterated some of these companies because they weren't going to places, and they, I guess they kind of fell apart, and so the supply demand must be off.

You must either must cost a lot of money to get them, or there's just not a lot available. Anyway, so we're not having carnival, so they reached out, and they said, hey, we want to do an event on Wednesday night.

If some churches would get together, do some games, and maybe you could do a service, and we want you to head that up, and I was like, okay, yes, we'll do it, so because it's kind of a it's kind of a community thing.

Here's some things I'm not overly comfortable with. Like, there's some involvement with churches that I'm like with the games and stuff, but here's where I draw the line. I'm preaching, and then another faithful church is leading the music, so there's some several churches kind of helping out with games and stuff, and then there is, I'm in charge of the preaching and the music, so another church be doing the music, and then I'll be preaching, and what I plan to do, Eddie, it's pretty profound.

I plan on preaching the gospel of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and calling sinners to repent and put their faith in Christ as their only suitable and all-sufficient Savior. What do you think? That sounds good, man.

I'll tell you, as far as what you were talking about, even dealing with this is maybe a bigger discussion than even just the rule church, how we think about the way that we work with other churches, and I've told the group of other ministers here in Searcy County, it's very odd that I am the president of the Ministerial Alliance because I'm the least ecumenical of us because I'm the least comfortable with stepping over the boundary lines between our different denominations and different doctrinal distinctions, but what I've found over the years is basically for faithful pastors, there's one of two choices when it comes to working with other churches.

Either we can be completely separatist. We can say, look, we're just going to do our thing. We're not going to work with anybody else, and then we can keep everything just clean and tidy, or we can have lots of involvement, and that involvement allows us to have more influence over things like what you're doing tonight because you're the one planning it that gives you influence so that you can kind of have more say-so in making sure that it doesn't go in a direction that we wouldn't be comfortable with or that wouldn't be faithful to the gospel, so I found that it really did not seem tenable to me in the ministry here at Marshall to be a complete separatist, so I found that I've had to go the other way, and I've had to be really involved so as to give myself influence so that we could make sure that things were being done in a way that's faithful to the gospel and that is honoring to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen, and there are certain things I wouldn't partner with. For example, if let's say it was going to be sketchy on the service or whatever, whoever it was, if someone else was doing the service, I might not just depend on what was going on.

I might not even be able to be part of that, you know, right, or you know, one time I'll tell you something that did happen here. I was involved in a thing, and something got said in the service that which I didn't know that this person was going to speak at all, and I didn't know what they were going to say, and what they ended up saying was essentially they alluded to the idea of extra-biblical revelation.

They basically claimed newly inspired scripture essentially in what they said, and I after that had to have a meeting with that pastor, called him to repentance, which he did not do, but and then had to basically say, look, I can't work with that person or that church.

That is a boundary line I won't cross and haven't had to cross it. That's been several years ago, but yeah, I think that we've got to be willing to say, look, there are boundary lines that we won't cross.

I'm not going to cross a boundary line when it comes to the sufficiency and authority of the scripture. We're not going to cross a boundary line when it comes to preaching the gospel, faith alone, you know, grace alone, Christ alone.

We're not going to partner with some kind of workspace, religion, or faith. We're not going to partner with a cult. We're not going to partner with the prosperity gospel. You know, we have to have those boundaries, those areas that we won't go past.

Practical Evangelistic Ideas for Fair Week

Amen. So some of these, some people hear this, and honestly, by the time they hear it, I think this won't come out. Well, it won't come out till next week. A lot of fair activities are probably over in a lot of parts of the country.

You know, September starts to kind of end, but let's say they're not, and let's say there is, there's events that people can be involved in, but they don't get to do, like, mine's an obvious event. Like, we're setting up games because we don't have a carnival, and then we're going to do a service.

Mine's an easy event. I'm going to preach the gospel. That's an easy, okay, boom, that's what we're going to do. What are some ways that people can be involved? I have a couple of ideas, but what are some ways that people can be involved?

You kind of mentioned some things in their local fair or local event. Maybe they can't organize a service, but what are some other ways that they can, or other things that they can do? Well, you know, one of the things that's really rather easy to do is to have a booth.

You know, there will be, I know the way that our fair is set up, there will be all kinds of different groups that will have a booth. Actually, in years past, even the Jehovah's Witnesses would sometimes have a booth out there, and if they're going to have a booth, there's no reason why a faithful Christian church or a faithful Christian ministry can't have a booth where, you know, opportunities to pray for people, share the gospel, to share more about the ministry of your church, or even more organically, just the opportunity for us to get out there and to be having one-on-one conversations with people about the gospel.

I mean, I'll be honest, the Searcy County Fair, it is not a big thing. It is a small town, small county fair, and so it's seemed to me over the years that the best thing to do is just get out there and be among the people, and let the fair be an opportunity to get into conversations where we can have an impact for the gospel and for Christ.

Amen. I'm a big proponent of tracks, and let me just give a plug for trackplanet .com. At trackplanet .com, you can give your church's name and address, and like on these tracks that I have, I'm looking at right now, we have our address and our website on these tracks, and I think that's important that when we pass out a track, it helps them know who it's from, and it points them to further, they can, you know, they can find more resources like on our website.

So one thing that we've done is encourage our people with tracks, and we ordered some tracks specifically for the fair, like they're not fair based or whatever, they're just, we ordered more tracks to have them, and so tonight, the goal is, as we're doing these games and stuff, to pass out tracks, and here's something else about track two.

You talk about, I love the organic idea, and I think it's 100 right. However, if you tell people, hey, just go up there and try to have organic conversations about the gospel, there's so many, there's so many roadblocks that are our own fear, you know, distractions, all that, whereas if you have tracks in your hand, that almost forces you, and by the way, I'm not saying tracks are the be-all end-all.

I'm not saying, I'm not saying you fulfilled your evangelistic duties just by handing someone a track and walking away, but I am saying, I do believe putting tracks in people's hands is a great evangelistic tool, and I also believe sometimes it's the tracks that help foster those conversations that you're talking about.

Any thoughts you have there? Yeah, I think that's the two things I would say. One is, especially if the track itself is something that immediately helps start the conversation. It's something that engenders some curiosity.

Number two, I think what you were saying about having your church information on the track is really important, because let's say that the Holy Spirit uses the gospel, uses the Word of God contained in that track to bring conviction on the heart of a person.

We want them to know where to go, because let's be honest, every building in town that has church or tabernacle on the name is not necessarily the place they need to go, and so we want them to have an idea of who do they need to turn to that's going to point them to Christ and to the Scriptures, and we're not saying that there's, for example, there in Perryville, we're not saying Second Baptist Perryville is the only church that they could turn to for that, but we are saying that it is a church that's going to point them to Christ and to the Scriptures as opposed to some other places that maybe wouldn't do so.

For example, here in Marshall, like I mentioned, there's that church that I can't work with. Well, for example, that would be a place that I wouldn't want them to go to if they picked up a track, so I'd want them to be pointed back to what we're doing here.

Gospel-Centered Floats and Open-Air Preaching

Amen. So, here's something else. We, with the fair parade, now this takes a lot of work, and I'm not even advocating everyone be able to do this, but we have some people that are, they think this way, and so it's helpful.

They're gifted in these ways, and so we have done fair parade floats, and we always try to take these floats and make them about Jesus. So, like one year, it was you had to come up with your own television show, and so, or not, the theme was a television show, like what are we going to do?

You were a televangelist. So, we picked, no, we picked Gilligan's Island, and we did our float Gilligan's Island, and on the side, we put your shipwrecked without Jesus, and then we had a float. One year, it was, the theme was book, book, book it to the county fair or something like that, and you had to pick a book.

Well, guess what we picked? We picked people of the book, and we did like a Bible theme, and then we passed out tracks. So, like we walked along the fair, our float, we just walked along, and our float is throwing candy, and then we're walking along.

We're just handing out tracks as we're walking along in the fair, and then this year, do you know what I did this year? It's crazy. Well, I did see your float. Okay, so the float, so the theme this year was who you're going to call, and so our, so we took that, and we did, and by the way, we would, we would like win first place because our floats were so amazing, and like this year, I was like, let's scale back a little bit.

So, we scaled back, and we put on our float. So, the theme is who you're going to call. When we put on our float, Isaiah 55, 6, seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he's near. So, we've got that going, and then we're passing out tracks, and then on top of that, I'm walking in front of the float with my portable speaker, and I'm preaching.

That's cool. And you know, I think it went well. I mean, I got some weird looks and stuff, and it's different kind of open-air preaching because number one, you're walking and preaching, and I didn't realize by the end how tired I was, you know.

It's preaching's tiring, walking's tiring, preaching and walking is tiring. Yeah, you maybe should have been on the float preaching. Well, I thought about that, but here's the deal. Like, I didn't, I did think about that, but I didn't want to take away from the kids like throwing candy and all that, you know, and like now they've got to deal with this guy preaching right in their ear because they're on the, you know, and plus we had other people were out walking by the float too, passing out tracks, and so just preach the gospel.

I preached Isaiah 55, 6, and 7, you know, it was like, let the wicked forsake his way and unrighteous man his thoughts, let him return to the Lord and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. You know, I just, I just, like those are, by the way, if you're going to street preach, Isaiah 55, 6, and 7 is a great short text.

I just read it, and I just tell people about Jesus' judgment's coming. God's going to judge Perryville, but he's given us hope and offered abundant pardon in Christ, and so whatever, man, I just preached a short little message over and over and over and over again because, you know, you're passing, you're just passing people, so it was like a 30 second to two minutes, depending on our speed sometimes, of a message, and then you just start over again, but those are some ways that we're trying to think intentionally about passing out tracks, preaching the gospel, getting involved with our community, and they can think we're crazy, and they can think all those things, but they can't say we don't love the Bible, you know.

That's right, that's right, and I think to some degree, that's what the community has helped by seeing, man, these people really believe what they say they believe. I think it was the humanist John Locke was once going to, and I hope I'm telling this right.

I hope somebody's not like that completely, that history's completely off, but I think it was the humanist John Locke that was going once to hear Whitfield preach, and he was asked, why would you go listen to him preach?

You don't believe what he's saying, and he said, yes, but he does, and so it really matters that they see that we believe what we say we believe. I think it might have been Benjamin Franklin that said that, but anyway, I don't know.

It doesn't matter, but you're right, you know. Yeah, to some degree, but well, so you know, I'm not saying, by the way, I didn't come up with the idea for preaching the fair parade. I got that from another pastor who's been doing it, and I'm like, that's a great idea, and so I just ad litened it, and I did it myself, and so I think that, but here's the deal.

The Gospel Is Not the Same as Being Nice

I know, and I want to say this about you and like the booth and all that. Okay, I know there's thousands of things that you can do, and churches are so bent on like, well, first we just got to let people know they love us, so all we're going to do or let people know that we love them, so all we're going to do at the fair this year is we're going to give out free sandwiches.

You know, we just want them to know, hey, we love you. Jesus loves you. Well, here's the thing. I'm not saying that it's bad to let your community know that the church loves them or even to say Jesus loves you, but I want to tell you that those things are not the gospel.

That's not the gospel, and what your community needs is the gospel, so you say, well, I just don't think it's effective for you to be out there preaching the gospel. Well, I don't care what you think because that is what the Bible says, right, and so I'm going to pass out.

I'm going to be intentional. That would be my exhortation to churches to be intentional in your community, whatever events there may be, to be intentional, not just to show your community that you love them.

That's great. Show them that you love them, but show them that you love them by being willing to tell them the truth and explicitly sharing the gospel, not parts of the gospel, you know, the gospel, including your sinner.

Judgment is coming. God has made atonement for our sins in Christ. You must repent of your sins, believe the gospel. Jesus lived the perfect life. He died on the cross for our sins, and He rose again in victory, and only those who turn from their sins and call upon the name of the Lord in faith will be saved.

Yeah, and I think one of the issues that we need to point out is oftentimes people think, well, everybody, I'm fixing to go over here to the fair, and you know, 92 percent of the people I'm going to see I know, and the danger is that we will assume that all of those people already know the gospel, and they don't.

That's right. When I was preaching yesterday, a lot of people were saying amen, but I'm like, I don't know that you're a Christian, you know, but this is my, a little bit different is this is my hometown, so I know a lot of people, you know, I'm preaching, but that's okay.

I even got a derogatory video, like there's Nelson, you know, preaching the gospel, like that's okay if that's what I'm known for, so be it. So we're getting kind of close to our 30-minute goal or whatever.

Intentional Evangelism in the Rural Church Calendar

Any kind of concluding thoughts you have? Yeah, just, you know, whatever it may be, you know, it doesn't have to be a rule church, but like you were talking about, you know, here a while back when Michael Coughlin was at your church, you know, I basically asked him that same question, like you were talking about, how do we look for these opportunities in these rural places, because the larger cities do seem to already have, it's kind of built in.

There are crowds everywhere, seemingly like every day, but we really have to, and I think what you said about being intentional is good, but we really have to, in the rural church, we have to take advantage of the calendar of things that happen in the year.

So, you know, I would kind of point out one last thing. So for us, we had our fair parade last night. Me and my sons, we rode our horses in the parade. We didn't have a church float. We don't do a float in the fair parade, because we do a float in Searcy County.

We have a fair parade, and then we have a Christmas parade, and so we kind of put all of our float energies into the Christmas parade, so we'll do that, but still last night, we had the opportunity to be a part of the parade.

I was able to make contact with a family who had came to church here a few years ago, and now they're attending another place, but was able to kind of keep contact with them. Not that I'm trying to draw them away from that.

They're in a good church and want them to keep going there, but just that's an example of people that I don't see every day, but it was another opportunity for a connection in the community, and so we ought to always be looking for those opportunities as they arise in the calendar of your rural community.

Amen, and I would only follow that up to say this, and just to reiterate what I've already said, the hope for your community, the hope is the Lord Jesus Christ. That's right. The gospel is the hope for your community, and I know that you, most likely, if you're listening to this, preach the gospel every Sunday in your church, but how can you intentionally lead your people in evangelism, and how can you intentionally take the gospel to your community?

Not just love your community, but to love your community specifically with the heralding of the good news of Christ. Remember this. Jesus is coming, and He's going to judge your community. Every people, all the people that you know in your community, the volunteer moms and the dads coaching the sports teams and the high school principal, every person that you know in your community, they're going to stand before the throne of Christ, and God has put you in this community so that you can herald the gospel to those people, and here's the reality.

His word never returns void. God will use His word at times to harden sinners, that's for sure, but God will also use His word to convert sinners. What a glorious reality. What a glorious privilege and responsibility, Eddie, we have as pastors in rural communities to take the gospel to these people.

They need it. I'm sorry. I've learned some things from Tim Keller, but I reject that the city brings the gospel to us. We bring the gospel to the city, and it's your responsibility as a faithful church in your community to take the gospel to the people.

Right, and I would reiterate, and I know I already said I was done, but I would just reiterate the idea that we've got to stop assuming that our community members already know the gospel. They probably know a truncated view of the gospel, but not the gospel in its fullness, not the gospel as it's taught in scripture, and so they need to hear the whole message of who is God, what is the condition of man, what is the hope of salvation in Jesus Christ, and what is the proper response of repentance to faith.

That's right. We've already said it, but God loves you and wants you to go to heaven or whatever. That's not the gospel, so everyone's imperfect. Everyone makes mistakes. That's not the gospel. We need the whole gospel for the whole person, for your whole community.

Do it. Amen. That's right. All right. Thanks for joining us on episode six of the Rural Church Podcast. Say goodbye, Eddie. See you guys next week.