We spent the week in Boone, NC and Asheville to preach at Appalachian State, and UNC Asheville. We will decided to change our hotel plans enroute as Kerrigan found out that ASU was a much larger school to minister to. We ended up getting great accommodations a few miles from the school. Mon, Tues, and Thur we were at Boone, and Wed we went to UNCA and visited my grandparents for a bit before the drive back to Boone.
We were praising God for at least the hundreds but probably the thousands that heard the gospel at ASU three days this past week. The first day on Monday was an uproar, with Kerrigan starting out and both of us preaching in a free speech circle on Sanford lawn. Our banner garnered much attention from the students, though we did not use it the second and third day on campus. The second day I started and we had a much more measured day with reasonable dialogue with many students. We broke on Wed down to UNCA and the roller coaster ride down the Blueridge parkway is not recommended by me, I almost got nauseous and I was in the Navy for 21 years! We came back a different way back to Boone. We had small crowds of 20-25 most of the day, with the weather change it was quite chilly. This campus has a strange layout that spreads the library, campus center, and eateries apart. This disperses the lunch crowd too much and we were told we would have to preach in a specific area, though that did not come from security who never approached us all day. We had lots of pagans, homosexuals, and earth lovers. They did the usual ranting against the Bible, I had some good one2ones while Kerrigan preached. We called it an early day about 3pm and went to visit my grandparents and have dinner with them. They are Roman Catholics who won’t deny Christ, but won’t deny Mary, the Saints, or the Pope either. Heart breaking, but we had an enjoyable time together and then we headed back to Boone for our last day at ASU. Our last day was the best so far, we had many listening intently, and even rebuking hecklers who weren’t thinking about what they were saying before interrupting the preaching. We heard more than one student say what a tremendous impact we had made on campus as everyone was talking about spiritual matters all week long even in their humanistic, evolutionary classes. It was great, Kerrigan noted that we held the attention of hundreds of students at a time for hours at a time, challenging their thinking and worldviews, and yet many of their professors were probably wondering how we did that as they can’t get some of them to pay attention or stay awake in classes.
- Appalachian State University, Boone, NC Sept 2008