Crosswalk Tour—More Than Tradition?

Many of you have only been recently introduced to Crosswalk, so you might not know that we have our roots in the summer tours. Begun in 1995, the summer mission trips have taken us into correctional facilities in 47 states and Canada to present the gospel message to over 30,000 youth. In 2007, God opened the doors for full-time ministry in Atlanta and Houston, and He has blessed both Bill and me with more than enough to keep us busy with our own local ministries year-round. So some of you might wonder why we leave our local work to our faithful volunteers every summer for three weeks to continue the Crosswalk tours. Is it merely a tradition? Could our resources be better spent in local ministry? To answer these questions, I went back to a tour story from 2004. This moment is indelibly carved into my memory along with hundreds just like it.

“That Makes Sense” (edited and reprinted from 2004’s tour report)

It was the first of two concerts that night in Orlando, and along with about 50 juvenile offenders, we were crowded into a room that was in reality much smaller than I had been led to believe weeks earlier when I booked the concert. A little of the “how-will-we-ever-make-this-work?” attitude had begun to cloud our spirits during set-up time. In retrospect, I see that it was one of the countless manifestations of God’s power at work during that trip, but at the time it was easy to let our human shortsightedness take over. At the end of the night, however, God gave us all a slap in the face through a young man named Jarvis who sat on the front row.

The main skit that year revolved around a framed portrait of the actors playing a father and his child. The final scene of the skit vividly illustrated God wiping away the black marks from our lives and leaving us in a perfect relationship with Him. Laurel and Anthony did the scene as usual that night, and Laurel placed the portrait on the easel after Anthony wiped away all the marks. We had always gotten an audible response from the audience at that moment in the skit, but what happened that night was a first. When he saw the visual representation of God’s amazing grace, Jarvis was compelled to stand up, raise his hands toward heaven, and shout, “That makes sense!” He then calmly sat back down to hear the rest of the concert. His response was so sincere and spontaneous that it brought no negative reaction from the crowd or the staff. It was as if this young man had never really comprehended the gospel message until that very moment, and it was just too much for him to contain. But the story doesn’t end there.

After the concert I was able to talk with Jarvis and learn that he had actually been released from Orange Regional JDC 13 days earlier. He was technically a free man, but since his grandmother had died while he was locked up, he had nowhere to go. DFCS was trying to place him but had not yet picked him up. I wasted no time in telling him how God orchestrated the whole thing so that the Spirit could touch his heart in a special way. He said he had already figured that out. What we came to realize later was that only five days into the tour, we needed him just as much to affirm that God was still in control and that there was no limitation too big for Him to overcome.

It is moments like these that keep us going back year after year. Just as Jesus had divine appointments with the Samaritan woman in John 4, Zacchaeus in Luke 19, and countless others in His three years of ministry, we have divine appointments with thousands of kids whose paths God crosses with ours to accomplish His will and purpose. Thank you all for your continued support of the Crosswalk summer tours.