SALT LAKE CITY (BP)–Tracking the long-term results of the thousands of commitments made to Christ during the annual Crossover evangelistic effort is often difficult, but anecdotal reports testify to its eternal significance.
In Salt Lake City last summer, for instance, more than 1,700 individuals made first-time professions of faith in Christ through Crossover. Three of those were girls who met a group of summer missionaries on a city bus, and eventually prayed with them to receive Christ. The missionaries had been working with childcare during the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, and providentially had found themselves forced to ride the bus because of transportation miscues.
After Crossover, the missionaries wrote the girls to find out how they were doing, recounted Rob Lee, religious education consultant for the Utah-Idaho Southern Baptist Convention, who wrote about their story in one of his regular newspaper columns. One of the girls wrote them a letter back. “She shared how excited she was about her relationship to Christ and about all the wonderful things he was doing in her life,” Lee wrote.
The missionaries responded with a follow-up letter, but this time did not receive a reply.
Then they got a letter from the girl’s aunt later in the summer. “They were surprised and saddened to read that the girl had been hit by a car and killed one month after Crossover. The aunt was writing to say thanks to the summer missionaries for being friends with her niece,” Lee wrote.
Lee’s column, based on reports submitted by summer missionaries, addressed the issue of whether Crossover was “worth all the effort.”
“For this one teenager the answer is, yes! She is with Jesus right now because we said yes to sharing the good new during Crossover,” Lee wrote. “And yes, many of us will be hearing a thank you when we get to heaven for our involvement in Crossover.”
