MOUNT VERNON — The Will Graham Celebration office printed 350 programs for its youth-oriented Ignite the Flame prayer event on Sunday evening at Lakeholm Church of the Nazarene, but ran out just minutes after the event began.
A packed sanctuary rocked with loud praise music and standing, waving young people, although there were plenty of adults in the audience, too. The evening was billed as “an evening of prayer, worship and equipping.” Most people wore bright green plastic bracelets, courtesy of the celebration office, bearing the phrase “Family-Friends-Gravity-Graham.”
The Billy Graham Evangelical Association’s upcoming Christian Life & Witness course series, which begins after Easter, dubs the Thursday youth courses “Gravity.”
The Altered Praise Team from Warsaw, dressed all in black, performed dramatic American Sign Language to soulful praise music, garnering much applause and, finally, a standing ovation from the crowd.
Cindy Ruckman and her husband, Mark, were there as counselors, the term the BGEA gives the people who will take the newly saved under their wings.
“My husband and I are part of the celebration youth committee. We’re the homeschool connection on the committee,” Cindy Ruckman said.
She explained that the youth committee is made up of representatives of schools, the Knox County Home School Association, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and other organizations.
“As Christians,” Ruckman explained, “we are not given the gift of evangelism or the gift of talking to people but we need to do so out of obedience. The celebration teaches us how to do that.”
The youth committee enjoyed a pre-event picnic and got a preview of the Christian Life & Witness courses.
“We got a Reader’s Digest version of the training with Josh Weidmann tonight,” Ruckman said.
Weidmann, an evangelist and “youth communicator” who heads up Honest To God Ministries, and whose father, Jim, is part of Focus on the Family Ministries and vice president of the Promise Keepers organization, was the speaker at the event.
The counselors were there, Ruckman explained, “Because you can’t assume that just because somebody goes to church or is part of a youth group that they definitely know with all their heart that if something happened today they will go to heaven. That’s the goal, to never assume. They may follow God’s will, but they may not have a relationship with him.”
Susanna Young of Mount Vernon said she attended the event as part of her work in mentoring young people at Mulberry Street United Methodist Church.
“I’m here to support this Will Graham Celebration,” she said. “I think it’s going to be awesome. I’m so excited. I’m looking to go to the classes to become a counselor.”
Weidmann, a native of Littleton, Colo., was attending another high school in that city when the Columbine incident occurred, and was able to minister during the aftermath. He now resides in Chicago but travels as, his literature states, an itinerant evangelist.
While he spoke to the crowd, he hauled two landscape timbers to center stage and, without stopping his presentation, proceeded to use a hatchet to chop out some of the wood. Chips flew above the stage and into the audience.
Still speaking, Weidmann constructed a cross, lashing the two timbers together with rope, hammered in nails at the appropriate places, and splashed red paint on it to represent blood. Then he raised it up, and gave an altar call.
The evening concluded with scripture and prayer by Knox County participants in the celebration and a discussion of BGEA’s Operation Andrew friendship evangelism program by Weidmann.
The Gravity courses are on Thursday, April 12, 19, and 26 from 7 to 9 p.m. at Trinity Assembly of God on Beech Street. Live music begins at 6:30 p.m. There is no charge for the course. According to BGEA, anyone wishing to become a counselor must complete the course.