ROCKWALL, Texas (ABP) — Commitment is the key to a fruitful ministry, Ron Evans says. He should know. He is the pastor of a church that literally meets under a tree.
On any given Sunday afternoon, people of all ages — ranging from wealthy families to homeless youths — gather in Haggard Park in Plano, Texas, for Church Under the Tree.
“They come here because they've been to a church or they've met church people,” Evans said. “And when they came in all dressed in black with tattoos and piercing[s], no one would talk to them, and no one acted like they cared about them. But they come here because we did.”
The group has become a church of its own, but Church Under the Tree has members who never would darken the doorstep of a traditional house of worship.
It all started after Evans, then-youth pastor at Brown Street Baptist Fellowship in nearby Wylie, Texas, started spending time in Haggard Park. The park is a place where teenagers from all over the Dallas area hang out together. Many of them come from broken homes, battle drug problems and are sexually active.
Later that summer, Evans and his three teenage daughters took a guitar, a Bible and their Labrador puppy with them to the park. They worked their way through the crowd, claimed a picnic table and began singing, hoping to draw people into conversation. In the end, the puppy was the draw.
Evans and his family put down the guitar and spent the next six weeks building relationships with people. That's how the church developed.
“You've got to get in their heart,” Evans said. “You've got to become their friend. It's relationship ministry, and that's all it is.”
Now the original group hangs out every Friday night, but they also meet more formally on Sunday afternoons. They gather for lunch and transition into a time of prayer and preaching. In the beginning, attendance was lackluster at best. These days, Evans said, on a typical Sunday dozens of young people will gather in the park for worship.
Evans and his group have challenged the Church Under the Tree family to seek depth in their faith. The group shares a prayer journal they call “The Book of Life,” which is passed around each Sunday for people to share prayer requests or what God is teaching them. Evans scans it into his computer and e-mails a file of the updated pages to supporters each week.
Small groups have started meeting on Thursday nights and Saturday mornings, and Evans said he hopes similar groups will multiply throughout the Dallas area.
“One-hundred-percent commitment to the students and to God's Word — that's the only combination that accomplishes anything,” he said.
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