Southwestern Union Record

They stand at a street corner, anxiously waiting for the light to change.  After what seems like an eternity, they are finally able to cross. Entering the George R. Brown Convention Center in the heart of Houston Texas, they join the river of other young people who have come from all across the globe to attend this year’s Generation of Youth for Christ in Houston, Tex.

“Fill Me, Our Earnest Plea” was the 2011 GYC theme, which was about asking for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Attendees had a plethora of great seminars from which to choose, such as Stephen Bohr’s Secrets of Revival and Reformation, Ivor Myer’s The Power of the Spirit, and Dwight Nelson’s The Gift: The Second Coming of the Holy Spirit, along with many others. For two days, young people packed the seminars, eager to learn all they could on living lives that are filled with the Holy Spirit. The Thursday morning plenary session speaker was Janet Page, assistant ministerial director for the General Conference. She talked about how prayer and having a personal friendship with God and the Holy Spirit are crucial. 

With so many great presenters present at GYC, and the fact that the attendees were on fire about what they were learning, people could not stop talking about the great experiences they were having. Taylor Hinkle from Phoenix, Ariz., said, “It’s wonderful to see this many young people coming together in one place to grow spiritually and to seek a better relationship with the Lord.” Friday was the highlight of GYC, as it was outreach day.

At the previous evening’s meeting, Lisa Melchor, a young woman who had started Bible studies in her apartment building, along with Chelsy Schauer, vice president for evangelism for GYC, announced that on Friday afternoon, several of the 55 buses for outreach would be going to a little town not far from Houston called Alvin. Lisa explained that some months before, she had started a small group Bible study with other residents in her apartment building. A few months after they had started studying, three of the residents fully accepted the Seventh-day Adventist message. The little group began to grow, and they soon outgrew the building where they were meeting. Amazingly, they found another place to meet for free. Once again they outgrew the building, and then they found a Baptist church building that they were allowed to use for free on Sabbath.

Lisa decided that she wanted to have a small two-day evangelistic series at the end of January 2012. She printed out 1,500 flyers, but she wondered how she and her small group of 15 were going to pass out the flyers in Alvin. Back in August, she heard that GYC would be in Houston. She contacted Chelsy and asked if GYC would be willing to help her out. The answer was an enthusiastic “Yes! You will be the first Adventists to do outreach in the history of Alvin.”

In the mad rush to load the buses, people were specifically asking which buses would be going to Alvin. The buses were loaded in record time and off they went. Once we reached Alvin, people were dropped off two at a time on different streets. For two hours they pounded the pavement blanketing the town of Alvin with flyers and Bible study interest cards. One team went into a convenience store to buy some water and told the clerk there what they were doing. The clerk asked them to leave behind some flyers, and to go next door to the laundromat and leave some there as well. Another group met a mother and her two sons, who happened to have just been talking about spiritual things. They gave them a Bible study card and a flyer to attend the evangelistic meeting. We returned back to the Convention Center tired but singing songs and thanking God for the many opportunities that we had had that day.