Crashing the Hash Bash

“How can they hear without someone preaching to them?”—the Apostle Paul

One evening during my senior year at the University of Michigan, our leadership team was discussing open-air evangelism. Some teammates objected to this often-misunderstood form of sharing the good news. “It’s ineffective,” one said. “It’s offensive,” said another. Others worried, “The students will associate us with the condemnatory preachers you often see on campus.”

These objections were hard to argue with, but we sensed that God had called us to a public, verbal proclamation of the gospel. We decided to study this together in Scripture. The next time we talked about evangelism, we did a manuscript study on Romans 10. The Holy Spirit truly worked in our team. In particular, a few lines of Romans 10 became our challenge: “How can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news’” (Romans 10:14-15). We realized that our campus cannot believe unless the students hear, and our Christian students will not preach unless they are sent. Even if no one took us seriously when they passed by on campus, we knew we had nothing to lose. We wanted to have beautiful feet that would bring good news to the campus!

We were awed by the plan we had come up with as we left the dreary old dorm lounge that night. We knew we wanted as many students as possible to hear. And we didn’t want people to have to run off to class or head to the football stadium in the middle of our preaching. So we decided to have an outreach on one of the most crowded days of the year on our campus, a day known as Hash Bash. (Hash Bash is a tradition that happens on the first Saturday in April each year. It begins with a rally to legalize marijuana and is followed by hours of partying on the most central part of U of M’s campus called the “diag.” Students, alumni and locals gather in the diag for hours to watch the events of the day.) Political radicals and people who smoke pot need to hear about Jesus too, we decided. And so we forged ahead with our planning.

The Logistics

What our team envisioned for the Hash Bash Outreach was to have a day of drama, music, preaching and contact evangelism following the rally on the diag while people were loitering and lazing about. But we knew that it would take a lot of work. We knew it would be important for our students to be well trained. We also knew that we needed more than just our chapter to pull this off so we invited our U of M sister chapter, the Chinese Christian Fellowship (CCF), to join us.

We made announcements at each chapter’s large group meetings, challenging people to sign up and be a part of the outreach. We shared our vision from Romans 10 and our belief that God would do good things through this outreach. We also warned them of the time commitment and that each person would need to participate in some training. To our surprise, about 40 students signed up for the outreach!

Then the training began. The CCF chapter president and I divided the students up into three teams, each assigned one of the three hours we would be on the diag. Each team would have a couple of preachers, deliver some testimonies, perform a couple of skits, and present a music set in that hour. During the other two hours of the outreach, teams would rotate between acting as an audience for the preachers or going out in pairs for contact evangelism.

We asked students who chose to give testimonies or to preach the gospel to go to one of two training times the week before Hash Bash. That way they could learn how to articulate the gospel, use illustrations and speak over a loud crowd.

In addition, each drama and music team had a student team leader responsible for planning, practice and prayer.

We used our daily prayer meetings that week to focus on Hash Bash outreach and on Friday night (the night before Hash Bash) we came together for a rehearsal. Each team went into a different auditorium and ran through their hour-long set. Watching fellow chapter members passionately share the gospel excited everyone. We prayed and went to bed early before the “big day.”

But our training and practice was not over. Many students in the two chapters had never before experienced contact evangelism. So we woke up early on the morning of Hash Bash and learned how to articulate the gospel, engage someone in spiritual conversation and lead a person to Christ.

We prayed some more, ate pizza together, and then embarked into the sea of smoke and bongo drums to share Jesus with lost souls.

The Impact

Our exec team had been convinced from the beginning that God would use us for his glory, but we didn’t expect all the things God had prepared for our chapters and his kingdom that day.

We first began to see the good fruit of God’s kingdom that morning in contact evangelism training. There was a student among us who had signed up to be in a drama and had been regularly attending CCF, but had not yet received Christ. When the rest of us were “practicing” sharing the gospel, this woman actually received Christ for the first time. When she stepped out to the campus to preach the gospel through a skit and in contact evangelism just an hour later, I think we all felt moved by what a privilege it is to be a part of God’s work. If for no other reason, we had labored all week for this new sister in Christ.

But God had yet more in store. We heard a report of a woman who saw the open-air preaching and was led to Christ by a Christian who wasn’t with our group but was standing next to her. Two other students were able to lead a U of M alumnus to Christ during contact evangelism later in the afternoon.

At the end of the day, we came together in the corner of the diag to celebrate and share what the Lord had done with music, praise and prayer. A few of the Hash Bash spectators even stopped by to watch us sing our praise. It had been a wonderful day of working for God, and though we were all cold and exhausted, there was a sense among us that it was a day well spent. In fact, the following week in prayer meeting, another senior from our chapter said the outreach had shown her that “this is what life is all about.”

Looking back at the Hash Bash Outreach, I consider it to be one of the greatest things I was ever a part of during my undergraduate years. Watching my peers sacrifice study time the last full week of classes to stand in the cold for hours on a Saturday and share the gospel made me so proud to be a part of InterVarsity on my campus. I hoped that the lives of my senior friends would be changed beyond graduation. As I watched freshmen preach the gospel, I thanked God for the new leaders he had given us and the way this outreach would train them for their next three years at U of M. Watching the two chapters work as a team gave me hope that they would begin to work together more in reaching the campus. But, most importantly, seeing God’s faithfulness to all of us and to the new converts was an overwhelming joy. I had prayed in frustration the previous year when I was evangelism coordinator and had a hard time getting my peers to the weekly contact evangelism times. God had heard those prayers, and was probably answering the prayers of the student leaders who began our chapter in the 1940s and longed for the Lord Jesus to reign over the U of M campus. God’s faithfulness and partnership with us was clear to me in an even brighter way as I participated in my last outreach as a student my senior year. Preaching the gospel to lost people, I thought to myself, What a way to leave, and what a way to live!