Darryl Strawberry & FCA

Hello, this is Matt Slick from the Matt Slick Live Podcast, where I defend the Christian faith and lay out our foundations of the truth of God's Word. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network.

Welcome to Truth Network. I'm Matt Slick from the Matt Slick Live Podcast, where I defend the Christian faith and lay out our foundations of the truth of God's Word. I'm Matt Slick from the Matt Slick Live Podcast, where I defend the Christian faith and lay out our foundations of the truth of God's Word. I was at a school this morning, West Forsyth, and just seen 50 kids worshiping and praising Jesus and teaching on the armor of God, which is amazing. So bringing Darryl in is going to help us to continue to further the gospel and growth of students in their faith and all of our schools here in the Triad. There's a desperate need to reach these young student athletes, but there's also a need to funding.

Like they say, the gospel's free, but you've got to pay the plumbing, right? So you have one of your board members here, you have a whole lot of folks excited. We were going to be promoted on the radio, and we were kind of speaking on behalf of all the different FCA and other ministry chapters all over the country and the world to support. Why is it so important that we come together as a body to pour resources and prayer to support these kind of things? Introduce us to your board member.

We'll let him take that question. Yeah, so we've got our board chair here, Rick Powers. He's been impacted by FCA growing up in school and going to FCA camp in Black Mountain, so he's serving with us and he's helping to charge our board in terms of helping us in terms of our funding. So Rick, just share a little bit about the impact that finances can have into furthering our ministry and our footprint in the Triad. Hey, thank you, Rashawn.

Thank you, Stu. Like you said, I was involved in FCA in high school with a high school huddle, also continued in college. But when you think about it, FCA and things are one of the few ministries that are still in our schools, and we need funding like with this bank with Darrell Strawberry on October 26th at Truist Park to help provide the funding to have huddles, to provide ministries like Athletes Bibles, also to reach coaches and athletes. And our goal is to try to reach every athlete, every coach in our area with the gospel of Christ and share the word. When you say coaches, that gets me excited because think about it. You reach one coach, you could have reached 100 people on that team, football team or 15, 20 people on the basketball team.

But think about all their parents, all the siblings, the opponents, the referees. I mean, one coach coming to Christ could be a bride. Think about the coaches that love Jesus that were in my life and the impact that they got me.

Look at me. I'm doing this today because I had some godly coaches that loved me, prayed for me, encouraged me. FCA was a big part of that.

It's a real. What's the mission of FCA? And for people that maybe aren't familiar with it, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, I know that's what that stands for. Rashawn, what would you say the mission is and what gets you excited about that? So it's the opportunity to lead every coach and every athlete and that's every to a growing relationship with Jesus Christ and his church. That's our mission. And our overall vision is to see the world transformed by Christ through the influence of coaches and athletes. So as we're on this mission of reaching every like you said, one coach can have an impact on thousands of lives.

And if we can touch every single coach in our area and every single athlete, the influence that they have, they'll be able to use sports, not as a pedestal, but they'll be able to use sports as a just as an opportunity to really lift up the name of Christ and to glorify him through what they do. There's a little background noise as we just had. I don't know how many men in here, maybe 60 men for Wednesday in the Word. Rick, you're part of this Wednesday in the Word group and you're on the board of FCA. Tell everyone what we just did. Tell them what just happened and why we have this background noise. We had this background noise because we had a minister, a preacher, the man of the gospel from India this morning share how he and his family was saved because a missionary came in their lives when they were all about to lose hope and basically commit suicide.

And with the word of the gospel, they knew that there was life because of our Jesus Christ. And it's just a tremendous ministry and I look forward to it every week and it's made a big difference in my life. So Wednesday in the Word, that's what's been going on, fellowship with athletes, Darryl Strawberry's coming. Give us the dates, the way people get involved, maybe a website, all that stuff for people to learn more. Yeah, so the banquet's going to be on October the 26th, Thursday, 630 p.m. at the Dash baseball stadium in Winston-Salem. You can find out more about how to be a part of that through going to our website, which is www.westerntriadfca.org. That's www.westerntriadfca.org.

Or you can reach out to us through email at bthompsonatfca.org. And I'm on the hook for a table. I'm a little embarrassed about how this came about.

Bershon, I'll let you do the play-by-play on that because it was pretty intense. Yeah, so we were playing two-on-two basketball all day for about two hours and then Stu takes the basketball and says, Bershon, if I make this shot by throwing it off the side of the wall, up into the air, and I'm not even looking. He's not even looking at the basket. He's facing the wall.

If I could throw it off that wall and ricochet it back into the basket, I'll sponsor a table. Well, Stu goes to the sideline. He faces the wall. He curls the ball back and he throws it forward off the wall. It bounces back over his head. And I'm looking at this thing and it's going, it's going.

And it swishes all net into the basket behind him without looking. And that's a table sponsor, he says. I was like, yes, praise Jesus. And he said, all for the glory of God. I said, yes, all for the glory.

So I'm on the hook for a table. And, you know, I wasn't supposed to make that shot, but I made it. In fact, as he's recording me, he's like, hey, should I edit?

I said, don't edit it. But we just trusted the Lord. But it was wild.

It went in. But it's real important because someone might come to that banquet, hear Daryl Strawberry share the gospel. People are going to write money to support FCA, which means a kid's going to get a Bible. It means a kid's going to go to camp. A kid's going to, you know, it's going to fund this ministry. It's going to help you be able to put gas in your car so you can go witness to entire football teams. You sent in these pictures of college and high school football teams. You did a big Wake Forest day the other day, which was powerful.

You know, when they played Georgia Tech and all that. But beyond that, someone's going to hear the gospel and someone could come to know Jesus as their savior at this FCA banquet. Is there anything more exciting after hearing our Indian friend share this morning about Christ coming to Christ? Is there anything more exciting?

I'm telling you, it's not. And in a conversation with Daryl Strawberry last week, he is super excited not to come here and talk about his baseball story necessarily. He is excited to come and share the gospel.

He is really pumped about it. And there's nothing like the gospel. Jesus Christ. Amen.

Rick, real quick on the board of FCA. You know, a lot of people. There's guys like you all. You guys are kind of like science school teachers.

Like no one knows your name, but like they know when they drop their kid off, they're going to get the word. You guys work. You know, we talk about Moses. He was known as a servant of the Lord at the end of, you know, at the end of Deuteronomy 34. A servant of God. I mean, this is the greatest patriarch, arguably, in history, the giver of the law, the emancipator of Egypt, Moses.

But he's called a servant. Speak to all the other board members out there, all the other people that are invited by Bereshon to join the board to serve, to show up, to put water in cups and to serve, to make coffee for coaches, you know, with FCA or any other ministry. There's a lot of thankless, you know, things, you know, setting up chairs for a service. Talk about the importance, the role of serving like that and give a final challenge as we get out of here about Fellowship of Christian Athletes and getting involved and getting, jumping in.

Thank you, Sue. I'll mention again that FCA and like Young Life are one of the only ministries that are still in our public schools and that they're spreading the gospel. And it's our challenge, it's our job, really, to help spread this to our youth.

As Bereshon said, we want to spread it to every athlete, every coach so that they can know the gospel. And that's, we need to be there hands and feet to be able to do that because a lot of our youth today, they're fighting challenges. They're in homes that they don't have a mom and dad.

They've got single-parent homes that those parents are struggling to provide for them and also to give them this opportunity. And a lot of times we can do that through the school and through people like Bereshon. And we need volunteers to do it. We need people to participate. We need to have the funding so that we can be the hands and feet. We've got to have that to provide this opportunity and to continue to provide that opportunity. That's our prayer. And hopefully we pray to have this placed on people's hearts that can make a difference. And we want these young people to have an opportunity to live a life that counts, to live a life that counts in the name of Jesus.

And so they can do that and spread it on with their children and grandchildren. Wow. Okay, well sign up for a table like I did.

You don't have to hit an acrobatic shot off the wall in a swish. I'm going to try to load this on the social media so people can see it. You may already have. But sponsor, get involved.

Get involved in your local chapter. Get involved in praying. Pray for right now. Start praying that hearts will be moved by Darrell Strawberry coming.

Pray for him as he speaks. And a big shout out to Coach Fred Willett who wrangled me in 1987. I was entering my senior year at Mount Tabor High School and he said, Stoo-bee-doo, we've got to start FCA. I'm like, what is FCA? And that's when I learned about FCA and I realized, you mean we can hold a Bible study on our campus?

I can bring in speakers like Darrell Strawberry and guys like you to share the gospel, even from India or anywhere. And we saw all kinds of kids get saved and be blessed. And to this day, there's a chapter of FCA. Coach Muse has got it rolling at Mount Tabor High School. And that was one of the first chapters of the whole triad then.

It was very early. But thank God for coaches like Coach Willett, all the other coaches that sponsored and teachers and students and lay leaders. You know what's kind of cool is we had a bunch of non-athletes show up every week to FCA. And we're like, what are you going to say?

No, you can't come in here because you're not in the swim team or whatever. You better come in here and bring a friend and hear about the Lord and how much God loves you. And that's the beautiful thing about heaven. Heaven will be full of all different partisans and athletes and non-athletes, right? It'll be full of people who are bought by the blood of Jesus Christ. Amen.