PRAISE IN THE PARK:
Crowd focuses on Jesus, not baseball, at AutoZone Park
Worship gathering brings crowd to AutoZone Park.
The big video screen at AutoZone Park usually shows advertisements and replays of baseball action, but on Saturday it was showing testimonies from people who said they’d changed their lives through accepting Christ.
The video programming was part of an hours-long event called Memphis Exalts Jesus, offering sermons and music that brought people dancing from their seats under a clear, sunny sky.
Memphis Exalts Jesus was one of a wide range of events across Memphis marking this Easter weekend, and it attracted a cross-section of city residents, with black, white, Asian and Hispanic participants visible.
Some of the presentations were in Spanish, which 22-year-old Yuli Galvez appreciated. She’s from El Salvador and she speaks English, but she came with her mother, Julia, who doesn’t speak the language well. Yuli Galvez, who wore a black cowboy hat, said she’d come “to pray for this city, so it will be a better city.”
She and her mother were among more than 30 attendees from Iglesia Manantial de Vida, a Hispanic church in Raleigh. Julia Galvez, 38, said in Spanish that she had expected more people to come to the stadium “because we have a need for God.” Still, she said she was grateful organizers had put the event together.
Hundreds of people came in and out during the free event, making it difficult to gauge attendance, but many areas of the stadium were empty, including some rows in the lower section.
Jeffery Rhodes, 52, said he’d learned about the event at World Overcomers church in Hickory Hill and wanted to
support it. “We don’t dislike the atheists. We love them. You know what I mean? ... I feel like that’s what this area’s missing, is love,” he said.
Rhodes was referring to the annual American Atheists national convention, taking place at The Peabody, just a few feet away from the Downtown baseball stadium.
Jan Winterburn, a 64-year-old participant in an unnamed church that meets in houses near the University of Memphis, said the atheists’ convention originally prompted her and others to put the stadium event together, but that it had evolved into an effort to unite local Christians.
She said none of the speakers or musicians at the stadium was introduced by name “because we wanted Jesus to be the only one that was named.”
Outside the stadium, Raymond Freeman, 60, sought to challenge the atheists, standing on a street corner with a handwritten sandwich board that read “Only a fool would say there is no God!” On the back, it said, “Who made sun moon stars in the sky?”
He said many people had taken his photo, and he described a lengthy debate with an atheist.
When musicians inside the stadium started singing an upbeat gospel tune on an infield stage, many people in the crowd started dancing, including Darryl Holloman.
He was among a small group of people who came over to the Memphis Exalts Jesus event wearing their name tags from the atheists’ convention. Holloman, 30, from Chicago, said he’s not religious but appreciates blues and gospel songs. “I love music that just gets it going.”
His friend Jon Engling, also from Chicago, emphasized that they weren’t there to cause problems, but wanted to check out the event and perhaps talk to people.
“You know, we are atheists, and it’s always good to hear both sides of an argument,” said Engling, 29.