This week we did two outreaches at the State Fair of Texas. On Friday, Wally, Duane and I rode the DART to Dallas. After some lunch and fellowship, we took the DART to the station at Fair Park. There we handed out a few thousand tracts, did a little open air preaching and shared the Gospel one on one with a number of people who were waiting for trains. For use outside of the fair grounds, we made two tracts that were specific to the fair. The first was a “fried food” trivia tract. The second was a bookmark featuring the Texas Star facts and the Gospel on the back. These tracts were well received at the fair park DART station.
On Saturday, we used the State Fair Gospel booth inside of the fair 
grounds for an outreach. We had over 20 people come to help with the outreach! At first glance it might seem that 20 people is too many to man this booth, but it actually gave us the opportunity to rotate people and give many people a chance to witness at the fair.
As each portion of our group arrived, they received five to ten minutes of
training from Rex Whitton who heads up this outreach. Then we were “on the job”. The booth features a big sign that says “Million Dollar Eye Test”. This attracts peoples curiosity and they come over just to see what we are up to.
The Million Dollar Eye test is basically used to diagnose someone 
spiritual condition. We first ask if they would trade one of their eyes for a million dollars. We would explain that we can do a simple, painless procedure to remove their eye and replace it with a glass eye. The glass eye would “look” the same, it just would not “look” the same! We use million dollar bill tracts to make the point that it is a lot of money. Most people said no to this question. Although some would say yes!
We then follow with a second question to ask if they would trade both of
their eyes for one trillion dollars. Again we had tracts to show how many zeros there are. We would also point out that a trillion one dollar bills laid end to end would reach from the earth to the sun. Nearly everyone would say no to this question. Although surprisingly a couple said yes, saying that they would use some of the money to buy new eyes!
The whole point of these two questions was to get each person to 
recognize that if there is a high value on their eyes than there must be an even higher value on their soul. So we’d just ask “if you would not trade your eyes for a trillion dollars, what must your soul be worth?”
For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? (Mark 8:26)
This lead to the ultimate “million dollar question”: Where will you spend eternity?
From here we were able to share the Law and Gospel with people. We 
had a number of amazing conversations. Everyone who was with us was pretty much constantly involved in as much and as many conversations as they wanted to be. We had some good opportunities to discuss the conversations and provide the team members with some “in the field” training on sharing the Gospel.
We were blessed to have so many people join us. We are thanking to have access to the booth at the state fair to witness to the people attending the fair. We will be praying about how to participate in the State Fair Outreach again next year.
Fair’s seem to be good opportunities to share the Gospel. The Texas State Fair is one of the (if not the) largest fairs in the country. Your town might have a city fair or a county fair where you could rent a booth and set up to share the Gospel. We know some people who witness at “trade days” each month in McKinney. Keep your eye open in your town to see what opportunities there are. There might be a small fee to reserve a booth. However, what we found is that once inside the fair grounds we were able to have many good one on one conversations to share the Gospel and also hand out Gospel tracts.
If you have some experience sharing the Gospel at a booth at your local fair, please post a comment and share your experiences.
