“I’ll Be Taking It Back Home”: A Boardwalk Chapel Testimonial

“I’ll be taking this training back home to unbelieving family members, friends, or coworkers. It’s not just applicable here on the boardwalk.” Landri Shope of Shiloh OPC in Raleigh, NC, left the Boardwalk Chapel not only feeling more equipped to share the gospel with strangers, but with all unbelievers in her life. She continues, “Where I live, most of the people know the Gospel. They’ve heard it before, they’re just more apathetic towards it. It is really important that they genuinely believe it. The self-examination questions we learned here are exactly what I need to get a conversation started.”

However, Landri’s time at the Chapel provided several interactions to individuals who were more than just apathetic to the gospel—they were antagonistic towards it, at first. Landri described an interesting but encouraging interaction she had one evening at the Chapel: “My friend and I were having a conversation with a young man who said he was an atheist. He started off the conversation saying that he knew more about Christianity than any of us. He also said that he never read the Bible. By the end of the conversation, he admitted that he didn’t really know enough about the Bible to be able to say whether or not there was a God, or whether or not there is a heaven or a hell. We asked if he would read the Bible to prove us wrong. He said yes. We started to hand him the New Testament, and he saw the whole Bible under my friend’s arm. He said, ‘Is that the whole thing? I want the whole thing.’ He took it, and we bookmarked John. We saw him again last night, and he said he was going to read it. It was really cool to know he walked away with the living Word of God.”

In all, she summed up her experience by sharing what she would say to someone considering coming to the Boardwalk Chapel for a week, “Expect it to be an exhausting week, but also a very spiritually intense week. It’s definitely a time for growth, and it doesn’t just end when your week here ends. It lasts throughout all of the months that follow. I would say that coming to the Boardwalk Chapel grew my faith immensely, and it made me appreciate my salvation much more than I had before. Which also led me to appreciate prayer, reading the Bible, going to church, and discussing spiritual and eternal things more than I ever have before.”