ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, July 15, 1996 TAG: 9607150112
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH
SOURCE: DAVE ADDIS LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
EVEN A SURFER has joined the ranks of those who walk the beaches in the name of spreading the Christian word.
There was a haze over the beach last Monday afternoon, and a pretty fair offshore breeze. Rollers were building a couple of hundred yards out, at slack tide, and the Boogie-boarders at 26th Street were lapping it up.
Good waves.
Paul Brown, a 22-year-old surfer-boy from South Carolina, was landbound, though, and managing mightily to ignore the ocean for the moment. Bearded and barefoot, a ball cap pulled down over his blond hair, he looked for all the world like a Gen-X surf-rocker, a guy who'd sooner dip a board in the water than draw his next breath.
But this day, Brown was mesmerizing three grade-schoolers from Ohio with a balloon trick he uses to tell a smoothed-out, kid's-eye version of the story of Jonah and the whale.
Their mom watched, smiling, drawing slowly on a Carlton cigarette, as her boys absorbed a quick Bible story between dips in the ocean. She thanked Brown when he was done, then bounced an offered blessing right back at him. We're heading for Ohio in the morning, she said. But we'll remember you.
Paul Brown is a beachfront evangelist, part of a group of hundreds who are pounding the sands for Jesus this summer. Little bands of the faithful have been doing this work for several years now, some of them aggressively, some so calmly that they've blended into the fabric of the tourist strip, as much a part of the scene as the T-shirt shops and pancake houses.
There was a time in his life, Brown will tell you, and it wasn't long ago, that the surf was his god, and Paul Brown was never a man to be shy with his offerings. His spiritual tides turned a couple of years back, and now he uses his easy-does-it style to get tourists to put down the Cokes and Coppertone for a minute while he talks about the power that made all the brilliant sand, sun and surf possible.
``Surfers are spiritualists by nature,'' he said, ``so it's easy for me to worship God out there. So it's cool and stuff.
``I've led people to Christ by teaching them to surf, so it's really cool. Before, surfing was my god. Used to be I'd tell people, `Yeah, I'm going to church Sunday morning' - it was like, `See ya at 41st Street.'
``You know, surfers don't want to hear a lot of church jargon, but you get out there in the middle of that ocean, hanging out there on a board, and they'll talk to you about Christ while you're out there.
``You just have to relate to people on their level.''
|n n| Of the four or five active ministries working the Oceanfront this summer, the one that Brown has joined on his summer break from divinity school - Tidewater Leisure Ministries - says something through its name about how it relates to people. Especially to people who came here for a rest, people who might be more than a little put off by being buttonholed for Jesus while trying to even out their tan lines.
``We're not very aggressive in our ministry,'' said Carol Baker, who supervises the operation for the Norfolk Baptist Association. ``It's a soft sell. People come here on vacation; they don't want to be harassed.''
A couple of other groups - she won't mention them by name - are a lot pushier. Some do blanket-by-blanket investigations of who's been saved and who hasn't. Others have done mass leafletting, much of which winds up as Boardwalk flotsam. A city tourism official said, though, that her office had fielded no complaints this season of aggressive evangelism on the resort strip.
Baker insists on a blend-in, don't-agitate style. ``We don't go out and grab people, like some of them do,'' she said. ``I've heard of some of them following people, badgering them. I don't like that. That's not what we want to do.''
That's fine by Paul Brown, who is one of Baker's four paid staff members for the summer. ``You just can't go prying at people like that,'' he said.
``If they seem receptive,'' Baker said, ``if they seem like they want to talk, then we will talk to them about coming to Jesus. It's a Christian ministry, after all. It's what we're here for.''
|n n| The signs are subtle, at first. Baker's people - usually a college staff member or two, and a rotating cast of teen-age volunteers - appear at the Conch Shell sculpture on the Boardwalk at 26th Street every weekday at 10:30 a.m., and at 1 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays. They twist balloons into fancy shapes and hand them out to kids, sometimes with a blessing. They do free face-painting, in colors and shapes like a rainbow or a butterfly.
Often, a biblical connection is made: They might tell a person that the rainbow represents God's promise to Noah never to flood the Earth again, or that the butterfly's metamorphosis is symbolic of a person's rebirth through a spiritual awakening.
A city permit lets them do all this, during specified hours. The group also runs beachfront Sunday services and ministries at local campgrounds. They hand out goody bags weekly to the young people who work the beach all summer: the lifeguards, the rent-a-chair kids, the snow-cone vendors. All are invited to a weekly cookout and volleyball game Monday nights at a Baptist church in Virginia Beach. Usually 18 to 20 will stop by, Baker said.
And then there are the shows: Different churches send young performers out through the week to turn a few tourists' heads. An interpretive dance group from the First Chinese Baptist Church did just that for a couple of days last week, with a lively routine.
A few days before, a Muppet-like show with a thundering, heavy-metal Christian rock score could charitably have been categorized under the rubric of ``make a joyful noise.'' Baker, and a few other adults, winced. But the few preschoolers who stopped to watch seemed to like it.
|n n| By and large, the thousands of tourists who in-line skate, bicycle or just saunter by don't give the group much of a look. ``It wasn't what I thought,'' said Melissa Thole of Pennsylvania, strolling away with a heart-shaped balloon in one hand and cradling her 2-year-old daughter, Carmen, in her other arm. ``But they were OK, they were nice and all that. I didn't come here to worry about stuff, you know, so you just let it be. They're not hurting anybody.''
A tourist in his early 20s, who wouldn't give any name beyond ``Jim,'' said he'd been collared the night before outside an Atlantic Avenue bar by evangelists from Campus Crusade for Christ. ``They were fairly pushy about it,'' he said, ``wanting to know if I'd been saved, all that. It bugged me, but I wasn't in any mood to argue. Too nice a night, you know, I was having a good time. So I just pushed on by.
``These folks,'' he said, nodding toward Carol Baker's crew, ``what they're doing looks a little less like a problem. If they don't bother me, I don't care what they're doing out here.''
LENGTH: Long : 131 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Landmark News Service 1. Paul Brown, 22, of Tidewaterby CNBLeisure Ministries makes a balloon figure while he tells a Bible
story.
2. A group from the First Chinese Baptist Church of Virginia
Beach dances on the boardwalk (left). 3. Amber Grabely, 3, (above)
tries to sit perfectly still for a free face-painting by missionary
Anne Marie Kinman. color.
4. Carol Baker helps the ministry group set up its face-painting
station on the beach.