Wednesday, May 15, 2013

There's a Lot to Learn

This footage was shot by yours truly on Beale Street during the latest Beale Street Blast, which is a  public ministry outreach organized by Banners Unfurled and Ken Lansing of Memphis Tenn.   We go to Beale Street during the Music fest and we preach to the crowd there.  Iti s insanely loud, and the crowd can be a bit hostile, so the standard practice is to have the preacher at the moment up on a small ladder or stepstool and then have a buffer of men between him and the crowd, as the crowd is apt to snatch you off of the ladder. In this video, Bob Love of Smyrna Baptist Church is the 'front man' and he is dealing with a heckler that  technically commits several acts of assault on his person.
  From this we can learn a handful of things. We can learn that it is possible to be gracious and loving in the face of open hostility. We also  learn ( from the last few seconds of the video) that the  police are  sometimes quite content to sit back and watch while you get assaulted. I don't mean to berate the Memphis PD, as they  have done an admirable job in times past of protecting us from the crowd. I just find their response very interesting. Then again, maybe they saw that Bob Love had the situation under control.




2 comments:

Naysayer said...

Strange that that entire area was fairly well cleared out. What was up with that?

Michael S. Alford said...

It was 37 degrees with a wind chill coming off the Mississippi of 5 or 6 degrees. Plus the Memphis Grizzlies were playing, and as soon as the game let out, the streets were flooded again.