Friday night in downtown Springfield, MO.  My mom and cousin were in town and decided to go out with us - both to watch and witness.  I asked trivia questions to draw the crowd, then we gave out stuffed animals as prizes for getting the answers correct.  I asked for a volunteer for the "Good Person Test".  There was a really evil spiritual presence this night at the square.  Michael Borich, one of the GNN Seed Sowers and a member of our team was out with us.  He also brought his video camera and video taped the entire open air preaching time.

During the test, we had all kinds of people yelling and screaming at me to stop.  I had my speaker box, so I just kept plugging away and ignoring everyone.  There were two hecklers tonight.  One was a man we met earlier that was just acting up and saying off the wall stuff in front of me to throw me off topic.

Another heckler came up and said (he was somewhat intoxicated - and was very loud), "You need to go preach in a church and not out here where all of us are relaxing and drinking.  You are shoving your religion down our throats!"  He kept cussing and yelling for a bit, then the other heckler started to "take up for me" and started yelling at him to let me talk.  I was able to calm him down and let him know it was okay for the other guy to yell. It is a different twist on things when one heckler starts defending your right to preach against another heckler.  Praise God.  

I told the man that we had to come out and preach the gospel, because that is what the Bible says, "go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature" and that it was a "freedom of speech issue" and that we had the right to be there.  After a while, he walked away.