Lee Lawson said if he’s honest, his first impression was that they were just weirdos playing board games outside.

“But I had finished a test and had nothing else to do,” he said.

So he joined them just to see what was going on. And Lawson, then a student at Jeff State Community College’s Shelby-Hoover campus, found out quickly he was wrong.

There was a lot more to it than that.

Jacob Freeman, Baptist campus minister for the University of Montevallo and the Shelby-Hoover location of Jeff State, had been coming over for a while to try to start a Bible study on Lawson’s campus, but so far it had been difficult to get a group going.

“So I would set up a tent and table and chairs and have pizza and games,” Freeman said. “It was a time for relationship building and engagement with a short Bible study. We could ask, ‘What are you doing tomorrow for lunch?’ and that was basically an inroad to a further conversation.”

Lawson bought in.

“I found out it was actually an opportunity to share the gospel, and I asked how I could help,” he said. “Jacob and a guy named Brandon Mallette (then college minister at Valleydale Baptist Church) took me to Waffle House, took me under their wing and helped me figure out what evangelism looked like on a college campus.”

New faith

Lawson hadn’t been a follower of Jesus for very long at that point.

“I became a believer during the COVID pandemic — a lot of us were just sitting alone and thinking about the hard questions of life,” he said. “I grew up with a cultural understanding of Christianity and I loved Jesus, but now I understand it was really a God of my own creation. He was easy on the things I was easy on, hard on the things I was hard on.”

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This article was originally published at TheAlabamaBaptist.org.