Go Tell Crusade to host kick-off banquet March 18

By Kim Cox
kcox@campcountynow.com

Evangelist Rick Gage will host a Go Tell crusade this May, but first, he will be here on March 18 for a kick-off banquet, held in Mount Pleasant.
“The vision for a crusade came about as the result of a conversation with Bo Pilgrim last year,” said Rev. Gage, whose father is an evangelist as well. “He expressed a desire to see another crusade come to the Pittsburg/Mount Pleasant area.”
Rev. Gage said they talked about the previous crusade, when the Rev. Billy Graham came to Mount Pleasant in 2000.
“He felt it was time for another one,” Rev. Gage said.
Rev. Gage said his ministry focuses on more rural areas, as opposed to big cities, with a special emphasis on reaching the youth.
“Bobby Bowden, a great college football coach at Florida State, said, ‘America’s youth may not be 100 percent of the population, but it is 100 percent of our future,’” Mr. Gage said. “We want to do all we can to reach the kids.”
The actual crusade, to be held on May 12-15, will include a special youth night on May 15.
Rev. Gage is a native of Dallas, who now lives in the Atlanta, Ga., area.
Orignially, he said, football was his life, and after graduating from Cameron University in Oklahoma, he became a football coach at Texas Tech University.
Then, one Sunday, he said he felt compelled to go to church to hear an evangelist friend of his father’s.
“It was while I was living in Lubbock, striving to become the next Tom Landry, when God got a hold of my life,” he said.
After coming to Christ, Rev. Gage quit his job at Tech and went to coach football at Liberty University in Virginia, the university started by Jerry Falwell. He worked there for two years before he said Christ called him in a different direction.
“I had lost the ambition,” he said. “I had lost the fire.”
Rev. Gage quit coaching and surrendered to the ministry, enrolling in the graduate program at Liberty University to become a full-time evangelist like his father.
After graduating, he said his “heart was to reach rural America.”
“People in small towns need Jesus just as much as big towns,” Rev. Gage said.
While in the area, Rev. Gage will also address all the junior highs and high schools in the area, as a motivational speaker, speaking to 6,000 students in Northeast Texas.
“We’ll be reinforcing what the school systems are trying to accomplish to combat drugs and alcohol,” he said. “We want to remind these teenagers you were born to be a winner in the game of life.”
The kick-off banquet will be held on March 18, at the Mount Pleasant Civic Center.