It’s Thursday night and the room is filling fast. The gig kicks off at 7 and by 6:30 there are no seats left in the room. My son and I are in the back row, far right, and we were here early. A lady with 3 little girls has just walked in and is standing against the rear wall. The toddler in her arms is probably 18 months or so and the other two look to be under the age of 5. She’s frazzled and the girls are restless, she has no husband with her. I look at her and marvel that she is here at all. Getting the girls ready, dressed in their frilly little dresses and coming to this must have been very important to her. I am suddenly moved by her commitment to her girls and her Savior.

My son and I get up and over her protests we see her and her girls safely seated in our place. We are now standing in the back of the room and it’s getting really close in here. We are at St. John’s United Methodist Church in Corpus Christi, Texas and something special is happening here. I’ve come because I was asked. The local UMM are putting on a drama of “The Last Supper” and I have been personally asked by two of the men to come tonight. They are both friends of mine and I wouldn’t want to disappoint either of them; so Clint, my son, and I drove the 30 miles in to watch the show.

The drama was great, every man was a member of the UMM and it was well done. You could tell the men had taken a lot of pride in the production. The room looked like it would easily have held 250 people and there had to be 300 or more squeezed in by the time the curtain rose. The great thing was that most of the people in the room weren’t members of St. John’s. Standing in the back as I was I could hear the ushers talking to each other and they were almost giddy over the number of people in attendance.  So was I.

At a time, when attendance and membership is falling all across the denomination, the men of St John’s United Methodist Church had just scored and scored big. With a simple story of “The Last Supper”, staying true to the Scriptures, the Men had brought 300 plus people to Church on Holy Week. God bless these men and God bless these people who came to hear the story of our Savior’s last night. Elvis may not have been in the building last Thursday but Christ sure was. I could feel him and so could everybody else. Jim Callaway Program director Rio Texas Conference UMM

The following post was written by Jim Callaway, Program Director, United Methodist Men, Rio Texas Conference