October 1, 2026
BUFORD, Ga. — A mission team from Everlove Baptist Church of Atlanta returned from Washington, D.C., with a renewed confidence that God can use any believer, anywhere, to share the gospel.
The team, made up of nine adults and seven students from the Korean congregation in Buford, traveled to Washington from July 27-31 for street and campus ministry at the Lincoln Memorial, the National Mall, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, and Asian markets.
Pastor Sanghun Lee said the goal was to help students see that the gospel can be shared in everyday settings, from campuses and grocery stores to city streets and shopping centers.
“I just wanted to show them and make our team convinced that Jesus is above everything,” Lee said. “Jesus is all-powerful. Even at Harvard or Yale or Georgetown, it’s nothing before Jesus.”
That confidence was tested at Johns Hopkins University, where one Everlove high school student led an astrophysicist to Christ.
As students and adults walked across the campus, they saw a man sitting on a bench. An adult encouraged the student to approach him, but she was afraid. She had moved from Korea only a few months earlier, and her English was still limited, so they walked past him.
After taking a few more steps, they decided to turn around. When they did, they noticed a woman sitting alone on another bench in a different direction. For some reason, the student felt more confident approaching her.
Although her English was not perfect, she spoke boldly about Jesus. The woman listened carefully and seriously, then began to share her own story.
The Johns Hopkins student was an astrophysicist, and through her study of the universe, she had become convinced that the universe and the laws of physics could not simply be the result of coincidence. Everything seemed too precisely ordered and finely tuned.
After her father died, her mother went through tremendous pain. But her mother encountered Jesus and found peace in Him. Since then, her mother had been encouraging her to come to church, but she had been reluctant.
On that particular day, she was struggling with feelings of emptiness, loneliness, and rejection. But as the Everlove student shared the gospel, the woman listened, her heart softened, and she put her faith in Jesus Christ, receiving Him as her Savior.
The college student shared her cell phone number, and after returning home, the church followed up and encouraged her to attend a Baptist church near the campus and get involved in a campus Christian organization.
Lee said the moment was especially meaningful because the student who shared the gospel was born in the United States but had lived in South Korea. For her education, her parents sent her to live with a church member in Georgia. She did not speak perfect English, and sharing the gospel on the streets was difficult during the first few days.
But the Holy Spirit worked, Lee said.
“For her personally, this experience is related to when I am weak, He is strong,” Lee said. “That’s really great to see. You don’t have to be perfect in your knowledge, in your language, or in your spiritual maturity. God can use you because He is perfect.”
Before the trip, students and adults trained using the North American Mission Board’s 3 Circles evangelism tool, which explains God’s design, brokenness, and the gospel. God’s design was broken by sin, and repenting and believing in the gospel leads to recovery and the pursuit of God’s design.
“It’s simple. It opens doors for deeper conversation. It makes dialogue,” Lee said.
Lee said a simple question, such as, “Are you a student here?” can open the door to a conversation with eternal consequences. If the person says yes, he said, the good news of Jesus Christ can then be shared.
The conversations also stretched the students. Some people asked difficult theological questions, including whether God is good and why He judged people in the Old Testament.
Lee realized the students had already wrestled with some of those questions themselves.
“Our students shared, ‘Hey, I had that conflict. I resolved it in this way,’” Lee said.
During the encounters, students and adults recorded as many of the gospel conversations as possible. The video was edited each night and shared every morning with the church congregation through YouTube.
“It encouraged parents a lot,” Lee said. “It’s a win-win situation. All of our congregation experienced the same emotions.”
Lee said there should not be any excuse for believers not to share the gospel. “Jesus said we must do it, so we do it,” he said.
Everlove plans to continue this type of mission work in Atlanta. In the near future, the church hopes to do outreach at Emory University and Georgia Tech.
Lee said the Washington trip exceeded expectations and showed the team that God can work in unexpected conversations with unexpected people.
“We never know who is going to come to faith,” Lee said. “This is just random people in a university campus. So deep inside, I think our team had that thinking, ‘Are they really going to believe? Is it really going to happen?’ But when it happens, their first reaction is, ‘Wow, it’s unbelievable.’”
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