It’s the place to go if you need vinyl siding, hot tubs, herbal supplements, high-tech kitchen mops, or knives that cut through bricks and tomatoes. Across from the grandstand sits the Varied Industries Building, an air-conditioned oasis of commerce for visitors to the Iowa State Fair. It’s also the location of an information booth for the Iowa Association of Regular Baptist Churches, staffed each day of the fair by volunteers from sixteen Des Moines–area churches.
“There are at least one hundred thousand people at the fair every day,” said Roger Bishop, a member of Indianola Regular Baptist Church. “Thousands of people come by here—the aisles are packed.”
A businessman who owns his own company in Indianola, Bishop was well familiar with crowded trade shows and convention displays. In 2001 he helped the Iowa churches reformat a booth they had been using for many years, introducing professionally designed Creation graphics, flat screen televisions with two-minute video clips, and a scale model of Noah’s ark. “If you want performance, you have to do things right,” said Bishop.
The redesigned booth left a large pass-through space for fairgoers’ conversations with volunteers. “It’s a two-minute shot,” said Bishop. “The key is to talk to the people who walk through, because they always have questions.” Bishop estimated that they would have twelve thousand conversations with fairgoers by the fair’s final day.
Meanwhile, a knife-wielding grandfather shouts, “It slices! It dices! It cuts through carbon steel!” while competing voices rise from across the aisle: “No, sir, this is not just a water softener. It’s a Water Conditioning System. Let me show you. . . .”
Children wander by with corndogs and deep-fried Twinkies on a stick. As they stop to look at the ark model, Bishop notes, “Sometimes parents pull their kids away; sometimes they stay and talk to us; sometimes they take home some of our gospel literature.”
Pastor Jeff Holub of Fellowship Baptist Church in Des Moines calls this “a seed-sowing ministry.” Roger Bishop agrees, saying, “The Creation story is the foundation that has been taken out of our society. Without that foundation, you don’t have much.”
Janice Marvin of Indianola Regular Baptist Church presents children with gospel tracts while meeting guests at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines. The booth—which features audiovisual presentations, a scale model of Noah’s ark, a mural, and dinosaur graphics—is an annual outreach of the Iowa Association of Regular Baptist Churches.
Roger Bishop of Indianola Regular Baptist Church chats with visitors in the Iowa Association of Regular Baptist Churches booth at the Iowa Sate Fair. Roger said volunteers from IARBC churches have more than one thousand opportunities each day to share Christ during the weeklong outreach ministry.
