About 200 hear music, testimonies at FCA event

 
By Steve Bowman
Editor, The Brentwood Spirit
Email: bowmansj@sbcglobal.net

About 200 students from more than 20 area high schools filled the Brentwood High School gym on Wednesday night for Fields of Faith, an annual gathering put on by BHS’s chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

Participants sang along with a live Christian rock band and heard fellow students share their faith testimonies. They were encouraged to read the Bible and to come to faith in Jesus Christ. At the end an altar call was held and dozens of students wrote prayer requests and sin confessions on slips of paper and placed them on a large wooden cross.

FCA is an interdenominational religious organization that uses the influence of coaches and athletes in Christian evangelism.

Brentwood hosts only event in area

The student-led Fields of Faith has been held at high schools nationwide every fall since 2004. It’s the seventh year in a row Brentwood’s FCA group has hosted it for all schools in the St. Louis metro area. According to the FCA’s website, there were 18 similar gatherings in Missouri this month but the closest to Brentwood was in Troy.

Brentwood’s FCA faculty sponsor, Shannon Koster, said nobody even considers holding it somewhere else.

“The first year we decided to do it we just took it on, so now everybody expects us to do it,” she said. “Brentwood is centrally located and it’s just what we do now.”

Bigger chapter, bigger event

It helps that BHS has a thriving FCA chapter. With about 40 students regularly attending, it is the largest organization in the school, Koster said, though she’s not certain why the numbers have increased this year.

“There’s just been a shift in the spirit of the school,” she said. “We have more school spirit. I have seniors, juniors and sophomores who have never come before and this year they started coming. They’ve been Christians all along, but for whatever reason they didn’t start coming until this year.”

Likewise, this week’s Fields of Faith had a bigger turnout, almost twice as many as last year, said Koster. She guessed that it had something to do with increased promotion by the Greater St. Louis FCA and by BHS students.

Students from 19 schools:

Students from at least 21 area high schools attended the Fields of Faith on Oct. 14 in Brentwood, including: Brentwood, Cardinal Ritter, Eureka, Hazelwood West, Incarnate Word, JFK, Kirkwood, Lafayette, McCluer North, Metro, MICDS, Miller Career, Nerinx Hall, Parkway Central, Parkway South, St. Joseph, St. Mary’s, Summit, Ritenour, Ursuline and Vianney.

To read The Brentwood Spirit’s coverage of the 2013 Fields of Faith, click here.