Day 39 – Lums and other cool places to hang out
The ministry I was a part of had a home near the campus of ECU. The idea was that college students would live there with a married couple, who would run the enterprise, and it would be an outreach center.
As I have shared previously, the coffee house we ran there was very successful, but that’s not all we did. There were 6 of us men in the home. All students at ECU, mostly athletes. We had 2 members from the swim team, 3 of us were past football players and 1 was just a student at the school. Nevett was his name and even though he wasn’t an athlete, by any stretch of the imagination, we accepted him into the fold.
The activities at the home went something like this:
6 AM – Pray together in the living room
8 AM – 4 PM – Classes on campus (we all were finishing our degress)
4 PM – Listening to old recorded Sunday night teachings
5 PM – Supper together…just us boys in our own kitchen/dinning area
7 PM – Whatever meeting as scheduled for the night
I may not have it exactly, but it went something like this…
Monday – Grad night
Tuesday – Women’s night
Wednesday – Open meeting
Thursday – Men’s night
Friday – Witnessing night
Saturday – Coffee House
Sunday – 10:30 AM open service, 5 PM open service
and the repeat the whole thing again. We did this unless we were running a class
and that was every night of the week for 3 weeks…and we ran a lot of classes.
In addition to this, for a while, I would go out to visit individuals or couples who couldn’t make a meeting at 10 PM and do a short meeting with them. But I had to be back at the home by 11 PM when we had our in-resident boys meeting to discuss the day and them in bed by midnight.
Friday nights, as I said, were witnessing nights. What does that mean? We would go out into Greenville and just talk to people. For a while, our favorite place was Lums. They sold great hot dogs and beer, and college kids LOVED IT!!!
You could always find people there just hanging out. So, 5 or 6 of us would go, split up and go sit at someone’s table and talk. That sounds strange today, but this was 1970+ and they were all college kids. There would be 5-8 people at a table just “shooting-the-shit” anyway, so another person didn’t matter.
We were not hard core “Bible pounders”, we just sat down and share about life, God and our experiences. At that point in time, people loved to talk, ask questions, debate, and just have fun, so it was perfect. It was fun to drink beer and talk about God. Now, remember we are talking 3.2% alcohol beer, so people rarely drink too much.
Some nights we would be there until we were the only ones left in the joint just hanging out. It was unusual to pray for people right in the middle of the chaos, if that’s what they wanted. It was a blast, especially if people bought your beer. Just another day in the wild and wonderful life of a college student in the 70s.
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