{"id":1247,"date":"2006-06-10T13:07:06","date_gmt":"2006-06-10T13:07:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/denominational-outreach.html"},"modified":"2006-06-10T13:07:06","modified_gmt":"2006-06-10T13:07:06","slug":"denominational-outreach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/denominational-outreach.html","title":{"rendered":"Denominational Outreach"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A different sort of evangelism in Atlanta<\/a><\/p>\n

They hit hard, hit fast and were gone long before the Mall of Georgia’s shopkeepers rolled down their gates and called it a night.<\/strong>Jason and Marie Bunzey cased out a shopper at a candy store. Melissa Humphries found her target at Starbucks. Carter and Emily McInnis braced a guy at Chick-fil-A.<\/p>\n\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Each time, they exchanged smiles with their chosen stranger. Money flashed. A card slipped from one hand to the other.<\/p>\n

And then they were gone, lost in the building crowd of Thursday night shoppers. Each time, they left people wondering: Who were they?<\/p>\n

They committed no crimes, the Bunzeys, Humphries and McInnises. They’re not shoplifters, nor con artists.<\/p>\n

They’re missionaries, members of Lawrenceville’s United Methodist Church of the Way. Armed with $100 in $5 bills, they hit the mall with the simplest of intentions \u2014 to reach out to strangers and perhaps get them in church.<\/p>\n

In each encounter, the church members found strangers and bought them something \u2014 coffee, pretzels, a sandwich with fries. Every time, they gave their new friends a card with the message: "God Loves You!" The card’s flip side gave the church’s address, hours of worship and Web site.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A different sort of evangelism in Atlanta They hit hard, hit fast and were gone long before the Mall of Georgia’s shopkeepers rolled down their gates and called it a night.Jason and Marie Bunzey cased out a shopper at a candy store. Melissa Humphries found her target at Starbucks. Carter and Emily McInnis braced a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nDenominational Outreach - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/denominational-outreach.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Denominational Outreach - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A different sort of evangelism in Atlanta They hit hard, hit fast and were gone long before the Mall of Georgia’s shopkeepers rolled down their gates and called it a night.Jason and Marie Bunzey cased out a shopper at a candy store. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}