Dateline: September 16, 2004

Gage to bring ministry to Clarendon next week

By Gail Shelton

Rick Gage, who will be leading the Go Tell Greenbelt Crusade beginning Sunday at 7:00 p.m., took the long way around to reach where he is today.

An evangelist who specializes in holding Christian rallies outside of the major cities in America, Rick is the son of an evangelist. He grew up in the church, knowing all the right words to say and all the right things to do. But he only did them when Dad was looking.

When Dad wasn’t looking, when Rick was on his own through high school, he would – party with the best of them, occasionally coming home drunk and sneaking into the house. Football was his whole life. He chose his college according to where he could play football, going the junior college route when no four-year school seemed interested. He had a successful first year on the field, in the classroom – and on the party scene. Rick and his friends regularly cruised bars and clubs.

“Drugs and alcohol became rituals in my life,” he says in his book, The Coach. “It wasn’t a matter of needing to be ‘accepted.’ I was already accepted and, to some extent, admired. I simply wasn’t strong enough to say ‘no.’”

But at the beginning of his sophomore year, he injured his knee badly enough to need surgery. Four-year schools that had been looking at him backed off, worried that his knee would not recover properly. Except for one school in Lawton, Oklahoma. Rick went on to play football for them and earned his degree with a goal of coaching football. Eventually, he wound up coaching at the college level, first at West Texas State and later at Texas Tech.

Through all of this, his hard partying habits didn’t change, even though every time he went home he still knew how to talk the talk. When he lost his job at Tech, Rick reached a low point. His job would end soon, he had no prospects for a new one, and he decided to go to New Orleans with friends to watch football and have a good time in the bright lights of the Big Easy. It didn’t help. He was still lonely, empty, and without hope.

Rick spent Christmas with his family; and before he went back to Lubbock to what was left of his dead-end job, his father urged him to go hear a family friend preach. So on Sunday, Rick went. James Robison talked about how God’s Son came to free captives and prisoners, and Rick realized he was a captive.

“All I could do was approach God in repentance and faith...I went forward and knelt down on my knees at the altar and cried out to God for forgiveness. Immediately, I felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from my heart.”

Rick Gage did not immediately move from that point to becoming the preacher he is today, but his life changed. He was not the same person he was before. “Christ changed my emotions (feelings); my intellect (beliefs, thought patterns); and my will (desires, choices.)”

Rick went on to coach at various universities, mostly in the east, for several years after this before he understood that God had other plans for him. Those plans are fulfilled in the crusades he conducts all across America, and in Clarendon beginning Sunday night continuing through Thursday. Come and hear what he has to say.