“I was walking around on the stage and it was overwhelming to me… this is where Paul stood,” Westbrook said. “This is where the Holy Spirit came to him and he spoke. I was looking at the other guys in the group, and speaking in a normal voice, I said, ‘Jesus Christ is Lord.’”
The Great Theater, one of the most magnificent buildings of ancient Ephesus seating 24,000 people, was the site where the Apostle Paul was forced to face the crowd because of his famous letter to the Ephesians. The amphitheater was designed to convey sound to the crowd, thus Westbrook could be heard 20 rows away.
“I wanted to say more…I was shaking a little bit, and I said, ‘Lord, if you want me to speak, ask me to speak.’ At that time members in Westbrook’s missionary group asked him to “tell us about Jesus.” Westbrook began talking about John 3:16.
“I spread out the gospel and told everybody there how you are saved. I invited anyone who was listening to give their life to Christ, and I lead them in a prayer,” said Westbrook, who gave no thought until midway through his testimony, that he was speaking freely and publicly of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a Muslim country, where such free speech is forbidden. Westbrook, though a little apprehensive, delivered his public testimony without dire consequences.
When Westbrook began his debut into evangelism, the Great Theater was a din of tourist tête-à-tête, but as he spoke the amphitheater became “dead quiet…everybody had stopped speaking and every eye was on me. There were seeds planted in people’s minds, and they know what the Gospel is all about.”
Westbrook, 24, son of Gary and Glenda Westbrook of Milano and a Milano High School graduate, received a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology from Sam Houston State University with plans of becoming a high school coach, but wanting to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ through his involvement in sports.
“Obviously we are proud of Jason, mainly because he desires to serve God and put him first in life,” Gary Westbrook said. “Jason worked hard and saved money and raised money to be able to go on this trip. When most young people are serving themselves, Jason is spending his resources serving others. We are thankful that he has discovered that true joy in life comes from serving others and bringing about the kingdom of God here on Earth by being the hands and feet of Christ as we reach out with God’s love to, and in service of, our brothers and sisters, both at home and around the world.”
Westbrook, through his church in Huntsville, participated in a prison ministry where volunteers play softball with inmates, with the goal of visiting with them informally and talking about salvation through Jesus Christ.
Amid organizations and missionaries working around the world, is a network of Christian coaches and athletes who use sports as the gateway into nations that do not embrace Christianity. Westbrook wanted to join one of these groups, but after failing to raise money for a trip to Russia, he was connected with an organization called Sports Reach, which was planning a trip to Turkey.
Sports Reach allows Christians to go where conventional missionaries are not allowed, to share Christ through one-on-one testimonies. Sports Reach operates under the foundation that sports is a venue to share the gospel, and by using their talents in the field of sports, coaches and players are a manifestation of Romans 12:6 that “we each have different gifts according to the grace given to us...let him use them in proportion to his faith.”
Sports Reach was organized as the Kentucky Baptist Sports Crusaders in 1986 and nine years later was christened with its current name.
Westbrook’s Sports Reach team of 17 departed the U.S. on May 11, and returned home on May 22. Their mission was to participate in a sports fest at Istanbul’s Bogazici University, with the goal of witnessing through their lives and visiting individually with the people they met in a very crowded city. Most of the people they met were friendly and surprisingly receptive to hearing Americans talk about Jesus Christ.
“We knew we were going into a Muslim country and we knew we couldn’t openly share the gospel,” Westbrook said. “They would meet us , they would get to talk to us, and we got to share our lives with them. If there is any point where we can talk about religion, we can tell them what we believe and who Jesus Christ is to us. We couldn’t set a booth up on campus, and be like, ‘Come hear about Jesus’.”
Westbrook never imagined a Milano, Texas kid would be in Istanbul, Turkey spreading the gospel, much less the humbling spiritual encounter a timid coach experienced when he preached before a multitude of nationalities at The Great Theater in Ephesis, but in Westbrook’s words, the explanation is simple: “That is what happens when God shows us how big He is and how strong He is.”
