Rolling onto South Padre Island for five days of evangelistic outreach, the passengers on Baylor University junior Chloe Mandeville’s van got vulnerable about their struggles and fears heading into the first week of Beach Reach.
“We just exposed it all at the very beginning, which I’ve never seen before,” said Mandeville, who was participating in Beach Reach for the third time.
“And I was so encouraged because by the time I shared mine, it was like nothing, because everyone before me and everyone after me had such similar stories. It was like [we were] truly handpicked by God to be in that van together.”
Every spring break, hundreds of college students from Baptist Student Ministries across the state head to South Padre Island to join Beach Reach, a mission effort to share the gospel while providing free late-night van rides and free pancake breakfasts each morning.
Sunday through Thursday nights, while many spring breakers are engaged in revelry, Island Baptist Church opens its facility to act as a “home base” for Beach Reach’s ministry. From 9 p.m. to 3 a.m., a hotline opens for spring breakers to call and ask for a ride.
Vans with a team of five BSM students and a driver—mostly BSM directors—are dispatched to pick up the riders they are assigned. Another team of students stays behind and prays over the ride.
The student acting as “navigator” on each ride tweets into the Beach Reach prayer wall using the #brspi25 hashtag, so those praying can pray for riders in real-time. Each BSM rotates between the two roles in three shifts throughout the night.
Meeting spring breakers with love and grace
On the other side of the island, at Louie’s Backyard, a popular bar and entertainment space, Texans on Missionvolunteers set up a tent and prepared to serve a “midnight pancake breakfast.” Here, BSM students can have spiritual conversations over pancakes with those coming to and from Louie’s.
When they finish their pancakes, spring breakers are walked to the pickup line, where several vans are available to take them home without having to call the hotline. Each night, a new group of 40 Beach Reachers and their vans rotate to be “on the ground” at Louie’s.
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Annie Hartman, a first-time Beach Reacher from Dallas Baptist University, said she was surprised by people’s “curiosity and interest in our faith.” She said Louie’s is an important opportunity for Beach Reachers to “not be scared of sin,” but to meet spring breakers where they are “with so much love and grace.”
“I think [Louie’s is] probably a place that a lot of Christians would want to avoid. So, I think it’s really good to be hands-on and reach people that may be lost and meeting people where they’re at,” Hartman said.
Texans on Mission volunteer Phil Winget has served pancakes at Louie’s for 10 years. He said the most encouraging thing to see each year is people giving their lives to Jesus. By Wednesday night of the first week, 50 salvations already had been reported.
“Where else can you see 50 college students accept Jesus as their personal savior in a week? Last year, we had close to 80 baptisms out in the Gulf of Mexico,” Winget said.
“[That] is absolutely the most impactful thing. I’ve never been anywhere where there were 50 college students saved in a week.”
Seeing God’s faithfulness
One of the 80 baptized last year was Destiny, a college student who Mandeville and a few other Baylor students met at Louie’s.
Mandeville said she “saw someone dancing around with a sign, and she ended up giving her life to Christ” toward the end of the week after attending the evening worship services held for Beach Reachers at the South Padre Island Convention Center. Beach Reachers are encouraged to invite spring breakers to join them for worship to build stronger connections.
Mandeville lost contact with Destiny but continued to pray her faith would grow. Her prayers were not in vain, she would learn, shortly after reconnecting with Destiny’s cousins, who also were baptized last year.
During the day, a few BSMs host a morning pancake breakfast at Island Baptist Church, an opportunity to deepen relationships with connections they’ve made on the vans the night before.
The BSMs not attending the pancake breakfast can go “fishing”—driving around the island to pick up people walking to their destinations or going to the beach to invite spring breakers to call the hotline at night and have spiritual conversations.
“I went to the beach, and I actually saw the cousins, and I was like: ‘Oh my gosh, you guys, it’s been forever. How are you?” Mandeville recalled.
“We were in a bit of a rush, and I had to scurry off. But the next day [the Baylor BSM was] hanging out at the church, and I was waiting for my van … It was so perfectly ordained by God, because I was the only one out[side], and [Destiny] walked up with this guy. I didn’t recognize her.”
Destiny asked, “When do you guys do the worship service?”
As she drew nearer, Mandeville recognized the young woman as Destiny and invited her to the evening worship service at the convention center.
Destiny told Mandeville in the last year, God had freed her from addiction, she had found a home church and was being discipled.
“It’s such an encouragement, because you don’t really see people after the fact. You interact with them once or maybe twice and then never again. So, it’s so cool to see her a year later and see she’s still on the straight and narrow.”
Destiny came to worship that evening and was “the most influential part of the night” for Baylor students.
“I had to let them know that they are making a difference … [there] may not be a hundred thousand people, but that one lost sheep is still important,” said Destiny. “I wanted to tell them … to never doubt themselves because God chose them … to be here.”
“Here she is, turning the tables and encouraging us … the Lord so clearly spoke through her exactly what we needed to hear in those moments,” said Mandeville.
Nathan Mahand, BSM director at Houston Christian University, encouraged students before their hotline shifts began in the evening that “the gospel is always on the move” and “not (to) let the fact that it’s been a slow week discourage you from sharing” the gospel.
“You’re here this week because someone shared the story of Jesus with you, and you came to believe this story. You want other people to believe the story in the same way that you do. That only happens when you vulnerably go and share what God has done in your life,” Mahand said.
As Mandeville shared her and Destiny’s story on Tuesday night, the prayer room went up in a roar of celebration as tweets on the prayer wall read that new believers were joining the kingdom family.
God’s sovereignty in salvation
On Wednesday, a team from Midwestern State BSM went to the beach to evangelize. Participants Evanne Kleinert, a second-time Beach Reacher, and Abigail Simbaña, a third-time Beach Reacher, had something to celebrate.
“We just prayed to have one good conversation, and then I saw a girl picking up shells on the beach. And so we went over to talk to her—we were asking people if we could pray for them—and I saw that she had a cross necklace on, so we started … asking what that meant to her,” Kleinert said.
“After questions, she claimed that ‘God is her best friend,’ and I was like, ‘Have you heard about the gospel before?’ and she hadn’t. … I shared the gospel with her and explained … what having Jesus as Lord and Savior means and the cost of that,” Simbaña said.
“She was like, ‘Well, I’ve been wanting to get baptized for a long time now.’”
Simbaña explained salvation doesn’t come through baptism but by putting her faith in Jesus.
“She was very receptive, and she was like, ‘I want to make that decision … [and] commitment,’” said Simbaña. “[She] definitely [had] a heart ready to receive the gospel.”
Klienert said her Beach Reach experience reminded her how every person truly plays a unique part in leading somebody to Christ.
Hayden Womack, a sophomore and first-time Beach Reacher from Lamar University, said the same.
“I’ve been uplifted by seeing the church work together, for lack of a better term, like a Rube Goldberg machine,” he said. “I’m just a small piece in the wheel, you know? … God has an ornate and sovereign way of knitting everything together perfectly.”
At Wednesday evening worship, Joe Osteen, East Texas BSM regional coordinator and Beach Reach coordinator, referenced Isaiah 49:5-6 and challenged students to “walk in obedience” even as the end of the week was approaching. He reminded them that “God’s salvation is meant to advance to all the ends of the earth.”
“Jesus comes and does the work to make [salvation] a reality, by living and dying and rising from the dead and saving all who call on his name. And he enlists us, in his grace and goodwill towards us, to be a part of that redemptive work,” said Osteen.
He encouraged the students to consider what obedience looks like off the island.
“Perhaps it’s too small to only pour ourselves out like this here at South Padre. Perhaps there’s a bigger purpose—for us to take what we’ve learned and what we’ve experienced here, back to our campuses and be encouraged to continue sharing the gospel,” Osteen said.
“Perhaps God is calling you to lift your eyes a little bit and see beyond your campus to the area around you or to a mission opportunity or to a nation … who needs to know who Jesus is.”
Staying alert for gospel opportunities
During a daily afternoon break, Avery Marsh, junior and first-time Beach Reacher from the University of Houston, got to use a special skill to have a spiritual conversation in a coffee shop.
“I learned sign language during my high school years, and I don’t remember a lot of it,’ Marsh said.
“But I remember some words, and I was in this coffee shop. And one of my friends was like, ‘Avery, this person’s deaf.’ … I saw this sweet [older lady] with a tiny little dog, and I got to sit there and talk with her.”
The woman had been hearing for about 40 years and went deaf gradually. She was starting to learn sign language.
“She is able to read lips and speak and ended up just telling me about her life story and telling me things that I could be praying for,” Marsh said.
“It was so encouraging to me that God doesn’t let anything go to waste—that this skill that I learned in high school randomly because friends adopted deaf kids, I got to use in this way to get to know” the person she encouraged that day.
Over two weeks of Beach Reach, from March 9-20, participants gave 13,832 van rides; took part in 10,014 spiritual conversations; and prayed with 7,750 spring breakers. Additionally, 246 people accepted Christ, 86 recommitted their lives to Christ and 87 were baptized.
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