more than 30 years, Poe is encouraged by the stories he hears from people who have attended Sonshine over the years. Poe recently received a call from a woman who said her daughter attended Sonshine several years ago. She had met her future husband at the music festival and now the couple has three kids. Another guy called Poe and said, “You know, Bob, I grew up a little more conservative in the Christian world. When I attended Sonshine, I raised my hands in worship for the very first time.” The gentleman told Poe that attending Sonshine was “one of the top three experiences of my lifetime.”
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REFRESHED | July 2014
Thousands of Sonshine Festival music fans camp out during the four-day festival. In the end, Sonshine is about music and offering praise to the Son and a chance for people to be introduced to Christ. “Every night [at the] main stage we make sure that … we have an evening speaker, and the challenge for that person is not to just encourage believers but to call people to become believers,” Poe said. What would he tell people who are considering attending Sonshine for the
first time? “Well, if they are music lovers, they’ll get more music in four days than they can get in four years at regular concerts,” he said. “The other side of it is meeting some new people, making some new friends, great worship experiences, probably walk away with something similar from when most of us were at youth camps, and we had a great week at youth camp and came home and it was about all we could talk about for a while.” ■