Learn more about World Methodist Evangelism: https://worldmethodist.org/

Transcript:

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King. I’m excited about telling people about Jesus today. I have a very special guest with me, Paulo Lopez. Thank you for being on the Evangelism Podcast.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (00:09):
It’s a pleasure to be here, Daniel. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:12):
Now you are with World Methodist Evangelism. Tell me a little bit about what you do.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (00:20):
Well, World Methodist evangelism started in the 1970s as the Methodist movement around the world realized that we had lost steam in evangelism and mission. And so this ministry was sort of commissioned out of the World Methodist Council. Today, 50 years later, we’re an autonomous organization. We serve the whole Wesleyan Methodist movement around the world. And so there are over 80 denominations and just over 85 million people around the world that would claim a Methodist or Wesleyan heritage. And so our work is to come alongside leaders to help them build faith sharing movements in their context, whatever that might be.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:14):
Yeah, I think it’s so wonderful that you’re doing that because the Methodist Wesleyan tradition has such a rich history of evangelism. I mean, going all the way back to John Wesley, he had a great heart for evangelism. And then in America we had Francis Asbury, who was a circuit writer, who traveled all over the United States, the Eastern United States at that time, planting churches and really evangelizing

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (01:44):
Countless others. I live in Virginia. My wife and I are from Brazil. We’ve lived in the US now for 17 years, but I get to live in Virginia. And Virginia was one of the first states to have circuit riders in them. And they were so prolific in fact that if you go to Virginia today, you’ll find many towns where all these churches are very close to one another for modern day. It doesn’t make that much sense to have so many churches close by. But when you imagine people horseback riding to church, having a church five miles, it’s

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:22):
A little bit

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (02:22):
Farther. That’s right. Having a, when you’re on a horseback, five miles, 10 miles down the road, made sense in a way that it doesn’t make sense anymore. But these folks, they would often only return to a congregation after two months, six to eight weeks by the time they got to come back. And so they relied heavily on lay leaders and preachers and evangelists and the pastors or the circuit writers were sort of apostolic ministers. So they were going out and starting new works. Really incredible.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:00):
I was reading John Wesley’s journal and he actually was introduced to the idea of preaching outdoors with George Whitfield. That’s right. And so George Whitfield, he kind of got kicked out of the Anglican church. Some of the leaders didn’t like him, so he went out and was preaching outdoors and seeing great results. And he told John Wesley, you got to try it. John Wesley said, I didn’t even think God could work outside the doors of the church, but he tried it and lots of people were touched by God. And then over the next year he says, I preached over 300 times and only once or twice was inside a church. And so now we’re actually here in Zambia together doing a mass outdoor gospel event, really kind of in the tradition of what John Wesley kicked off all those years ago. And

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (03:57):
In many ways, Daniel, we’ve kind of lost that in many parts of the world. The guy on the corner of the street with the bullhorn is what comes to mind. And in the West, it’s not how you do ministry anymore. We’ve kind of lost touch with meaningful ways of doing ministry. At one point in one of his journals, John Wesley says, in response to seeing how people are responding to Whitfield, he goes, I submit to be more vile to him, it was like this crazy thing that Whitfield was doing going out preach

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:39):
To preach outdoors.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (04:40):
But then I got to go to Bristol in the UK a couple of years ago and visited at the new room, which was kind of John Wesley’s home base for ministry where he was training preachers. And there’s a little museum there, and there’s this story of him going down to the port where all these mine workers and port workers would come, some of the hardest men that you could think of. And he would preach to these folks and their stories of their faces being all darkened by dust and

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:20):
From working in the minds, from

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (05:21):
Working in the minds. And then after preaching, you would see streaks of white in their faces because these hardened men had been having an encounter with Jesus through preaching outdoors like that. So yeah, there’s a lot of similarities between what we’re

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:38):
Doing here. We got to go out on the street today here in Zambia and preach, and we had a bike rider who was doing some tricks. That’s right. And gathered a crowd and it was pretty amazing. I mean 50 a hundred at one place, I think we had almost 150 children and adults who gathered around to watch the bike tricks. And then we preached to them, and I saw a picture of you. You were doing the

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (06:00):
Same. What’d you see God do today out the streets? We were in the back of the truck. I tend to find this to be real here in Zambia and other places around the world. I think there’s a caricature of being out in missions somewhere remote and seeing the kinds of things that we see all these people gathering and the hunger. I think people are hungry everywhere in the world. It’s being able to discern the hunger and then respond to it. And I think the way that the Paal Association g and e, and the way we’re doing this outrage here is just appropriate for this place and the moment. But I’ll tell you what the thing that I really like about what we’re doing, if what we were doing was simply coming out and doing rallies and doing a festival, it would be a bit of a turnoff for me because I’m a Wesleyan.

(06:59):
The innovation that John Wesley had that Whitfield later said, I regret not doing that, is that John Wesley, he would preach, but then he would stay in that place until people that were receiving Christ would be put into small groups called class meetings back in the day. And so what I’ve been impressed with what we’re doing here is the fact that there has been some groundwork prior to the festival for months as church leaders have come together. So the church in Ndola has kind of unified around the purpose of evangelism, and there are strategies for how to receive people that are now making decisions for Christ in those local churches. So what are the next steps? How do they connect with a local church? All of that has been figured out. So it’s not kind of a one and done and you come in and there’s impact and then people are left like lost sheep waiting for a pastor to care for them.

(08:04):
No, they’re being connected to local churches in the area. And I think that’s the way to do it. There’s a bad rap in evangelism, and I think we often disconnect the notion of sharing our faith with others from discipleship. When I stop to think of it, particularly when I see the pattern of Jesus and the 12 disciples is that Jesus calls them to follow him. But we don’t know. I always ask the question, when was Peter’s conversion? Was it when Jesus called him and he started following him? Jesus says, who do you say I am? Or was it later on after the resurrection when Jesus says, do you love me, Peter? I don’t know for certain when my guess is, do you love me, Peter? That’s the conversion moment. But by then Peter had followed, Jesus had been a disciple for three years, and so we

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:02):
And been rebuked by Jesus.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (09:04):
And so he had walked with Jesus, had seen stuff with Jesus. And so we can’t control conversion, but we can invite people to walk alongside us. We can’t control how many people are going to raise their hands and receive Christ, but we can encourage them to find a local church and to follow in Christian community. And I think when those two things are married, then what we see is great fruit that lasts generations. I think unfortunately a lot of what we’ve done for many years is just write down the number of people that have said yes, and then we leave and we celebrate it. Right. And the donors are really happy because their numbers are good, but we haven’t really done anything about it.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:49):
So let’s talk. We talked about the historical impact of John Wesley and Francis Asbury. How do we bring their passion for evangelism and for reaching people into this modern time? What are you doing to inspire Methodist evangelists and just inspire the entire Wesleyan tradition to keep evangelism as part of their passion and focus? Sure.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (10:19):
Our mission is to help leaders build faith sharing movements. And what we are realizing is that there are two separate realities right now might be an oversimplification, but generally speaking, there are two separate realities in the world. There’s the part of the world that is wide open and very hungry for the gospel. Generally speaking, the global south kind of fits into that

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:51):
Category,

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (10:51):
Which you’re from the global south, you’re from Brazil, I’m from Brazil.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:54):
So you’re kind of a missionary to the United States.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (10:57):
I feel that way. Yeah. Actually, technically I am a missionary from the Brazilian Methodist Church to world Methodist evangelism. So that’s my Well, thank you. We need

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:10):
Some of the fire from the south to come north again.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (11:14):
That’s right. But see though it’s true that people are on fire in the south. What I often find is that people in the global south struggle to be mobilized outside. It’s almost like in salvation, in finding Christian community that becomes kind of a bubble. And so they go from Sunday to Sunday from discipleship meeting to discipleship, meeting from conference or revival to revival. And it’s something that stays, it’s almost like a subculture in the global south. The church becomes like a subculture that’s almost removed from everything else. And the biggest challenge for me in the global south is helping leaders figure out ways to mobilize their people to look outside of the church and into the field. And so we don’t see a lot of that. We don’t see as large as the church movement is in the global south, we don’t see nearly as much in the way of mission workers coming out of the global south. And there should be way more.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:28):
Yeah. Several years ago, God spoke to me. He said, Daniel, the mission field shall become a mission force. And I think that we’re on the cusp of seeing that in the global south where we will see more and more passion for mission because really in many churches in the global south, they have become very mature. They’re mature theologically. They have a lot of passion. And so now I think that if they will catch the vision of the Great Commission, we will evangelize many parts of the world that used to be Christian and now need a new witness of

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (13:08):
Christ. Yeah, I think you’re completely on track, and I think it makes sense in the greater context of what we’re seeing all over the place. I think that’s the big challenge for the global south. It’s getting people to get out. I think part of that challenge is maybe because the global South has been accustomed to receiving in the way of investment and funding and all that sort of thing. So having a leadership mindset that says, in order for the great commission to continue, we need to take the lead and do this. That’s a big deal. But we were with a bunch of young adult leaders in Cape Town in March, and many of them raised money to get there by telling people that they would be investing in missions. And so my word to them was, coming to this training in this conference is not the mission if you don’t leave here and get involved in the mission and this wouldn’t have been worth a thing.

(14:25):
So we conflate often being a part of conversations about mission with the mission itself. And that happens a lot in the global south, in the west and in the north it’s a different picture. You have a cooling down, if you will, of the church movement. You have a loss of steam in evangelism and mission. Churches are generally decreasing in size. Denominations in particular losing many people. You can point to Europe, but in the US this is true as well. And so the kind of work that we do than in the West has more to do with awakening people to their faith and their calling.

(15:14):
We want the same results wherever we are in the world, but we realize the challenge in the west and the north is different than the challenge in the South. And so we try to respond accordingly to that. So one of our guys that we bring with us, and a lot of what we do does these talks on the Holy Spirit, DNA in the Wesleyan movement. And so you have people that have been Methodists or Wesleyans for their whole lives and never understood how rich a theology of the Holy Spirit we have. And so then you get to minister the Holy Spirit over pastors that have been pastoring for years and never been baptized in the Holy Spirit. And so you go from that to, okay, now this is what evangelism could look like. And there’s sort of an awakening the mission versus mobilizing the mission in the south.

(16:11):
And we do that primarily with pastors, younger pastors, usually under 35 through a ministry called Ordered of the Flame. So we gather pastors in this community, invest in them in the area of mission and evangelism, and then invite them into cohorts afterwards where there can be some accountability around what they’re doing. And then we do have a ministry called Metanoia, and that’s with young adult leaders. We’re getting ready to launch a separate ministry out of metanoia that’s with marketplace leaders. What does it look like to be involved in mission and ministry and in faith sharing ministry in the marketplace, in your business, your career in the public square? What does that look like for people who aren’t professional ministry people? So that’s something that we’re involved in as well. And so we do these wherever we are invited churches, people in these different parts of the world will invite us to come and we partner with them in ways that make sense for continuity of the ministry afterwards. And then we offer a way for them to connect online through an online community platform that we’ve developed called We four 19. And people can join in over there, find resources, webinars, and all kinds of things. So that’s how we spend a lot of our time.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:44):
Amen. Is there hope for the Methodist church in America? In my hometown in Tulsa, Oklahoma, there’s just a couple miles from my house. There’s Asbury Methodist Church, which is extremely evangelistic. They have done amazing work in our city, identifying different areas that need help in going and offering the love of Christ and leading people to Jesus. And they’re really significant. And then down the street the other way, there’s a much more liberal Methodist church. And it seems like sometimes there’s issues that are very far from what you would see in the Bible. What do you think the solution is? Is that a fair question?

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (18:33):
Totally

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:35):
Tough to deal with on a podcast.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (18:38):
I have a bit of an outsider view of it, which I think is an advantage not being from the us but having enough time living in the US to kind of understand what’s going on and the way I feel about, and I would say not just the Methodist church in the US but the more established, established historical denominations in general, mainline denominations and so on. I think what we’re going through right now is not a whole lot different than the scene that John Wesley found himself in England in the 17 hundreds, which was a church with all the trappings and the lookings of church, but without the spirit and a lukewarm faith, a socially acceptable faith. I think it’s Alan Hirsch that once said that Methodists lost their steam when they decided to become respectable. And I

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:48):
Think there’s something about being an evangelist that you have to leave your respectability at the door. You have to leave it because to go out and you have William Booth, he would send people out in uniforms, they’d make music on the street corners. That’s not really respectable, but it’s what you have to do to get an audience to preach to them about

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (20:07):
Jesus. So to me, that’s exactly right. And so to me, John Wesley, one, he realized mentally and with reason that there’s something wrong. Stuff I’m reading here doesn’t match what I see in practice of the church. And so he, he’s seeking and trying, but there’s a humility about him in that he’s traveling back from Georgia where he was a failed missionary traveling back from Georgia, and he’s on a boat and there’s this big storm and

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:49):
Meets the Moravians.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (20:50):
He meets the Moravians and instead of a pride of I know how to do things, he couldn’t help but be curious about why is it that these folks are not afraid to die right now and I’m afraid to die? And we’re both Christians. There’s something about them that I want. And so he has an awakening experience at Aldersgate, which is the heart strangely warmed experience. But what few people know is he actually went and visited with the Moravians Count Zinzendorf and learned from them. So in the Methodist discipleship system, bands were like the smaller group of people three to five that would ask each other tough questions about their sin and about how they’re dealing with their family and how their soul and how they’re serving and how they’re giving and all that sort of thing. And their prayer life. And he learned to do bands with the Moravians shamelessly, copies it and starts using it in the Methodist

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:55):
Movement very effectively in the method very

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (21:56):
Effectively. And so there was a humility there where he’s not afraid to pick up stuff that seemed to be working with other people. And I think in the world today, I think Methodists could learn a great deal from the charismatic movement and the Pentecostals around the world who have no trouble with evangelism, and they’re very bold and rediscover the power of the Holy Spirit.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (22:30):
I mean, that really was why the Holy Spirit was given. I mean, acts one, eight, you’ll receive power after the Holy Spirit comes upon you to be my witnesses. That’s right. And so the whole encounter with the Holy Spirit is what gives the believer the power, the ability to go out and be bold and witness. And we see that on the day of Pentecost where Peter we talked about earlier, he denied Christ went out and preached, and 3000 people were saved that day because he had been filled with the

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (22:58):
Power of Holy Spirit. It wasn’t because he was a skilled preacher, right? It was entirely the work of the Holy Spirit. So to me, that’s it. If there’s hope for the church, it lies in leaders willing to humble themselves to realize, one, we have a problem, two, we don’t. While in our heritage, there are solutions within our heritage. Right now we’re not living within solutions. And so who is it around us that seems to be alive and what can we learn from them? And then you apply your theology and your way of thinking and you innovate and you do all kinds of things. But I think where Methodists and Anglicans and Presbyterians have been learning from others and not afraid to innovate, I’ve seen a lot of promise. Many churches, just like the Asbury Methodist Church in Tulsa, I could point to a number of churches just doing really great ministry. I would say their exception, not the rule right now, but I don’t think it’s a Methodist thing. I think it’s a church in general thing. But in particular, mainline denominations have struggled to recover their identity.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:21):
I’ve made an observation as I’ve traveled around the world. You have different types of countries around the world. So you have the countries that were colonies of Great Britain, so places like the United States, like Australia, like Canada, even. You had an influence of Great Britain here in Africa where in Zambia at one time,

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (24:48):
They still drive on the left side, they still drive, which is

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:50):
So weird, Kenya. Okay, so that’s one type of country. Then you have another type of country that was really strongly influenced by Roman Catholicism. So Brazil would be an example of that. Like Dominican Republic, a lot of central and South America had a strong Roman Catholic presence. And then you have the Francophone countries that were colonized by the French. And I was just in Congo a couple weeks ago, and it was colonized by Belgium and really mistreated in many ways. And so you have these three different types of countries, the Francophone, you have the Roman Catholic, and then you have the Anglican, the people that were colonized by Great Britain. And you see the difference in how the countries are like the Francophone countries often are very poor. And I think it goes back to the French Revolution where they went into the churches and they turned them into cathedrals of human reason instead of worshiping God.

(26:10):
And that spread as France spread its colonies around the world, and where you see it really vividly is like Dominican Republic in Haiti. Haiti was settled by the French, Dominican Republic was more Roman Catholic, and when you look at it on a map, the Haitian side is brown because they’ve burned all the trees. The Dominican side is lush and green. And so there was a blessing I think that came from God during the Methodist. What John Wesley did changed the course of history, and as it spread, you really saw the blessing of God come on many nations because of what impact Wesley had on spreading the gospel. And you see in Roman Catholic countries, you see they’re not as bad off as some of the francophone countries, but I think you can really trace in some ways what God has done through the ministry of John Wesley. What do you think about that theory? It is kind of interesting looking at how different countries are.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (27:38):
Yes, and I would say you can easily point that to the, it’s been studied, the Protestant work ethic and what that did in terms of economic development countries that took on the Protestant work ethic. I don’t know how much to do with John Wesley. That part had, right. England was a Protestant country before John Wesley. I say the revival I think is by the mid 18 hundreds, I believe one out of every three Americans was a Methodist, which is absolutely bonkers. Right?

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (28:25):
When Francis Asbury came to America, I think there was something like 200 Methodists in the whole country, and by the time he died, it was like half a million

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (28:33):
And there were a hundred thousand in England. When

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (28:38):
John Wesley, I mean, when you have the stories of Francis Asbury going out on the frontier, the frontier men in America were extremely rough. I mean, they were drinking, they were out there just on the edge of, and the circuit writers would come in and start preaching to them and really turn sinners into saints. And that had to have an impact on the spread of America. Yeah,

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (29:07):
Absolutely. So I think you can say, well, definitely religious movements had a lot to do with that. The type of colonization had a lot to do with that. Africa and a lot of South America were what you would call exploitation colonies. And so even today, there are signs of that, like the railroad system in Brazil, most railroads go west to east. Very few of them go north to south. Why? Because they were moving goods to the ocean, to the port, to ship to Portugal, and then Portugal was using that as currency to purchase industrial goods from England and from other places. The same with Spanish colonization. Colonization in North America was different. It wasn’t colonization out of exploitation. It was people looking for a different kind of life. And so your attitude towards development and building things is just different when it comes to that.

(30:23):
But the effect of mission, sort of the missional evangelistic mindset, the Methodist movement, and a few others, I would say have definitely marked what society looks like in the US and certainly in Great Britain. Man, you said the change of in history and in Great Britain, there was a huge issue with drunkenness. A lot of mine working was one of the main things, and there were no labor laws back then. You can trace many of the early labor laws to Methodists, vowing for or fighting for better, for human dignity, for human dignity. John Wesley wrote a book, an entire book on health, a book of medicine, and a lot of the things that he wrote are still things that we utilize today because it was a gospel for the whole person. It wasn’t we’re going to just save your soul. You’re going to save your soul, but your life is going to be different.

(31:48):
You’re going to become healthier. You’re going to stop drinking, and therefore you won’t beat your wife anymore and therefore your kids will grow up to be healthy people. It is just all these things, which to me is the definition of revival. Revival is something that gets stirred up in the hearts of Christians. It has an impact on the entire society, and it starts in the church, but then it affects society in general. And when you see societies changing, then you go, yeah, that’s revival right there. So I mean, that was in the west. In the West, I would say probably the last great revival. You have the great awakenings in the us, but nothing that was like society shifting in the way that the Wesleyan movement is now. You see signs of that in other places in the world underground church in China, what that’s doing in that culture in society. You see the church growth in India and what’s happening there. There’s many places in the world that are just experiencing social change because of revival in the church. And

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (33:06):
So yeah, last summer I got to preach at a little tiny town up in the Nebraska area, and I was invited by a female Methodist pastor from India.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (33:23):
Oh, that’s

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (33:23):
Cool. And so she had come

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (33:26):
How unusual, right

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (33:27):
From India, I think one of the Methodist schools had given her a scholarship. She’s come over and studied, and then they put her in this little tiny town and made her the pastor of the church. And there were like 10 people in the church, which is a little tiny church. And the first thing she did when she got there is she went to all the other pastors in the city. There were seven different denominations. And so she went to the Baptist pastor, the Lutheran pastor, and she says, in India, we get together and pray. And so she said, we need to start praying for our city. And so she gathered these pastors and she was a fireball, and she gathered them together and they started to pray every week together. Then after several months of praying, she says, you know what we did back in India is we would have a revival where all the churches would work together. We need to have a revival in our city. So she challenged the churches, let’s have a revival. And they called me in as their revival evangelist, and some of the churches were like, I’m not sure who this guy is, and we’re a little hesitant, but we saw revival in that city and it was because this Indian Methodist pastor female was just on fire and brought a fire to the entire city.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (34:58):
Yeah, that’s amazing. It’s really cool. Yeah. What’s great about that is that as a female minister, I mean just saying that an Indian female minister is already a big deal because it’s culturally not something that would be typical. So what an incredible story.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (35:22):
And so I’m just really excited. I think in talking about the different movements, I think it just shows the need for a new move of God in our time.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (35:33):
Yeah, you see signs of it though. I feel, man,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (35:39):
God is

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (35:39):
Moving. Yeah. I’ve been talking about this with some friends, especially since I had been thinking some of this, but it didn’t become a theme of conversations with others until the outpouring at Asbury University in 23, so last year, early last year, and

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (36:08):
Did you get to go to that?

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (36:09):
No. See, I was heading out to uba. I didn’t get

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (36:12):
A chance to go, but I mean, it was so neat to see so many young people there. It

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (36:16):
Was just

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (36:16):
Worshiping the Lord.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (36:17):
Well, what doesn’t make the headlines is the fact that that sort of thing is happening in all kinds of places around the world right now. There’s just a fresh something going on. Daniel, wherever we’ve been in the last three years or so, we have seen signs of awakening, particularly with young leaders, pastors, and lay folks, just humility about them, a hunger about them, and a lot of repentance and realization their sins. So what I realized is in the places where we go, where we’ve had these events, we are not the ones causing anything. Neither is it a move of the spirit that is primarily through us, but we’re kind of riding a wave of something that God’s already doing there, and we can’t quite put a finger on it, but it just feels different, I would say over the last three years. It just feels different, and I keep hearing that from people that are not a part of our movement at all, who are saying, I was in this place and I was like, man, it just feels different. There’s just something going on. So I guess we’ll have to shoot another one of these in 10 years to talk about it and say, did something actually happen or not? But I don’t know. I have a feeling that there’s something fresh going on, and it’s transnational. It is not in one country and

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (38:10):
It doesn’t seem to have any identifiable leader.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (38:13):
No, no.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (38:14):
There’s no one who’s leading it. It’s a divine move of the Holy Spirit.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (38:19):
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (38:22):
It’s something that’s kind of happening under,

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (38:25):
And what a beautiful thing that is. We’re in an age of celebrity where anybody with a phone and a camera can become a celebrity of sorts, an influencer or something. How cool is it that God would choose to move in a season like this in the world in a way that’s sort of faceless, go to places, and it’s just neat to see God doing stuff and nobody claims it. Everybody’s just happy to be a part of it. Amen. And that’s cool. That’s better than all the division we’re used to, isn’t it? Amen. Yeah. Well,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (39:05):
Let’s finish up today by just praying together.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (39:07):
Yeah, that’d be awesome.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (39:08):
Would you just pray that God would raise up more great evangelists around the world? Yes,

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (39:16):
Absolutely.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (39:16):
That we would see God pour out his spirit upon all the different movements around the world.

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (39:21):
Yeah. Let’s pray and I invite those that are watching, even though it’s not live to pray this prayer with us. I think as we humble ourselves, whether it’s on listening to the podcast or watching it on YouTube, we can invite people to join us in prayer as well. Yeah. Let’s pray. God, we are humbled that a God like you would invite people, even us to be a part of your mission in this world. And God, we’re just in awe of who you are and what you’re all about. God, we thank you for your reconciling work around the world where person by person, heart by heart, community by community, nation by nation, you are in the mission of bringing people back to you and reconciling them to yourself through your son Jesus, through so God. We know that right now there’s a rising hunger for something more in this world, and God, you say this in your word, that the fields are just full of fruit and there’s nobody to pick it up.

(40:43):
The laborers are few. And so God, we pray right now that you would raise a new generation of laborers, of workers, of passionate followers of Jesus that would go out into the world boldly, humbly in ways that reach to the heart of each community that they go to God. We pray right now that you would call people who you are preparing that they would awaken to your mission in this world. God, we pray that you would lift up leaders not just here in Africa and not just in North America, but all over the world, God, that your mission would be accomplished from people from all over the world going to all over the world, and God, that the world may know who we are because of our unity God, because of the common spirit that we share with one another and God because of the humility that we come into this mission.

(41:47):
God, it is your mission. It’s your church. It’s your spirit. We just get to be a part of it. God, so would you do that? Awaken us, God, revive our hearts even as you do this with those that are still yet to be called, and God allow us to be a part of this beautiful movement that you’re beginning in the world right now. We want to be a part of this fresh outpouring of your Holy Spirit, so do it in our hearts. Do it in the hearts of those that are watching or listening to this and in their communities and in their families. We pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (42:26):
Paulo, Thank you for being on the Evangelism Podcast. I just have one more question. Someone’s listening and they’re from one of the Wesleyan traditions. They have a heart for evangelism, and they want to get to know you to connect with some of the resources that you guys have. What’s your website? What’s the best way for them to get

Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism (42:43):
Connected? You can find us online@worldmethodist.org or you can follow our handle on Instagram at World Methodist, which is our handle for most of our social media, and if you really want to get into it, I invite you to go to your app store and look for we W four nine, we four 19, and that is our online community platform. We hold live events, webinars. I need to get you to do a webinar for us on evangelism. That would be amazing. I’d love to. We’ll have to set that up. We do monthly webinars, book clubs. We’re putting out videos, podcasts and all sorts of things, and then leaders get to connect with one another on the app as well. People from all over the world. I think we’re up to 26 countries right now on the app, and we launched just a few months ago, so we’re excited about that. But yeah, those were the ways to connect with us. If you want to reach out to me, you can email me at paulo@worldmethodist.org and I’d love to connect. Daniel. Thank you so much for having me, man. Been a joy.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (43:53):
Well, thank you for being on the Evangelism Podcast.

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The post Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism appeared first on King Ministries | Evangelist Daniel King | Our Goal? Every Soul!.

Transcript:

Evangelist Daniel King (00:00):
The devotion that I want to talk about is how to take a city for God. I’ve gone to many different cities around the world and we do big evangelistic events, and our goal is to take the city for the kingdom of God. The city I want to talk about is the city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is very significant. It is the capital of three different major religions. The Jews claim it, the Christians claim it, and Islam claims it. And so Jerusalem is known all over the world. But what made Jerusalem famous, it’s not a port city. Usually the famous cities of ancient times were port cities where the ships would come bringing goods. It’s not on a river, it’s up in the mountains. It’s hard to get to. So what made it famous? The thing that made Jerusalem famous was King David decided to make Jerusalem the capital of his kingdom when he decided that he didn’t own it.

(01:17):
It was known as the city of Jab bbis, and it was owned by the Jbu, the Jebusites. And so how did King David come to own the city of Jab bbis? The story is found in two Samuel chapter five, verses six through nine, it says, and the king and his man went to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land, who spoke to David saying, you shall not come in here, but the blind in the lame will repel you, thinking David cannot come in here. Nevertheless, David took the stronghold of Zion. That is the city of David. Now, David said on that day, whoever climbs up by the way of the water shaft and defeats the Jebusites, the lame, the blind who are hated by David’s soul, he shall be chief and captain. Therefore, they say the blind in the lame shall not come into the house.

(02:21):
Then David dwelt in the stronghold and called it the city of David. And David built all around from that region inward. So the city of Jab bbis was on top of a mountain. It was surrounded by high walls of stone. There were large wooden gates that guarded the only entrance to the city. When David and his men arrived, the gates were slammed shut, and it was impossible for anyone to enter the city. The men of jab were extremely confident. The Jebusites felt safe. They were hidden behind their eye walls of stone, and they began to make fun of David. They stood high on the walls and they shouted down, you cannot enter here. They said, even if the only soldiers in the city were deaf and lame and blind, you would not be able to enter. And so they’re taunting them from the walls. I don’t know if you remember the Monty Python in the search for the Holy Grail. There’s a group of French soldiers on top of a wall, and they’re making fun of the knights who come. You remember that scene? I don’t remember what they said, but it was funny at the time. Does anyone remember to quote it? You know what they say? You are a monkey. You are so smelly.

(03:55):
I mean, that’s what the Jebusites were doing. They were standing on the wall saying, oh, you can never take our city. It’s impossible for you. You are so stupid. We are here in the city. Even if every one of our soldiers was dumb and deaf and blind, you would not be able to take the city. But somehow, perhaps through a spy, David heard about another way of entering the city. It was a tiny water shaft that extended from the valley all the way up the mountain and came out in the middle of the city of jab bbis. And so here was a flaw in the city’s defenses, a tiny chink in its impenetrable armor. And David said, I am tired of these heathens making fun of me in saying that even the blind in the lame could defeat me. And so David gathered his men together and he promised who whoever climbs up by way of the water shaft and defeats the Jebusites, he shall be chief and captain.

(05:16):
And so for many years when I read this passage, I thought of a water shaft with fresh water going down to a well. And I had this picture of a soldier climbing up with his sword strapped to his back and his shield. And as he climbs, there’s a little bit of moss on the wall and the water is splashing in his face, but he manages to climb all the way up this water shaft, and he comes out at the top in the middle of the night, pulls out his sword, and begins slashing and takes the city. That’s kind of the picture I always had of this story. But as I studied this passage, I discovered that there are several commentaries that suggest that my picture of old fresh water well is not entirely accurate. Instead of being fresh water, it’s possible that this water shaft was actually a sewer.

(06:21):
And that’s why the Jebusites thought that it was impossible for anyone to climb up this water shaft. What’s in a sewer? It’s full of trash. It’s full of bones from dead animals, it’s full of feces. It stinks to high heaven. It’s full of rats flies and creepy crawly bugs. Climbing the water shaft would require more than just physical strength. It would also require a strong stomach and a stopped up nose. And so never in their wildest dreams did the Jebusites imagine that someone would climb up the sewer, who would push their way through the trash and waste altogether in a cramped up space. They didn’t imagine that it would be possible for anyone to attack the city through this sewer shaft. And so imagine the slime. Imagine the smell climbing this shaft would make you want to gag, and it would make you feel like you’re going to throw up.

(07:36):
By the time you reach the top, you would not be in the mood to fight a battle. Your sword handle would be slick in your hand. This attack was not a picnic, but sometimes in order to take a city for God, you have to go through waste. I don’t want to be too crass, but what would you call it? I mean, it’s waste feces, poo dung shit, kaka, stinky. It doesn’t matter what words you use, the reality is foul. And so David was surrounded by mighty men, but this mission required someone who was exceptional to lead. Usually climbing through the sewage is not heroic. It’s a job for a trash man. So who would step up to take the lead? Who would lead David’s men? Who would win the award that David was offering to the person who could take this risky climb? In 1 Chronicles 11:4-6, we find the name of the chief who volunteered for the job.

(08:59):
His name was Joab. And so Joab lifted his hand and he said, I will be the one to climb up this sewage shaft. I will be the one that will go first in the city. And he grabbed some of the other mighty men of David, and he grabbed and said, come on guys. We can do this. We can work together. We can get up there and we can take this city. And so Joab was a hero. And because he was the one who ascended the shaft later, David appoints him as the leader of all of his armies. And so taking a city for God requires heroes. It’s not easy. It’s not a stroll through the tulips. It’s not just a walk in the sunshine. Coming to a city like Ganja, dika requires sacrifice. Sometimes it’s hot. Sometimes when you take a city, it’s cold. Sometimes you have to take a cold shower out of a bucket. Sometimes it’s smelly. Sometimes you have to use an outhouse. Sometimes the road is bumpy. Sometimes there are mosquitoes. Sometimes you have to leave your wife and children at home for long periods of time. Sometimes there’s conflict. Sometimes there’s not enough money, and you have to bargain for everything.

(10:53):
Sometimes you have to sleep on a hard bed or even a hard floor. My bed over in Muji Maya, it was a nice room, but the bed had slates in it. It was very uncomfortable. Sometimes you’re sick. Sometimes you have to go for a long period without eating food. Sometimes you’re thirsty. Sometimes you have a gun pointed at you. I’ve had that happen to me in a couple of different countries in Pakistan. One time we were shot at. But in order to take a city, you have to be willing to go through dumb. Taking a city requires hard work in sacrifice, but the man or the woman

(11:49):
Who is willing to make the sacrifice to take a city will receive a great reward. And so I want to tell you today that each one of you are heroes. Some of you have been coming with C fan for many, many years, and that’s one of the greatest things about Christ for all nations is the years of dedication that people have given to it. And it’s not easy. When you read Reinhard Bonnke’s autobiography, there have been sacrifices, even people that have died. If you listen to Brother Winnie, he tells the stories of traveling across parts of Africa and some of the adventures he’s gone on would make a great blockbuster movie. It’s not been easy what CA has done, but that is what is required in order to take a city for God. It’s required your sacrifice to take ganja dika.

(12:56):
And for that, you are a hero. And I want to say thank you to each one of you for your sacrifice, for the effort you put into this, and not just this one. Some of you were here last week. Some of you are going to be here next week. We’re going to go from this city. We’re going to take the next city. We’re going to take all of Congo for Jesus. We’re going to take all of Africa for Jesus from Cape Town to Cairo. Do you know how audacious it is to say we’re going to take 50 cities in one year for Jesus? Never been done before, never even been attempted. But 50 different decap events. I mean, this is historic, but what are we doing? We are taking cities for Jesus Christ and we couldn’t do it without you. And so thank you. Let’s pray together.

(13:45):
Dear Heavenly Father, I want to say thank you for the heroes who are in this room. Thank you for their sacrifice. Thank you for the effort that they put into ganja and into Congo and into the other cities where crusades are happening. And Lord, I pray that because of them being willing to go through the challenges of operating in a nation like Congo, Lord, I pray that you would give them a great reward that just like Joab became the captain of all of David’s armies, he received a great reward. Lord, I pray that you would reward each one of my friends, my brothers, every staff member that’s here. Lord, I pray that they would receive a great reward. The type of reward that only comes through you. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

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The post How to Take a City for God | Evangelist Daniel King appeared first on King Ministries | Evangelist Daniel King | Our Goal? Every Soul!.

Learn more about the Pentecostal Movement in Sweden: https://www.pingst.se/english/

Transcript: 

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King. I’m excited about telling people about Jesus today. I have a very special guest with me, Josef Maxson from Sweden. Thank you for joining me today.

Josef Maxson (00:12):
Thank you. So nice to be in your podcast.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:15):
Well, we are here in Guinea, and we have been having a wonderful gospel campaign, and you came with one of the evangelists who’s here, and it’s been absolutely wonderful to get to know you. And you are actually working right now with the Pentecostal movement of Sweden. And so over the years, God has done really amazing things through the Pentecostal movement in Sweden. Let’s just start at the beginning. How did Pentecost come to Sweden?

Josef Maxson (00:54):
Yes, so I mean, the Pentecostal movement have been in Sweden since around 1907. So I mean, it started on Ausa Street and some years later it went first to Norway with a man called Barat. And in Norway it was a man called Ros. And he went there for a Bible school and to hear this Norwegian preacher preach about what’s happening over on Asa Street, and I mean the movement started to spread in the Scandinavian and mostly in the Baptist churches. So Lewi Pethrus, I mean, he gets to this teaching and he starts to preach it, and more and more people are listening to him and he starts ministering in a church in Stockholm, I think around this time also in the Baptist Church. And in this new Pentecostal movement, you don’t, meaning at that time you needed to be a member in the church. You took the holy communion.

(02:20):
And this was, I mean, they didn’t like this fault anymore. They wanted to, I mean, everybody could take the holy communion if you are a believer. So then this congregation that Levi Pets was pastoring, they decided to break up from the Baptist movement in Sweden, and they started their own church, so to say. And in that time, you can say the Pentecostal movement started in Sweden when they broke laws and they choose to be on their own. And then it continue in many different Baptist churches, but also people started new churches. So I think the first 10 years, it was around 50 churches that started that connected to the Pentecostal movements, so to say. And the founder in Sweden is Lewi Pethrus. So he was pastoring this church for nearly 50 years, and he was, the Pentecostal movement in Sweden shouldn’t exist without him. He was a real apostle and entrepreneur.

(03:40):
And his church grown a lot the coming year during the twenties and the thirties. And I mean, he was a road model for a lot of pastors. And what he said, they listened to him, so to say. And I think after 20 years there was over 55,000 members. And then they decided around between the wars like 1,930 to build a new church. And they built a church for, I think it was four, 4,000 attendance. And this was the biggest, not stadium, but city hall or church building, church building, or the biggest building to gather people in at that time in the northern part of Europe. So it was really big

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:49):
Building. They had big faith

Josef Maxson (04:53):
And I think it was the biggest for nearly 30 years or something.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:58):
So the Pentecostal movement has continued to grow and is now very mature. And you serve on the staff with the Pentecostal movement. What’s your position?

Josef Maxson (05:09):
So my position is head of communication. So I work with the marketing with the social media, our webpage, but also a lot connected to our events, leader events, pastors network, summer conference and youth conference, and different kind of campaigns during the year. We do a lot of advertisement around Christmas and during the Easter in the secular media to tell about Jesus and so on. So it’s a lot of different parts. We have a magazine coming out fourth time every year.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:54):
And so approximately how many churches and how many members would be considered Pentecostal now

Josef Maxson (06:03):
In the Pentecostal movement in Sweden, it’s around 440 churches right now, and the member is 18,700.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:14):
Wow. And so for a country the size of Sweden, that’s quite good.

Josef Maxson (06:20):
Yeah, it’s the biggest. In Sweden, we have had a church for over a thousand years, the state church, but the other churches called Free Church Free Churches. So this is the biggest dominations among the free churches, of course. I mean when it was as big as it was over 100,000 members, but it’s still the biggest dominations.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:47):
And so what is the spiritual atmosphere like in Sweden? As you mentioned, Christianity goes back a thousand years, but in that type of atmosphere, sometimes people’s love for Christ grow cold. And so what are the opportunities that the Pentecostal church sees and what are some of the challenges that you feel you’re facing right now?

Josef Maxson (07:12):
I mean, the Pentecostal movement was growing on until 1980s or something, and then this slowly started to getting down in numbers. But the last 10 years we have seen that the Baptist number have been going up, and we’ve seen a lot of new churches planting, I mean, to Sweden. We have a lot of refugee have been coming in the last 50 years, but especially the last 20 years. And they start new Pentecostal churches only in Stockholm, the capital. It had been started over a hundred new Pentecostal churches the last 10 years.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:57):
Wow. And do they come under the umbrella of the Pentecostal movement?

Josef Maxson (08:00):
Some

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:01):
Of them or some of them stay independent.

Josef Maxson (08:02):
Some of them stay independent, and some of them come into the umbrella. And we are working quite hard to get them in. I mean, some of them don’t know for many years that it exists a Pentecostal movement or domination to be part of. So we work to them to get them in, and we see a lot of growth during that process.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:28):
Let’s talk about the missionary legacy of the Pentecostal movement, because I’ve been all over the world and I have seen the impact that missionaries from Sweden have had in different parts of the world. And so this last week I was in Foya, Liberia, right across the border from where we are. And there is a hospital, a school, a beautiful church building and a radio station and some other buildings that were built by Swedish Pentecostal missionaries that came back in the late 1940s, early 1950s and stayed there all the way up until the war. The big war happened in Liberia. And it is just amazing. The Pentecostal legacy continues today we’re working with my friend Billy Bimba, and his father was led to Jesus by one of the Swedish Pentecostal missionaries and pastored there for many years. And now his children and his grandchildren continued to minister in Liberia. And I’ve seen that in different places. I was just not too long ago in Bangladesh. And there’s a church there that has been supported by the Pentecostal movement, and it’s growing by leaps and bounds in a very unreached area. What are some of the other stories of impact that the Pentecostal Church of Sweden has had through the missionaries you’ve sent out?

Josef Maxson (10:01):
I mean before or when many of the churches started in the early 19 hundreds, before you built a church building, you send out missionaries or before you had your own pastor, you send out missionaries. So it’s really in the Pentecostal congregation in Sweden’s DNA to send out missionaries. And I mean, the impact is enormous. It’s hundreds of millions of Christians who have been coming through Swedish missionaries. And I

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:39):
Heard that at one time per capita, Sweden sent out more missionaries than any other country on earth.

Josef Maxson (10:45):
Yeah, that’s true. So I mean, I think we had started churches, the Pentecostal movement in Sweden has started churches in over a hundred countries all over the world. And I mean, most of them we have good relationships with today. And even if the work has been changed a bit, we still do a lot of work through our humanitarian organization. And we have a mission organization works with the media like radio and tv, and also a lot of congregation, they have their own relationships with different congregations and dominations and countries. And so to say, so I mean, a lot is in the history, but we still works a lot around the globe

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:37):
Today. And would you say that missions is still part of something that the churches want to support and want to be a part of?

Josef Maxson (11:44):
Yeah, I should say that’s one of the keytones in the Pentecostal movement. It have been, and it’s in the future also, but of course I should say it have been the last 30 years. They have been going down a little bit. But the last 10 years, it’s growing quite a lot. And especially among the young people, they got new burning heart for missions in all different ways and to build relationships, and you want to reach out with the gospel. I mean,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:17):
Let’s talk about your burning heart for missions because you’re from the Pentecostal movement of Sweden, but this week you are here in Giga, do Guinea. And this morning, of course, we were at the fire conference with all the leaders from the city, and we were preaching on the Holy Spirit, laid hands on them. Many of them spoke in tongues for the first time. Many of them were filled with the Holy Spirit. Several even had demon manifestations that demons came out and the bad spirits came out, and then the Holy Spirit came in. And so it is really beautiful to see, but what is it that drives you as a young Swedish Pentecostal to go out on the mission field?

Josef Maxson (13:01):
I mean, the experience for myself is one important part of it to learn, to get a sense of the history of mission send out from Sweden, but also to see, I mean, unreached people getting to know Christ today. I mean, I’m growing up in a old church where you tell a lot of stories how it was back as many years ago. Sure, yeah. But it’s so interesting to go out now

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:37):
You have a fresh story just from this morning a few hours ago.

Josef Maxson (13:40):
Exactly. Exactly.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:42):
And even last night, we saw miracles. You were taking pictures of the people that were healed. There was one deaf woman and her ear was opened. One woman who was blind in one eye, her eye was open and you were taking pictures of them. And so now you have fresh stories that Jesus is still working today.

Josef Maxson (13:58):
And my normal work is a lot about how do we do missions in Sweden and to sometimes every year go out and to learn and to see how other do and what’s happened around the world. It’s getting me very inspiring. And to see that unreached people get to know Christ, even today, it gives a lot of hope when you work with Swedish teenager. And also to see how we can learn from different cultures and so on. And also to go out to meet people who have been infected about them. The earlier missionaries from Sweden, I mean, I went to Bible school in China, and we was out on the countryside, and then a man come in front of us, me and my friend who was there, and he thanked us, and he was crying like, thank you that you bring the gospel to me and my family over a hundred years ago.

(15:01):
And I mean the missionary who sent to China, I mean, this was in the late 18 hundreds. This was one way ticket to go to China from Sweden. You packed everything. You leave everything behind because you had some burning heart to tell the gospel. And I mean, to hear that and to understand that and to see that with my eyes, it’s getting me a lot of inspiring to continue my work. And then how can I both be helping in the mission doing around the world, but also how can we do a better work in Sweden? And I mean, it’s the next generation growing up. They have a hunger for something. In many years, it was hard to preach the gospel in Sweden because a lot of the youth said, I don’t want to hear. I don’t believe in God. I’m an ageist. But today you belong or belong for something and you want to hear and you want to experience spiritually chi and so on. That’s quite interesting to see what’s happening in the coming years. Yeah.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (16:13):
Amen. Well, I believe that every Pentecostal church is always praying for revival. And so let’s finish the interview today by praying together that God would pour out his spirit upon the Pentecostal churches of Sweden. That new fire would come, that new growth would come, and a new heart and passion for missions would come. And so can you finish? But instead of praying in English, can you pray in Swedish, pray for the Swedish Pentecostal Church to experience a new move of the Holy Spirit in this modern time?

Josef Maxson (16:47):
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes…

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:24):
Amen. Well, thank you Joseph for being on the Evangelism Podcast.

Josef Maxson (17:29):
Thank you. Thanks Having me.

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The post The Pentecostal Movement in Sweden | Josef Maxson appeared first on King Ministries | Evangelist Daniel King | Our Goal? Every Soul!.

Learn more about the Free Churches of Bangladesh: https://fccbchurch.org/

Transcription:

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. Today I have a very special guest with me, Bishop Albert Mirdha from Bangladesh. Thank you for being on the Evangelism Podcast.

Bishop Albert (00:15):
Thank you brother Daniel to meet you this morning.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:19):
Yeah, so we are here in the nation of Bangladesh and God is moving. It is so beautiful to see what God is doing here. Tell me some about what God is doing in this nation.

Bishop Albert (00:33):
Yeah, actually you see that Bangladesh is a new nation, about 52 years old, independent from Pakistan and it was third largest Muslim nation in the world and church was very tiny in Bangladesh after the liberation. But anyhow, the God has started to pour his spirit in the country of Bangladesh and from 175,000 when we are free from Pakistan and until now it is almost 600,000 Christians. So it is couple of times, hundred times increased means that is from the newborn babies in the country and the church is growing by his fire. So churches establishing in the country,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:21):
What would you say is the total population of Bangladesh?

Bishop Albert (01:25):
200 million people in the country and only 0.2% say you can say that Christianity in the country.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:34):
Wow. So I was reading some statistics and something like 91% of the population is Muslim, 92 7%, 8% is Hindu and then 0.2%

Bishop Albert (01:53):
Percent Christian

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:54):
Is Christian

Bishop Albert (01:55):
And this very

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:57):
Small

Bishop Albert (01:58):
Percentage.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:59):
But in the midst of this, it seems like there is a great harvest that God loves Bangladesh very much and Jesus is doing many wonderful things. Can you tell us some about what you see Jesus doing here?

Bishop Albert (02:13):
Actually, look, gospel came in this part of the country 500 years back, but mostly it was in Indian side and very few people has moved to the east part of India. I mean it’s a former India,

(02:30):
But the thing is it’s just a communication problem as well as it was not preached by our own people because we didn’t have any local Christians. The Jisu came and also some Catholic missionaries came and Orthodox people came but it didn’t need to work properly because they work in a very few areas. But actually in 1947 to 1971, mostly the church started to begin on the feet and 1971 when was independent and then there so many missionaries came from the west as well from US Canada and a part of Asia also. And then evangelism started and I think 72 to 80 it was, I mean, is a blooming of our churches because so many churches, new churches established in the country, like our church also, I mean started in 1984, but the missionary from Swedish free mission came or Swedish. Pentecostal churches came in 1970. So this is the way actually the after liberation in Bangladesh, 1971, the church has started to establish the kingdom of the country.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:39):
Now you’re leading the free Christian churches of Bangladesh. And in back in 1972, how many churches were there?

Bishop Albert (03:48):
Actually, 1970, the missionary came from Sweden

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:52):
To support

Bishop Albert (03:53):
To humanitarian areas because we had a tidal board in 1970, 15th of May, 15th of November. And then the missionary came here with social help. And then after a couple of months, just four months later, we had a liberation. We were started or begin in March, 1971. So then all missionaries leap again to their own country and then they came back after liberation in 1972. So this 72 to 1984, there is no mission work started by our missionaries, which Pentecostal missionaries jointly and individually scattered. They work. But lately they decide that they will start a mission organization called Free Christian Churches of Bangladesh. And this is a Pentecostal church from Swedes Pentecost Church. So we started in 84 and then 84 until, I mean now we have so many churches, we have 474 churches with 54,000 people all are from newborn babies. So I mean from 1970 to 1984, we are not existing. That time we didn’t start our mission work. So mission work started in 1984. Wow.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:11):
Let’s talk some about your testimony. How did you become a believer and how did you know that you were called to be a pastor and to lead churches?

Bishop Albert (05:23):
Actually, see, I born in a Christian family. My father was a pastor as seldom he was the mission school teacher of churches of God, US and 1972, actually I came into the ministry when I was fresh young around 15 or 14 plus almost close to 15 years old. I started to evangelize people of our country and I started to give the trust and sharing word of God. This is the way actually 72, I engaged into the evangelism Since then until now I’m voluntarily serving to my Lord.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:00):
Wow, what a blessing. And I had the opportunity this week to see the beautiful school that you have up north and I was so impressed with the children. They were so well-behaved and it was so beautiful to see the vision that God has given you

Bishop Albert (06:22):
Actually, I mean education is the key of development in anywhere else, socially or spiritually. Without education you’re going to do anything. Our church people are very illiterate and they do not have an opportunity to send their kids to the schools because school is very, very expensive. In Bangladesh, you have to pay everything. It’s not free. So I thinking I was praying to God in seventies that I will help to the kids with education if it is an opportunity God given to me. But finally I got this opportunity, 1998, to establish this home of peace that you have seen anywhere there. Actually these children are from orphanage back down. They’re single parents, they are very poor. Marginalist background of the new believers, our main motto to give them education and they can discover the truth of life and truth of heaven and then they will work that independently in the church will be self-supported in the future because the leadership will come from there.

(07:29):
That’s the reason actually 570 children you have seen from different areas and different ethnic group they’re studying over there. So our main goal to make them understand and also give them education and they can stand on their own feet. Otherwise they can be the physical laborer in the field or they can be the domestic worker or they can be the trafficking somewhere else. That’s the reason I know we have started and they’re, well actually they are taught like that. They knows how to behave with the field and usually the 570 kids in the children, I mean in the home of peace and it didn’t found that the noise is there, but they’re playing with joy and they’re very happy to be there. And I mean over 500 children already graduated from this place and they’re now in different areas of life.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:21):
Wow. Let’s talk about the future. I met your son John, and he has the same calling on his life that rests upon your life. And I was so impressed with your son. He went and studied in Canada, he went

Bishop Albert (08:38):
To the

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:38):
United States and studied and he’s very smart and he could have a job anywhere in the world, but he feels like God has called

Bishop Albert (08:48):
Him

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:49):
To be here in Bangladesh. And you and John and the pastors in this movement have come together and put together a vision for the next 10 years. What do you hope to see God do

Bishop Albert (09:04):
Here? Yeah, actually we are so thankful to our loving Lord and also John, I mean because we thought that he will be staying in USA because he studied in US in Florida.

(09:15):
But after completion, his study and after graduation same day, he returned home and he said that we tried to push him to stay in us, but he denied. And he said, no, that’s my calling to go back home and also I will serve over there. So finally we found that it’s a Gore’s will that he’ll be coming back and he helping to the ministry. And we are planning because I already 51 years I am in the ministry and I’m planning to hand over to him. And since he’s very matured and very capable to run this whole ministry because these 477 churches with lots of people and I think he can manage well and he’s learning our decade of revival and all, we have a vision 2032 that the F C C B, the Serve Pentecostal Church will plant new a hundred churches in Bangladesh within this 10 years of time and 1000 people will be baptized and 10,000 new people will join into our congregation and a whole and 200 leaders will be prepared or raised that they will work for the future generation in the churches. That’s our goal right now.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:34):
I think that is a goal that comes from God. And God is going to do amazing things in the years to come because Bangladesh really is a harvest field and there are so many people that need Jesus in fact, right by where the home of peace is. There are some fields there. And we went and I was watching the farmers in the field, they were cutting the rice plants down and I was thinking, wow, this is a vision from God that Bangladesh is a great harvest field. And I pray that God raises up many laborers here

Bishop Albert (11:13):
Actually. You see that Bangladesh really is right now the harvest field and this is an abundant mission fill of the west. So one day missionary leap from this country and because of no result, but now God is God’s time. He’s giving result to the churches. So this is the harvest time. And if we have few laborer truly speaking that God, Jesus has told that plenty of harvest, but few are laborers. So we actually, this is thing Bangladesh is right now the place of mission and also the mission field and harvest is plenty. So we need to harvest because he’s coming. I believe personally that he’s coming. We are living in the end time. So this is the time for harvest. This is the time for preparing people on earth and we are responsible for Bangladesh. We want to reach to every corner of Bangladesh with the gospel.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:05):
Amen. So many believers listen to this podcast. How can they best pray for the nation of Bangladesh? And then how can people help with what God is doing here?

Bishop Albert (12:21):
You see the prayer bind us together and this is actually the spiritual bindings is most important and the time has come to come closer and the believers will come closer and pray for extending the kingdom of God. So Bangladesh is one of the unreached country in the world, number one. So the people, those are actually our brother and sister in many countries, we going to say that

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:51):
Please

Bishop Albert (12:52):
Prefer Bangladesh, that we can win the souls of the country because this is very hard soil. Bangladesh is really hard soil once upon a time, but now God is opening the doors for missions and the local church want to reach to the corner and to every people. So we need your prayer support at the same time, you are most welcome to have the campaign or work together with our church and also supporting with your generous prayer or answer finance if it is possible. This is where we can work together for his glory.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:26):
Amen. Well, there is great opportunity here. There are many

Bishop Albert (13:30):
Villages

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:31):
That need a campaign, that have never had a campaign, no one has ever come to talk about Jesus. And so it has been a great privilege to be here as your guest. Thank you so much for inviting me here and for being here. It has really been wonderful to see what God is doing here. Let’s finish by praying for Bangladesh

Bishop Albert (13:54):
Together. Yeah, Daniel, you are not

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:56):
Guest.

Bishop Albert (13:57):
We are family. The family of God. We are working together for his kingdom because that’s our purpose, that God

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:04):
Has

Bishop Albert (14:05):
Called us,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:06):
God have

Bishop Albert (14:06):
Raised

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:07):
Us

Bishop Albert (14:07):
For supporting and we didn’t know each other, but now we are brother

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:12):
In

Bishop Albert (14:12):
Christ, so let’s work together, pray together, and sub together for his kingdom.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:18):
Amen. So

Bishop Albert (14:18):
You are most welcome anytime in the country of Bangladesh and that we can work jointly for this. And also please pray for

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:25):
This

Bishop Albert (14:26):
Children home where 570 children are there because they’re the future of the country, the future of the churches, because you have seen that they have a morning devotion and evening devotion and they’re learning who is God, how to support him and how to solve him.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:43):
Yeah, they were singing songs, quoting verses, and even being led by other students. I was very, and they did a beautiful cultural program.

Bishop Albert (14:54):
They

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:54):
Danced and they had different groups from different parts of the country, different ethnic groups, and they dressed up in the traditional costumes of their people and did the traditional dances and it was so beautiful. Yeah.

Bishop Albert (15:10):
They’re actually from 17 different tribe groups or ethnic group, including also Bengali, our main motto

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:19):
To raise leaders from

Bishop Albert (15:22):
All different tribe groups and ethnic groups that they can work for their own community in the future. That’s our main, main plan or vision. That’s wonderful.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:33):
Well, let’s pray. Dear heavenly Father, we pray together for the nation of Bangladesh. We ask that you would pour out your spirit upon this nation. Lord, we pray for many salvations, many miracles. Lord, I pray for the churches to be strengthened. Lord, I pray that new leaders would be raised up. I pray for more churches to be planted. Lord, I pray that all of Bangladesh would hear about Jesus

(16:07):
The great work that Jesus did on the cross to provide for our salvation. And Lord, I thank you for Bishop Albert, for his son, John Lord. We ask for your blessing to be upon them and give them great wisdom as they lead these churches. This movement of believers in reaching one of the great unreached areas of the world. Lord, we ask you for a mighty harvest of souls here in Bangladesh. In Jesus’ name,

Bishop Albert (16:43):
Amen.

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The post Bishop Albert | Free Christian Churches appeared first on King Ministries | Evangelist Daniel King | Our Goal? Every Soul!.

Learn more about Pastor Niclas Wiktorell: pingstlidkoping.se

Transcription: 

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King, and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. Today I have a very special guest, pastor Niclas Wiktorell from the Nation of Sweden. Thank you for joining me

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (00:12):
Today. Thank you, Daniel. So glad to be here.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:15):
We are in Asia together,

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (00:18):
And

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:18):
We have had a wonderful time this week. God has been moving here, and so

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (00:23):
It’s been

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:23):
So wonderful to get to know you and you pastor a church in the nation of Sweden. Can you tell me first, what is the name of your church and then what part of Sweden are you in?

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (00:35):
Yeah, of course. The name of church is the Pentecostal Church in Lead Tripping. And Lead. Tripping is in the southern part, southwest part of Sweden, close to Goberg.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:46):
Okay. And let’s start with your testimony. How did you become a believer and how did you know that you were called to be a pastor?

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (00:55):
Okay. I think it started all, when my uncle came back from Africa, he was a missionary in Liberia in Africa, and he came back and he told about Jesus and what he did, and that really moved me as a little kid. I was maybe six or seven years old or something like that. And then I believe I saw that, okay, this is what I want to do with my life. But then

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:20):
It took a

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (01:20):
Little while, maybe during the teenager, as a teenager, I forgot about it, but I had my faith and I went to a Bible school. And on that Bible school I decided I wanted to do this, and God spoke to me about it. Yeah.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:35):
Wow. And how long have you been pastoring?

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (01:38):
I’ve been pastoring for about 20 years. Wow.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:42):
And what is the spiritual climate in Sweden? I know historically there’s a strong church there, but now it seems like Sweden is more of a secular society. What would you say people’s understanding

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (01:59):
Of God is? Yeah, it’s very secular, and I think the minority has the idea that there is no God no at all. Maybe 10% has some sort of notion about God, but very few Christians, maybe two, 3% maybe.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:23):
And so in a secular society where people have a historical understanding sometimes of Christianity, but now believe that there is no God, how do you reach those who are lost?

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (02:37):
Wow. That is a tough question for us to do that. But I still believe that, well, it’s the same thing, even though it’s a secular country, I actually believe that now it’s so secular that when we come with the message of Jesus, it’s like, wow, people haven’t heard it before. So when I grew up, everyone about Jesus, but they rejected it. But now the kids and the young people, it’s like they’re hearing it for the first time. So I think you just have to be bold and you just have to try to reach out and tell the good news.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:16):
And so this year at Easter time, you had a very unique outreach. Tell me what that looked like and what God did.

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (03:24):
Yeah, we did it in a local arena. So we had 1500 to 2000 people in that arena for free days. And it was from the region, our city, it’s a small town. I mean, it’s like 40,000, but we could reach people in that area, in our region. And every night we saw people coming to Christ.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:50):
How did you promote it? How did you invite people to come?

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (03:54):
Mostly through social media, actually. Only through social media. Yeah.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:58):
Okay. So

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (03:59):
Facebook. And Facebook and mostly Facebook.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:03):
And so you asked your church members to share it and to invite people, and then were you also doing advertising on

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (04:10):
Facebook? Yeah, a little bit of advertising too, but that was what we did.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:17):
And so Easter’s a great time

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (04:19):
To

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:19):
Reach

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (04:19):
Out to people.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:20):
That seems very amazing that for three days you were able to fill the place with

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (04:27):
1500,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:28):
2000. I

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (04:29):
Mean, it was such a huge step of faith for us. It was because we maybe do like this in Sweden two or three times a year, and now we thought we would do it in our little town, and it was a big step of faith, but we did it and with God.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:47):
And what type of program did you do? Was it like a typical church service? Were you doing an Easter drama? What

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (04:53):
We did a number of different things. It was music programs and then also of course preaching. A lot of testimonies, a lot of testimonies about people that have been in different kinds of addicts and so on, and also some drama. Yeah.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:15):
I’ve read in the news that there are lots of immigrants that have come to Sweden, and it’s a little bit controversial because some people want to be very welcoming. Other people say that is difficult to integrate them into the society, but your church is actually reaching out to immigrants that have come from many different parts of the world, and you’re reaching them with the love of Christ. What does that look like?

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (05:43):
Yeah, we reach people from Syria and from Afghanistan and from Iran. And every week we have this program Thursday nights when we invite them and we teach them about Swedish society, our culture and so forth. And also, we have a Swedish school for them, so they learn to speak Swedish.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:09):
And many of them coming from these nations are probably Muslim. The majority, the majority are Muslim. And so I think that’s really wonderful that you’re reaching out to the Muslims. In many times, Christians go on a mission to another nation in order to reach people, but really God is bringing the mission field to you. They’re right on your doorstep now, and I think it’s so wonderful that your church is reaching out to them, loving them, and showing them the love of Christ.

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (06:41):
Yeah, we always say that, but God has brought us the mission feel to us, so it’s much more easier now in that way.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:49):
And how has your church responded to that? Have they been enthusiastic about being a part? I think

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (06:54):
It’s been really, really amazing. A lot of people put in their hearts to this and work with this every week, and you see friendships with the immigrants and so forth. So it’s really, really nice to see what God does in people’s lives.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:11):
I think that’s so wonderful. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, we’ve had many Afghan families that have come there, and my father worked in Afghanistan for 12 years, and so we have been working with a group of the Afghans that have come to our city, and some of them actually had a stopover in Sweden, and so

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (07:31):
They

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:31):
Had some very nice things to say about their time in Sweden, and then they left Sweden and came to America. So we’re happy to have them now,

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (07:39):
But

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:40):
I think this is so important for Christians to open up their eyes. Jesus told the disciples, and John Pour is open your eyes and see the harvest fields. Really, the harvest field is all around us.

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (07:52):
And

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:52):
If we’ll look for opportunities to talk to people about Jesus, to share God’s love with people, then we can see God begin to do miracles in their lives.

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (08:02):
Yeah, that’s amazing.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:03):
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism podcast.

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (08:08):
Thank you, brother.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:09):
Daniel, let me ask you, what is your life message? What is the message that you like sharing with people the most that God has given you?

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (08:21):
Well, I think that God is a good father and he wants to invite you into his family. That is the thing that he’s a good father and he cares for everyone. He loves everyone, and he wants to take care of every person, and he sees everyone individually. Yeah,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:39):
That’s beautiful. Thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast.

Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (08:43):
Thank you, Daniel.

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The post Niclas Wiktorell | What is God Doing in Sweden? appeared first on King Ministries | Evangelist Daniel King | Our Goal? Every Soul!.

Learn more about Pastor Samuel Jonsson: www.hovslattpingst.se

Summary: 

In this podcast episode, Evangelism Coach Daniel King interviews Pastor Samuel Jonsson from Sweden. Pastor Jonsson discusses the challenges of spreading the gospel in Sweden, a secular and individualistic country. However, he remains hopeful, noting that God is raising up young leaders and churches are starting to reach out and grow. Pastor Jonsson shares his church’s efforts to reach a specific area with a high concentration of broken homes and single parents. They have started a Sunday school and a children’s choir, which has attracted children from non-Christian homes. He also emphasizes the importance of pastors going on mission trips to expand their worldview and gain new perspectives. The episode concludes with a testimony of an 80-year-old man from Pastor Jonsson’s church who returned to a country he had previously worked in and witnessed the growth of the church.

Transcript:

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. Today I have a very special guest with me, pastor Samuel Jonsson from the nation of Sweden. Thank you for joining me today.

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (00:14):
Thank you so much for joining this podcast. It’s wonderful.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:17):
And so you are pastoring in the nation of Sweden. You have a Pentecostal church. Tell me what is God doing in Sweden right now?

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (00:32):
I think God is doing a lot of things in Sweden. It’s quite, Sweden is quite a tough country in some ways, very individualistic, very secular in some ways. So it’s a quite hard time getting through everything else with the gospel, the message. But I think God is racing up young leaders and I think God is racing up leaders who wants to search the gifts of the Holy Spirit, get more into what God is doing, what God is saying, what God wants to do for the nation of Sweden. So I have hope for the nation of Sweden. I think God will do great things, but maybe we have to go through some tough things also during the way, but we can see some churches starting to reach out more, growing a little bit more. And then some churches of course struggling, especially in the north of Sweden, maybe small churches struggling a lot. And also in the south of Sweden, church is struggling because they’re quite small, some of them. But still I think God is moving in many ways. I can see small, I don’t know how to say it, but small signals of great things to come. I don’t know how to explain it better than that, but a longing for the things of God and a longing for the spirit of God to start to move and talk and speak and direct and heal and so on.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:05):
Now in what part of Sweden is your church located?

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (02:09):
We are located in the south of Sweden, not the furthest down, I dunno how to say

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:15):
It,

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (02:16):
But in the south of Sweden. Yes.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:18):
And I’ve heard that that area is maybe known as the Bible belt of Sweden. You have many believers in that area, but of

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (02:26):
Course there’s, compared to the rest of Sweden, there’s

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:28):
Still many people that need Jesus.

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (02:31):
Yeah,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:31):
Definitely. In the context of your area, what are you doing to reach out to the lost and bring people to Jesus?

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (02:42):
Yeah, if I go to my church, the church where I’m a pastor, we are trying to specifically actually reach out to a specific area where we live. Of course we tried to reach out to all people where we live, but God gave us a heart for a specific, is like a small, I don’t know how to say it in English, but apartment, house area, something like that. Many families live there who have a quite tough situation, single parents and broken homes and so on. And we just received the heart for that area to try to reach out. So the woman who is a child and family pastor in our church, she got the vision together with a couple of other guys to start to have a Sunday school in this area. So on a regular basis they go up there on Sundays first we meet together, all of us in church and we pray together, together with this team and together with the rest of the church, we’ll celebrate.

(03:49):
We have worship in church and then they go up and they have a Sunday school for kids. But the focus is also to reach out to the whole family. So primarily through the kids, but then through the kids to the parents as well. And in this area we also had small, you say small events, gone there, done fun things for the kids, just blessing them, talk to people, get to know people. So we are trying in different ways to reach out to this specific area because we realized that almost none of the churches where we have people coming from this area to their churches. So it’s almost like a small subculture almost in the outskirts of the area. So we are trying to get in there and trying to reach people with the gospel. But then we also actually, I want to tell you about a kid’s choir. That’s also,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:58):
I think this idea is a very unique outreach idea. You were telling me about your children’s pastor and she has started this choir for the children and what is that?

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (05:10):
Yeah, she got the vision for that. Also, I think our kids pastor has some kind of an evangelistic heart and she just got a vision to start kids choir in the area. So first we just had kids from our church maybe in the beginning starting to come and they wanted to sing and learn to sing and so on. But then the kids started to take their friends from school into this choir. So a lot of friends came who came from non-Christian homes into this choir. So I think now they can gather on Tuesday evenings and on Tuesday evenings there can be 70 kids, sometimes 60 to 70 kids and maybe half of it are from non-Christian homes. So then we have added special services Sunday services on a regular basis during the semesters where we try to, we invite everyone, all of these families to come because the kids’ choir will sing and we try to give different kids and the choir specific roles.

(06:24):
So the families really will come because they want to see their kids and then they come and listen to their kids singing. And we just try to incorporate dramas into those services and incorporate a simple gospel message just to present the gospel in Jesus Christ to these families. And we have not yet seen the fruit we are praying for, but we are just trying to continue in that direction because just recently actually we had this kind of a service for, I think it was two weeks ago or three weeks ago. And then a grandma who had followed the family to the church, she told one of our leaders afterwards, I don’t think she was a Christian or had any Christian heritage in that way, but she said that these services means so much to me. It was like something touched her heart, but maybe she could not spell it out what it was. I believe it was the spirit of God of course, but maybe she could not spell it out. So we are trying to reach out also through this choir. And then the church where I’m a pastor is really, I told you in the car, I think it’s a really entrepreneurial church, many entrepreneurial people. So there are more ideas than we can almost do so many ideas, so many visions. But it’s really fun.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:57):
I think that’s really wonderful. I think in the years to come, some of those entrepreneurial ideas will result in grapefruit for the kingdom of

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (08:05):
God. Yeah, I hope. I

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:07):
Sure hope. Let’s talk about your history. How did you become a believer? How did you know that you were called to be a pastor?

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (08:16):
Yeah, I grew up in a Christian home. So I grew up in a Pentecostal church and both of my parents were a part of the church. My father was an elder in the church, but when I was quite young, I think I was nine years old, I remember quite vividly that my sister came home. I don’t know where she had been or maybe she had been to a camp or something. But she came home one day and we sat and we ate dinner. And I remember my sister started to talking about God and saying things about God that touched me in a special way. I had never experienced that because I remember looking into my sister, I was only nine years old, but remember it still, I was looking at my sister and I realized she has something that I don’t have. I had some kind of faith in God.

(09:13):
I remember, I mean we prayed together as a family. We prayed in the evening and so on. We could read the Bible together. And I had a children’s kind of faith maybe, but I saw something in her eyes and I realized she has something. And later on I realized that she had in some way accepted Jesus entire life. And that made me think at an early age think like what is this? And I started to pray. I remember in my own room like Jesus, I also want what she has. But then the specific moment came when I was at a big conference and I remember I had decided in my heart that tonight I want to really spell out a prayer that Jesus, I want you here in my heart. So I said to my mother, we were sitting in the front row seat that the conference, and I remember still that I turned to my mother at the end of the service and I said to her, I want to become a Christian. And then she followed me to what you call it when the

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:20):
Altar, the altar,

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (10:21):
Exactly to the altar. They had an altar called people were coming in front of the preacher or what? It

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:32):
Was for the altar time. Yeah,

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (10:35):
For the altar time, exactly. So I was just following my mother, and then an old man came up to us and he asked, what do you want? And I said, I want to become a Christian. And I remember praying that prayer, not feeling very much. I did not have a specific feeling in my body or anything, but from that moment, I have never looked back. It’s like Jesus has been the biggest part of my life since that moment. And then I got baptized a couple of years later when I was 11 or 12 or something, 11 years old. I think I had to wait a little bit. And then I got baptized. And then when I was in seventh grade, I experienced the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues for the first time at the church service, like a prayer service or something like that in my home church. I was sitting alone and just feeling the spirit, starting to draw me to him and then giving me words, speaking of tongue.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:35):
And then how did you know that you were called to be a pastor? To be in the ministry?

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (11:41):
It’s a quite long process actually. But when I was in seventh, eight, nine grade somewhere, I started to think a lot about what am I going to do with my life? And remember quite early that sometimes when I thought about that, I started to think maybe I should be a preacher or maybe I should do missionary work or maybe I should. I started to have those thoughts in my mind, but I was pushing it away because I thought that pastor is always not for me. It’s like old men in strange clothing and I don’t want to be that. So I pushed it away. But then when I came to, I think in the states, you call it senior high school. In Sweden we call it gymnasium. So when I came to gymnasium when I was like 16, 17, 18 years old, then I started to become really passionate about serving God.

(12:45):
So we started a group in school, me and some friends, we had a group in the school, we were going to a Christian group and we did outreach and gave away books and gave away Bibles and did different events. And the passion to serve God just grew in me during that season. I could not say that I have a calling to become a pastor, but I just knew I want to serve Jesus. Jesus is the best thing I want to serve him. So that grew in my heart really during that period. And then when I came out of high school, I was still quite confused, what am I going to do with my life? But then I had some different events happening that pointed me in this direction. First it was actually, I worked at an industry where my father worked just for a short period of time.

(13:37):
And one day when I was standing there and working, I actually heard a voice. I think this was almost the first time where I can say I heard almost a clear voice. I almost jumped because I heard a voice saying that when you come home from work, your pastor are going to call you and he will offer you a yoga church to be a youth youth leader. And I was like, what is this? I remember going to the toilet and being like, God, was that you? It was so whoop. But then when I came home, I went up to the tv, put on the tv, and then 30 minutes later the phone rang and I just immediately knew my pastor is calling now, my mom picked up the phone and she called me Samuel Michael, our pastor is calling you. And I was like, yep.

Speaker 3 (14:31):
It’s like God calling Samuel in the Bible, Samuel.

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (14:34):
Yeah, it was so specific, I just knew it. Okay, yes, I will take this. I took the phone, hello, Hey, we have been thinking do you want to work as a youth leader here in the church? And I was like, yeah, I’m going to think about it. You had a word from God, you knew he was calling. Let me pray about it a little bit. Yes, let me just pray. But I knew the answer of course. So then I worked at my home church for a short period of time. And then one year later or half year later, I went to Peru actually with a friend. We were on a short mission trip together, me and my friend. And in Peru, I once again heard that clear voice. And that was also very specific. I remember one night when I was laying in my bed, I just suddenly heard a voice say, when you come home, you are going to go to Bible college.

(15:29):
And he also told me what bible college it was. You will know when you get home why you are going to that specific Bible college. And in that bible college you will get what you call it. You will get direction for where and how you will serve me. So then I came to the Bible college. I met my then soon to be wife early on in the Bible college. And we started to date and see that we experienced, we felt that we should be together. And then at that bible college, in the beginning of it, I once again a third time heard the voice talk. And I remember the voice said that in the spring you will get an offer to start to work at the church and I want you to say yes, and then you will continue in that direction. So when the spring came, once again, that situation occurred.

(16:29):
So we got an offer, me and my then soon to be wife. We had an offer from a church in the north part of Sweden, far up north to come and work together with them quite broadly. We worked as some kind of youth workers, youth and kids workers, maybe you could call it, but also very evangelistic and also quite pioneering, but also preaching, teaching and everything. We had to do everything. So it was a great school actually to be there. So we was there for three years and then I felt, okay, this is what God has laid on my heart to work, to be in church, to be in ministry, continue as a pastor in different capacities. So then I went to study theology. So then we went to Stockholm in Sweden, the capital, I studied theology and leadership, and my wife studied to be an OB optician.

(17:25):
I think you can say. She had had that on her heart for a very long time to become that. So we was in Stockholm studying. And then I actually once again heard that voice. I’ve been hearing, of course God speaks all the time, but sometimes you can hear it more specifically, I believe. So I heard the voice when I was studying, say that the church where you are practicing now, they will ask you to become their senior pastor. And also once again, I want you to say yes. And I was like, I can’t be a senior pastor. Of course I can be on staff, I can be in a team, but can I lead the church? I had, it felt too big almost for me. I was only like 27 years old at that time or something. So I was like, oh no, that’s too big.

(18:16):
But then it came later on, a year later from that time because their pastor sadly became quite sick. The one I worked together with him in a small, I had a small percentage. I was paid a small percentage. So I worked at the church together with him, and then it became sick. And then they asked me, and then we just felt, yeah, God has prepared this, so let’s stay. So when I had studied, I continued in that church outside of Stockholm, a suburb of Stockholm. That’s like a long trajectory, but small steps where God has led. It

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:53):
Is beautiful to see how God has spoken to you at several key moments in your life and given you direction. Now, right now you and I are together in Asia, and I don’t want to mention exactly the particular country that we’re in, but we are here telling people about Jesus. Now I have a question for you. Do you think that pastors should regularly go on mission trips to different parts of the world? And what benefit would that be to a pastor?

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (19:31):
First, I just want to say definitely I think you should go if you have the possibility. And the church may have the economy to send you away sometimes once in a while, I think you should do it definitely. Because especially when you come from the West, and maybe if you come from Europe who is quite once again quite individualistic, quite secular, it’s a quite tough place sometimes to be spiritually, I think. But then to also come to other places and see other kinds of soils almost,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:08):
They have a different set of problems. Yeah,

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (20:10):
Yeah. Every part of the world have their problems, but sometimes it can be good to change the

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:16):
Problems

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (20:17):
To see something else and see how other kinds of churches are thinking to see how they are working, to see how they are reaching out to the neighborhood. And when you come to places like this, we are now in Asia or I have traveled to Africa several times and you see, you can see, especially maybe when I was in Africa, you can see their hunger for God and their hunger to pray, their hunger to seek things of the kingdom, their hunger to lay hands on the Sikh and pray for them and believe that something actually can happen that stirs something in your heart that you have to take home. I mean, you can’t leave it there. You have to take it home

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:04):
At the very least. It gives you some good stories to tell next time.

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (21:08):
Yeah, exactly. Definitely good stories to tell in your service. But I think, yeah, I always recommend, I had actually, when I was in Stockholm, I was the pastor of a satellite church and I had senior pastor working, leading me of course, and leading all the satellite church pastors. And he once said that you have to travel as a pastor from your country to other countries because you have to expand your world, otherwise you will become very narrow-minded and just thinking that you have all the answers and you know everything. So you have to, on a regular basis, expand your world. And I have carried that thought with me. If I have the chance to go away for a week or some days and you see something else and experience another culture, another church. And then I take it. And then I also love to travel, so it’s nice to travel, but I like that idea to expand the mind and expand the world and not become too narrow.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (22:20):
Now, there is a really wonderful testimony that has happened this week in this part of Asia. The Swedish Pentecostal church has actually been working for many years, and you brought with you one older gentleman from your church. He’s 80 years old, and he actually was here in this country working back in 1985.

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (22:46):
Yeah, somewhere

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (22:47):
Early eighties,

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (22:48):
84, 85 until I think 87 or something like that.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (22:52):
Yeah. And so at that time, the church in this nation was very small, and now it is growing. They have gone from only a handful of locations to now over 450 different congregations with over 50,000 believers just in this one network of churches. And it was so beautiful to see this 80 year old, great man of God, come back and see some of the fruit of what the seeds that were planted so many years ago.

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (23:32):
It was so beautiful. And he both were a part of the leadership seminar we had. And I mean, his English is not so well right now, but still sitting there and listening to him teach. And you think about how he planted that seed for like 35 years ago or something like that, more than 35 years ago, and he now gets to sit in front of young leaders in the north part of this country and teach them the word of God. I think it was so, it touched my heart, but then also to see him lead in the prayer of salvation yesterday at the campaign, it also touched me so much because you can see the faithfulness of God and you can see how he has walked with Jesus all his life, and he still has a passion for the kingdom of God. I mean, he’s seen a lot. He both have seen the good things and the ugly things in church and in the Christian life, and he’s seen everything of that. But still, he has a passion, a soft heart. A soft heart for God, and a soft heart for

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:43):
People. Now tell me his name. How do you pronounce it?

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (24:49):
Sorry, not the common name in the States.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:52):
Yeah. Well, it was so beautiful to see, and it really encourages me because it means that the seeds that we plant today, imagine what God will do 30, 40 years from now. Can you imagine being 80 years old and coming back to some of the places where you have sowing seed

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (25:11):
And

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (25:11):
Seeing a great harvest?

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (25:12):
Yeah. That’s a dream. That would be a dream.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (25:16):
Amen.

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (25:17):
Could be in that place.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (25:18):
Amen. Well, brother Samuel, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast. I appreciate it.

Pastor Samuel Jonsson (25:23):
Thank you. Thank you, Daniel. Good to meet you.

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The post Samuel Jonsson | Building the Local Church in Sweden appeared first on King Ministries | Evangelist Daniel King | Our Goal? Every Soul!.

Learn more about Giles Stevens: https://gilesstevens.com/

Learn more about the church GIles Stevens is part of: https://www.igrejavideira.com.br/

Buy the book about “The Eleventh Question”

Transcript: 

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. Today I have a very special guest with me, Giles Stevens from Great Britain now in the great nation of Brazil. Thank you for joining me today,

Giles Stevens (00:15):
Daniel, a joy to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:18):
Alright, you are passionate about evangelism. Tell me a little bit about your testimony and how God has brought you to where you are now.

Giles Stevens (00:27):
Well, I’m the first believer in my family. I like to say I got saved by mistake. I was looking in all the wrong places for life and for adventure. I’d rather thrown out the idea of Christianity as a young teenager because of my rather negative sort of traditional church experiences. And so I went to look for life and adventure outside of the church and that took me down all sorts of wild and paths and so forth. But thank God in his rich mercy, he sent along a couple of nice friends of friends who preached Christ to me and it kind of tricked me up, woke me up, brought me out of my lost state and showed me what life was all about, where told me the truth. And it just radically changed my life. And I think the fact that I’d come from a family where we didn’t know Christ personally and didn’t have that relationship and the fact that I suddenly realized there was an eternal realm and the decisions we make here during our lives affect where we spend our eternity.

(01:29):
I kept thinking to myself, well, how come nobody’s ever told me this before I could have died and if I’d have died, where would I be today? And so in a sense, I became a natural evangelist. I just thought there would be thousands, millions of people out there just like me who had no idea about these eternal consequences and destinations who’ve never heard. And so I just began. Once I was saved and knew the Lord, I just thought, boy, I’ve got to tell everybody else. So I preached at everything that moved. That’s how it started.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:56):
So you definitely have the call to be an evangelist on your life. And now you’re living in the nation of Brazil. How did you end up going to Brazil?

Giles Stevens (02:06):
Well, I married the girl.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:09):
Where’d you meet?

Giles Stevens (02:10):
Well, my wife, who is Brazilian as I’m indicating, she had won a scholarship to go and study in a Bible school in London, a place called the International Bible Institute of London, run by the quite well-known church, Kensington Temple. And so she was there and I was a full-time evangelist traveling around London at the time and other places with a big gospel tent and putting it up in downtown parks and using music and test me and other things to bring people in. And then preaching, there was no tomorrow to the crowds. And her church brought in the whole tent and all the equipment. I noted her in the kind of gang of young people. But being a classic Englishman, we have this slight reserve on us. So you shouldn’t really in decent society introduce yourself. So I saw this girl wanted the local pastor to introduce me and he didn’t. And so in the end, at the end of this mission, I went away having seen her thought, well she looks lovely and she’s full of the spirit and there’s something different about her. But I didn’t get introduced. But interestingly, a year later I was in a Reinhard Bonky fire conference in Birmingham and I saw her again. And thankfully by then I had more kingdom culture than British culture and I thought, I’m not going to miss my chance. Second time round,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:34):
God is the God of a second chance he brought her back.

Giles Stevens (03:37):
So I made a beeline for her.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:39):
Oh well that is a good place to meet your wife at a Reinhardt Bonky fire conference. I know you know that here is someone who loves Jesus.

Giles Stevens (03:47):
Well that’s right. People who go to those fire conferences, they have to have a certain are type of believer. They love the fire, they love evangelism. And so I like to say it’s a good place to find a partner better than the pub.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:01):
Alright, so you met her, you got married, how many years have you been married now? 23. Wow, congratulations. And she’s from Brazil, so you ended up going to Brazil with her?

Giles Stevens (04:14):
Yeah, we married in England. And so it was only really after our marriage that we went down to Brazil to meet the extended family. And we have completely different upbringings. And this is one of the challenges, but also one of the exciting things about our relationship is I was brought up, my father was a general in the British Army. I went to private schools, studied at Oxford, been traveling around the world ever since. My youth,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:43):
A classic British gentleman. Well,

Giles Stevens (04:47):
I trying to be, be gentle. Anyhow, Sylvia, in contrast, she was brought up out on a ranch in the back end of nowhere. I think you Americans, if you can picture in your mind the little house on the prairie, then you’ve pretty much got how Sylvia was raised. She’s the oldest of four girls. Her father and mother had this ranch literally miles and miles away from the big city. And they were brought up without electricity, without a car, without telephones. They would go to town once a week in a horse and cart to go to church and buy a few supplies. And she tells these incredible stories about how sometimes in rainy season to get to town you’d have to cross rivers and if if it had risen through the rain, they would have to sort of camp by the river until it had gone down so that they could cross over in their cart.

(05:39):
And so it was completely different upbringing. But as I’ve often said to young single people who are looking and praying about their married marriage partner, I’ve said, look, it’s not the past that counts. It’s the destination, your future that counts. Scripture says how can two walk unless they are agreed. And so when you’ve got a similar vision, a similar heart, a similar passion, then I believe that partnership can be a success. And thankfully, like we were talking about Sylvia being in a fire conference for evangelists, I knew that’s somebody with a similar vision. So it’s been a great, great marriage.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:16):
And what city are you living in? Brazil?

Giles Stevens (06:20):
Well, it’s a place that nobody knows and nobody can pronounce even if they know it well, certainly us foreigners. It’s called Goya. And it’s actually a large city, 1.5 million. So it’s big, but it’s kind of, it’s cowboy country. So people think when they think of Brazil, they either think Amazon or they think of Rio de Janeiro and the beaches kind of carnival football on the beaches. So we are more than a thousand kilometers inland, if you know where brazilia is, a couple of hours drive from there, right in the heart of Brazil below the Amazon and to the east of the Panol, which is the equivalent of our Everglades or your Everglades. And it’s a lovely region, beautiful countryside, jolly hot, but great place to be. Goana itself has no tourist attractions apart from an old zoo where there’s zebra that’s lost its stripes, there’s a lion who’s forgotten how to roar. And an old bear who strolls around. That’s our only tourist attraction. But Ang is not known for a tourist center. It’s known for something much more superior. And that is the move of God that’s happening there. It’s an extraordinary, it’s a city of revival.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:29):
Wow. Tell me about the revival.

Giles Stevens (07:32):
Well, I mean my experience mean in general. I can tell you about Brazil. I mean, it’s just extraordinary really what’s happened over the last 20, 30 years. I mean, Pentecostal, the Pentecostal missionaries came in and we’re here at an evangelist conference. So these sorts of conversations we’ve been having. But Swedish Pentecostals came in 112 years ago to the Amazon and started that sort of whole Holy Ghost move. But it didn’t really take off numerically until the last 20, 30 years. And so we’ve seen multitudes coming to the Lord in a general sense. I mean literally millions and millions, remembering that Brazil is a country of 230 million people. So that’s a big, big country. But I’ll give you more of the context with the network of churches with whom I’m based and principally work for, even though being an evangelist, I’m a kingdom man. So we started that church, which has now grown into a large network. About 24 years ago, I joined up with one of Sylvia’s youth pastors, my wife’s youth pastors, who had started this new church with a group of people, 70 people in a garage or on a veranda. And now that church is over 30,000 people.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:51):
And what’s the name of the church in port in

Giles Stevens (08:53):
Portuguese? It’s called Reja Viera, which translates directly as the Vine Church. The Vine Church. So we’ve now got over a thousand churches. And

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:01):
So there’s many branches all over Brazil.

Giles Stevens (09:03):
Yeah, I mean originally we just, the growth is so organic, the thing just kept growing and growing. And then before we knew it,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:15):
Well, if you name your church the vine, you figure it kind of spreads. We used to have a vine on our house and it would cover the entire thing. And so I think that’s a good name for a growing church. Yeah,

Giles Stevens (09:25):
I agree. I agree. I agree. It’s very biblical John 15. Of course. Yeah. But we did mean we were intentional as well. I mean some of the growth came just because people would get saved, become a member. And we have quite a strong church culture. So the people who sort of like what we teach and the way we do church, we’re a cell church. We have a lot of encounter weekends, and it’s a very busy active church full of young people. And so people who have been in that environment, if they get moved to another city for, I dunno, work or something else, they tend to, because of the culture they carry, they love having church at home as well as in a big building. So they’ll automatically start a group at home, a cell group. And so we just found these new groups growing up in other cities as well. And then we thought, well, we better send a trained pastor or a leader down there to help them. And suddenly we found that we had a network and then we did become a bit more intentional saying, well, let’s get a church into every one of the capitals of each state that 26 states. And then we thought, well, let’s get a church into every city with over 200,000 and so on and so on. And now we’ve become actually a growing international movement as well.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:31):
Wow, that’s amazing. And so tell me your position and what you do.

Giles Stevens (10:37):
Well, I kind of wear two hats really. I’m on the one hand an evangelist, and that’s really my principal.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:46):
The reason I’m asking this question is because a lot of evangelists who listen to the podcast are wondering how do they fit into the local church? Not every church makes a place for the evangelist, but I think an evangelist really needs to be part of a church and plugged in doing evangelism as part of a local church using their gifts. So how has that worked in your life? Well, I

Giles Stevens (11:11):
Think I really agree with you, and it’s not only good for the evangelist, it’s good for the church. It’s a two-way thing and it’s good for the family of the evangelists. You can’t just be out there on your own all the time. You should be in a community of believers. And in a sense, I mean I’ve always operated like this. My call as an evangelist is principally to my local church or to the group of local churches with whom I’m based. But obviously evangelists are kingdom people as we referred to earlier because we’re preaching the gospel to get people saved and to join a church. So we work with other churches as well. But for me, I think every evangelist needs to champion the local church. Christ is coming back for the church, it’s the church that will be raptured, the church is his bride.

(11:57):
And so the idea of having, even if you have a parachurch organization, you’re not building up that organization. You’re actually using your parachurch organization, your charity, your not-for-profit to build the local church. And I think pastors, they’ve had an uneasy relationship with evangelists over the years. They perhaps felt threatened by them or they feel that they might be pulling their flock away. But I think if evangelists express that and show that pastor I’m here to do a campaign so that your church grows so that new families come in, then obviously pastors are going to open up their hearts and their doors to them as well. So yeah, it’s always been a passion of mine. And I think also that coming back to the way we do church is that as Ephesians four says, the primary purpose of a five-fold ministry gift is to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry. So yes, I do campaigns, big campaigns, but actually I spend just as much time, if not more time training all the believers to be evangelists as well, all the believers to share their faith.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:05):
Yeah, that’s so much an important part of what the evangelist is called to do. So you said you wear two hats. One is the evangelist and are you saying the other one is the equipper or you have another hat? Yeah,

Giles Stevens (13:18):
Well yes, we might have a few hats here. We start breaking this down. But what I wanted to say was I do run an evangelistic association. It’s called the Great Mission, and that is to serve the body of Christ and the local churches at large. So I am an evangelist doing that within the Vine Church itself, I’m part of a presbytery or an apostolic team. I kind of serve as the director of evangelism. And so I train all the members of those churches. I prioritize that multiplying my own gifting and giving them tools and strategies so that they can be fruitful as well.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:58):
And so what does that training look like? Often in church, people want to do something for God and they have a heart to share their faith with others, but they don’t really know what to say or what to do. So in the Brazilian context of where you are, how do you equip believers to share their faith?

Giles Stevens (14:19):
Well, it’s great question. I really like that it’s right at the heart of what I feel like I’m called to do. I think firstly, local churches need to have a structure which allows them members to be sharing their faith and encourages them. It’s one of the reasons I really believe in cell groups where it’s not just now the pastor who’s doing the preaching because in cell groups, all the members of the church and that cell group can get involved in preaching and starting their own groups and so forth. So you are sharing what you’ve received, you are teaching what you’ve learned. And I think that produces healthy growth in the individual believer as well. If the believer is just receiving, then in a sense he grows lazy. If he’s just giving, then he’ll dry out. But you’ve got to be having both sides receiving and giving learning and teaching.

(15:08):
So we need to have church structures where that can happen. But as you rightly say, often people have a heart to win. Others, they just dunno how to start the conversation. They dunno what to say, they dunno how to do it. And so I think one of the things that the Lord has anointed me or gifted me to do is to create tools and strategies that help ’em to do that. And Daniel, you know how it is the evangelist as a character, one of the characteristics, the traits of an evangelist normally is that he’s quite extroverted. He preaches with ease. He burns all the time to share the gospel. And that’s great, but not all believers are like that. Like I say, a genuine believer, somebody who’s born again has a new nature, they’re going to have a heart to see others saved. Of course we are, but they perhaps just dunno how to take that step.

(16:02):
And so one of the things I’ve done is produce tools or materials that help people to share. Back in 2008 now I launched, or 2007 I launched a strategy called the 11th Question, a little booklet I’d spent some time with Reinhard, actually this is an interesting story. And he’d been down to us, he’d come and visited and preached in our conference and he was talking about in those days, I think his vision was to win 50 million people for Christ. Now we were really, really growing. We were really growing. I mean our churches were exploding, but when he started talking about the millions, it kind of makes you feel like you’re doing nothing in comparison. And I remember just lying on my bed after he’d been there and I’m just wrestling it out with the Lord. I’m thinking, Lord, I’m excited about winning 5,000 and he’s winning 50 million.

(16:53):
I said, I’ve got the same Bible as him, the same spirit as him. There’s something wrong here. And I felt like the Lord said to me, Giles, it’s one thing to have a vision, it’s another thing to have a strategy. I think we all tend to have a vision of winning our generation for Christ or something like that. But you’ve got to go beyond the vision and actually have a strategy in place that then fulfills the vision. And it was clear that Reinhard had his strategy of big crusades and all this kind of stuff. So I prayed that through and I felt like the Lord said to me to do two things, write a book for believers to equip them to share their faith, but also write a little booklet for unbelievers so that they can hear about Christ in a dynamic way. And I mean, if you think about it as well, you go to a Christian book shop, there’s pretty much nothing written for the unbeliever.

(17:44):
It’s all for the believer. And that’s got to be wrong because we are the salt and the light of this earth. So anyhow, I wrote this booklet called The 11th Question, A Spiritual Self-Evaluation Test. There are 11 questions, you have to answer those questions. The 11th is the most important, and the way you answer the 11th will determine your future. And what I did, it’s a little booklet with these 11th questions in, and we equip believers to share those 11 questions with friends. Now what happened was, this is back in 2007, I equipped 10,000 believers to do this test with seven people over the course of one month. So we evangelized 70,000 people in one month and we baptized at the end of it, 3000 on a day. So that was the beginning of this.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:29):
That’s like the day of Pentecost, 3000 people getting saved in one day.

Giles Stevens (18:33):
Well, we’ve gone beyond that. I then launched more recently another little booklet called Seven Good Things that maybe you Don’t know, same kind of idea. Because remember what I’m doing is I’m helping believers witness to their friends, to their neighbors, to their colleagues. So it’s not me doing the big preach. I mean, I do do the crusades and things, but this is getting the body to do it.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:55):
So let’s talk about the 11th question. What are some of those questions that people are trained to ask?

Giles Stevens (19:00):
You have to buy the

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:00):
Book to find out now is it on Amazon? Yeah, it’s on Amazon. We’ll put a link on the podcast so people can find the book The 11th question. But tell me some of the questions. No, I won’t.

Giles Stevens (19:12):
I

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:13):
Really won’t. The thing is,

Giles Stevens (19:15):
Like I say,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:15):
Because otherwise it

Giles Stevens (19:16):
Takes the kind of thunder out of it.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:18):
I mean, I’ve got a book, but I only got three questions in my book. You’re much more complex money. I just get them there much quicker. I’ll tell you some

Giles Stevens (19:25):
About my last one called The Seven Good Things. And that’s been really effective, which we launched just before the pandemic. And interestingly, when the quarantine came for us evangelists, most of us turned like tigers in a cage. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We love being out there doing crusades. You can’t have big gatherings. And I just was praying about, I just thought, Lord, what do we do? I just refuse to let not just kind of regulations shut me down, but also that kind of spirit of fear that was in the air, that everybody

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:56):
Was afraid

Giles Stevens (19:57):
That they were going to die and so forth. And I felt that classic story of David and Goliath. Saul ran from the Giant, but David ran at The Giant and I just thought, I’ve got to run at this thing. I’ve got to do something sort of bold and courageous at a time like this. And so I created a network on WhatsApp and for a hundred days I challenged this big network, thousands of young people to share their faith with one person every day for a hundred days. And I gave them different things to do. But one of the things was this booklet called Seven Good Things that Maybe You don’t know. And they would share these messages. And so some of those things, I’ll tell you those no matter who you are, you are much loved another one. No matter what you’ve done, there’s forgiveness available. I’m a real good news preach. I believe that Jesus Christ came as a friend of sinners to tell them the good news that their sins had been forgiven through his blood and by the

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:56):
Cross. And so over the course of those a hundred days, what were some of the miracles that you saw? Well,

Giles Stevens (21:01):
I mean the biggest miracle as we evangelists will say, is the miracle of salvation. And so actually at the end, it was in October, beginning of October during the pandemic, we baptized 10,000 people in a day.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:12):
Wow, that’s amazing.

Giles Stevens (21:14):
And that was in swimming pools and lakes and rivers and seas. Anywhere there was water because we couldn’t gather them together. We had this online meeting through YouTube and so forth, and all the different churches and places, the cities that were holding these events were baptizing. So we ran at the Giant.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:32):
Wow, what a miracle. Let’s talk about the spiritual atmosphere in Brazil. What do you see God doing in the nation of Brazil?

Giles Stevens (21:41):
Yeah, I mean we really have to talk about that because again, the tendency when we think about church growth and winning souls is to immediately go to strategy. But I think it was moody or one of these guys said, it’s not so much how you present the gospel, just make sure you present it hot. It’s got to be anointed, it’s got to be full of fire and life. And really, if you’re full of fire and life, it doesn’t really matter what sort of strategy you use. I mean, I teach young people these days. I say, look, be filled with the Holy Spirit and then do whatever you like because if you’re filled with the Holy Spirit, life is going to flow through you. So we work, how can I say? We’re very conscious, I suppose, as church leaders of creating spiritual atmosphere, culture, a revival culture.

(22:30):
And so I almost want to talk in tongues. So difficult to put into words this, but you’ve got to have that atmosphere where people are just going after God, where the presence of God is liberated and manifesting the whole time, and a fire will naturally go out unless it’s fed. And so we see that as well. It’s very easy for a move of God to stop very easy unless you make a personal decision. I think this is one of the roles of a church leader. You make a decision that your meetings, your church, whatever you do is you don’t accept anything but a manifestation of the presence of God. Whether it’s in a prayer meeting, a Sunday church, a crusade, an encounter weekend. We are going to pray to have that presence. We’re going to preach. Until we get that presence, it just becomes our life source. We need the living water. Because of that, there’s life manifesting. And of course growth comes because of life. Most people go after growth. I always say, no, no, go after the spiritual atmosphere and growth will be the result.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (23:37):
Wow. I know you’re a very proud father. Your son is at Oral Roberts University right now. My friend Rubens Konya took him over to Ethiopia for a crusade. And so God doesn’t just call individuals, he calls families. Talk to me about balancing family life and ministry life.

Giles Stevens (24:00):
Well, yeah, I mean that’s really interesting. Again, I’m really enjoying your questions, Daniel. We are a missionary family. I’ve got four children. Titus is the oldest, so 21, 19, 18, and 15 little girl at 15. And so let me say it like this. Sometimes you hear Christians say, God, first, family second, ministry third or those kinds of things. But I’ve never seen it like that. For me, it’s all one thing. So it’s not just about Daddy Giles being the minister and everybody else following me. No, we’re a ministry family, we’re a family of priests. We are all in this together. And so also for us, church isn’t a building, church is a body of Christ. And so we’re just as much in church at home as a family as we are if we’re in a pulpit somewhere. And I think that atmosphere and that way of life has just meant that what the gift and the call of God on my life has just been naturally spontaneously shared with the children.

(25:03):
And so they are all involved in the ministry with me. I mean, I was listening to a message that Titus preached the other day, and I had to post it on a pastor’s group. I just had to, on a WhatsApp group that I’m part of, I said, just listen to this coming from a 20 year old boy. Because what he preaches in this message, I think is wiser and more anointed than most ministers I’m hearing who’ve been in the ministry for years. And I don’t say that as a proud father. I’m just trying to say that when you’re brought up in revival and it’s just in you from the get-go, then it just sort of gushes out, doesn’t it? And so it’s just been a joy. Obviously, they’ve all got slightly different and giftings and so forth, but all of them are just full of the Holy Ghost. That’s great.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (25:52):
That’s awesome. What advice would you give to a young evangelist who really wants to be used by God?

Giles Stevens (26:00):
Well, yeah, really good question. Again, boy, you’ve done this before, haven’t you?

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (26:06):
You’re my 290th interview on evangelism. Fine. Yeah. Have I got anything new to say? No, it’s good. I mean, it’s so neat seeing how God uses different people, different personalities. There’s so many different methods of evangelism, but God is so wonderful. He uses all of us. Yeah, yeah. I mean

Giles Stevens (26:25):
Advice to a young evangelist is if it burns in your heart, preach it. I started out pretty shortly after I got saved. I remember reading the scripture that Saul, who became the Apostle Paul, he preached Christ immediately. The scripture says in the synagogues immediately after his conversion. So he didn’t hang around to start sharing about Christ. And I think when you’re faithful with the little, God will give you much. And so you can see how Paul’s revelation just grows and grows and grows. He was constantly giving out what he’d received. So I think there’s a principle there. If you’ve been anointed, to be honest, if you’ve got saved, start talking about it, start testifying. At least that’s what we’re empowered to do by the Holy Spirit. But I think really, if you’ve got a call to the full-time ministry and you dream of the multitude, so to speak, I think probably the best thing you can do is something rather like Elijah did with Elijah, serve a man of God, a more experienced evangelist.

(27:25):
Because there’s a certain amount you’re going to learn in the classroom, and obviously you’re going to learn through your own relationship with the Lord principally and the study of the scripture. But so much is transferred in that discipleship process when you’re actually under the authority and you’re serving a man of God who’s already doing it. There’s just lessons there that you wouldn’t get anywhere else. And I again like to teach on that particular story in the Old Testament that scripture gives detail and it says that Elisha, he poured water on the hands of Elijah. And I read that and I thought, that’s really strange that it would say that, but it’s clear that the detail is in the scripture, I think, to show us that if he was doing the menial tasks of just even helping Elijah Elijah wash his hands before dinner, that really meant that he was disposed to serve his master in any possible way that he could be helpful.

(28:21):
Remembering that, of course, Elisha was a rich young farmer, and so he was the rich young ruler, let’s say, who gave up everything unlike the rich young ruler who Christ called and went away. So he served this rather strange prophet. He saw the anointing of God upon him. So if you’re a young guy, then you kind of need to let go of sometimes of your natural world and your natural relationships and get around somebody who’s really anointed, but serve them in practical and menial ways. And you see, this is the glory of this revelation is that as Elijah poured water on the hands of Elijah, what he didn’t realize perhaps at the time was that Elijah was pouring spiritual water upon the head of

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (29:08):
Elijah. I love that story. And then one of the most tragic stories in the Bible is the next one of Gaze who was called by God, I think, to be the next prophet of Israel, but failed his test, and he was serving Elisha, but then for a little bit of money in a few sets of clothes, he gave up his anointing in his bad trade dollars because he didn’t know that being a servant is just a stepping to the destiny that God has for you.

Giles Stevens (29:43):
Yeah. Sold himself out. Oh, dear.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (29:46):
Tragic. I’m going to put a link to your book on the podcast, but do you have a website, a way that people can connect with you?

Giles Stevens (29:59):
Yeah. The ministry that I run, the evangelistic ministry I run is called The Great Mission. Put a.org on the end of that, and you’ll find us or Giles Stevens, old English name, G i l e s, Giles Stevens with a v.com. You can find me there and you’ll find materials. Like I said, my heart is very much to equip and empower others. I’ve often said, what’s best? One guy speaking to a thousand or a thousand preachers speaking to their multitude. So I’m very much about helping not just teach, but giving other young evangelists and teachers and preachers and pastors sermons to preach and strategies to use so that you can be fruitful in your own life.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (30:42):
My passion. Well, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast. I appreciate

Giles Stevens (30:46):
It. Daniel, it’s a joy. Thank you for receiving Titus when he’s been to help you as well and your crusades, and I

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (30:52):
Hope we can, he’s a blessing. Hope

Giles Stevens (30:53):
We can do more together.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (30:54):
Thank

Giles Stevens (30:54):
You. Bless you.

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The post Giles Stevens | Church Multiplication in Brazil appeared first on King Ministries | Evangelist Daniel King | Our Goal? Every Soul!.

Learn More About Jesus at the Door: https://jesusatthedoor.com/

Transcript:

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. Today I have a very special guest with me, Scott McNamara. Thank you so much for joining me on the Evangelism Podcast.

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (00:10):
Thank you, Daniel. Great to be here.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:12):
So your ministry is called Jesus at the Door, and you specialize in taking Jesus to the door of every person’s heart. Tell me a little bit about yourself and how your ministry got started.

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (00:26):
Yeah, so Jesus at the door, this is kind of what it looks like. It’s framed around the picture of Jesus knocking on one side with the handle on the inside of the door. And then on the back we have nine imagery laden PowerPoints that articulate succinctly the message of the gospel. So really on one side is the image and the other side is the message. It’s a real simple way of presenting the gospel. I got into this, I guess accidentally. I was a musician, came to the Lord, wanted to continue to be a musician, and the Holy Spirit said, no, I have other plans for you. I want you to be an evangelist. And I wrestled with the Lord akin to Jacob, wrestling with the angel of the Lord, and he came away blessed with a hip replacement. I kind of feel that way. I came away blessed with Jesus at the door and also a hip replacement.

(01:08):
I realized that to be hip is to be holy, humility, integrity, and purity. The Lord began to speak to me about the hipness of my heart to say, only with a pure heart will you really see the things that I want you to see working through you. So yeah, I guess the Lord began to do surgery in me in terms of having a heart that ss to be humble, having purity inside of my heart. So that was the building blocks for becoming an evangelist and then becoming an evangelist. I guess it was just accidental. I just talked to everybody that moved about Jesus and somebody told me there’s a title for that. It’s called an Evangelist, and my pastor employed me to be an evangelist in 2014. He told me to stand on the street corner every day, all day. And I did that for three years.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:50):
And where was

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (01:51):
That? That’s in Northern Ireland.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:52):
Northern Ireland. Well, and so you stood there, you’re talking to people as they’re walking by and from all of your conversations you came up with some really great lines and ways of presenting the gospel to people. Talk to me how that process went.

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (02:09):
Kind of. I mean, I can’t really take credit for it if I’m honest. I was sharing with people as best as I could, but the Holy Spirit would drop phrases into my heart and the phrases he dropped were the phrases that compiled Jesus at the door. So I don’t think I can take credit for it. I was more of a conduit than a creator, but I just received what the Lord gave me and I would write them down in my phone as the person walked away. And that’s what, over a number of months, we ended up with this and then it kind of grew legs and run around the world. Really

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:40):
Pretend that I’m someone that you’re talking to on the street corner and you’re using this tool in order to tell me about, just kind of walk me through how you would do it and how you would train someone to use this tool.

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (02:52):
Yeah, I will do so. Obviously, evangelism is partnership and partnership is power. If we bring the partnership, he the power. So everything we do in Jesus at the door is in partnership with the Holy Spirit. I don’t believe you can do evangelism without partnership, but it is very significant for us to understand that this is not just some kind of scripture reading. This is an invitation into partnership. That’s kind of how I view it, because the Lord gave it. So with me going through this, I’m already locking in with the spirit, and that’s the most beautiful thing about it. So I would approach you, I’d say, excuse me, if you’re on the street, excuse me, sir, can ask you a quick question. Now if you say to me, no, I’m good, then I don’t believe he’s drawing you, John 6 44. Nobody can come unless the father draws them. I’m saying, Lord, you are my evangelism partner. Who are you drawing? So even down to that detail, I

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:41):
Let the Lord show. So you’re not pestering people, you’re giving an invitation, and then if they respond, then you’re ready to start to talk to

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (03:47):
Them. Yeah, yeah. Because important that we don’t possess, we partner but don’t possess. So I’m going to just partner and say, Lord, where are you going? So if you agree to allow me to talk to you, I would say, have you seen this picture before? Do you pray is what I would ask you.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:01):
I pray sometimes. I don’t know if I’ve seen this

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (04:04):
Picture. You don’t recognize it. No. So this is Jesus knocking at the door of your heart. The handles on the inside only you can let him in. Now lots of people pray, praying can be like talking through the door. He’s there somewhere, but you don’t know him personally. And then I’m going to pause because for the born again believer, if I challenge you on the street as you and me as me, you would probably bring some rebuttal there. You’d say, well, I do know Jesus personally, so I’m going to let that simmer. But for the individual who doesn’t know Jesus, that’s going to sit and they’re going to think, man, I don’t know him. So there’s a couple of moments where they’re born. Again, believer can out themselves as it were, and say, I do know Christ. And that would be one of them. So then I would say, visualize wearing a backpack. If we filled it with all of your sin, would it be heavy?

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:47):
Yeah, it

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (04:49):
Would. There’d be something in there. And that represents your debt with God. It stops you having a relationship with him. So if you owed the bank a million dollars and I gave you a check for that amount and you gave it to the bank, what would happen to your debt?

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:04):
They paid off.

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (05:04):
It’d be paid off. It’d be clear. Huh? That would be a good day for you. That’s what Jesus did when he died on the cross. He wrote your check, signed in his blood with your name on it. What is your name, sir? Daniel. Daniel. So he wrote you that Check Daniel in his blood, then he rose again, and today he’s standing at the door of your heart wanting you to cash it. If Jesus were here right now, would you let him in?

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:26):
Yeah. If he showed up.

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (05:28):
If you knew it was him. Yeah. So if we took a walk outside, can you see the wind? Can you visibly see the wind?

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:34):
No. You can’t see the

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (05:35):
Wind. You can’t see it, but you can feel it, right? So like the wind, I believe Jesus is here right now. Could I pray for you to feel his presence?

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:42):
Sure.

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (05:42):
Yeah. Can I put my hand on your shoulder? Sure. Which obviously we don’t need the Holy Spirit, don’t need your hand. But I’m a tactile guy. So Lord, I pray for Daniel right now by the power of your Holy Spirit. Would you touch his heart? Let him feel your presence. Let him know you’re here. Let him know you are real. Change the atmosphere as he sits here and reveal how personal of a God you are, how personal of a father you are. You love him like a son and Him reveal you loved him in this moment, in Jesus’ name. Then I would ask you, what did you feel when I prayed for you? What did you feel?

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:10):
Well, peace.

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (06:12):
Peace. Come on. Amen. And Jesus was the prince of peace as we read in the Book of Eyes Eye. So what we’re doing is in essence we’re saying, if Jesus were here, would you let him in? And they’re saying, yeah, and then we have to prove that Jesus is here, but we can’t prove that, but the Holy Spirit can. So we give all control so that he can take full control and let the Holy Spirit do what he does best, which is shine. So after that moment, do you believe he’s here? What did you feel? Yeah. Okay, great. The last thing, now you’re on a road of life going this direction without Jesus, you need to turn from your sin, change direction and follow him. My question, I want to ask you and think before you answer, do you want to follow Him?

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:53):
Yes

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (06:54):
You do. Praise God. So the Bible says invite him with your mouth, mean it in your heart. So just echo this prayer with me. Just say, Jesus, Jesus, forgive me for my sins.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:02):
Forgive me for my sins. I

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (07:03):
Open the door of my heart.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:04):
I open the door of my

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (07:05):
Heart. I make you Lord of my

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:06):
Life. I make you the Lord of my life.

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (07:07):
Fill me with your spirit. Fill

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:09):
Me with your spirit. Amen.

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (07:10):
Amen. Amen. So our prayer, we call it repent, believe, received just a simple way that we break down that prayer. Now after this is why I believe Jesus at the door is one of the most exciting evangelistic techniques on the planet. Because the Holy Spirit has not only given me a gospel presentation that is so easy and works with anybody, but he’s given me the part that happens next, the part that you do next. So Rahar, who’s a great inspiration in all of our lives, evangelist Bonnke said, he talked about the ABCs of evangelism as in the simple gospel, simple nuts and bolts of the gospel. I took that, sat with it, and the Holy Spirit fleshed it out for me. The A is the acceptance, and C is church, but B is the bridge. And there’s a lot of people who are saying amen on the acceptance, but they’re not coming to church and they’re not coming anywhere after because we have a great chasm, because we have no bridge, that we have nothing to walk them across.

(08:04):
So the Holy Spirit began to give me a bridge, a training materials. We have another card that is like this, that I train my team in how we access this bridge. Quick example, after you say amen, a lot of people will say, here’s a church card, let me send you a text or whatever. But in that moment, right, there is a very special moment like akin to the golden hour moment, the magic hour when the sun’s coming down that last hour, it’s a holy moment. It’s a moment where the sun is warmest to the horizon. It’s closest to the horizon. Your new believer, the sun, Jesus is warmer and closer than he’s ever been probably in their life. And we move past that moment quickly instead of hitting the pause. So what I’m going to do, I’m going to pause there. I’m going to say, sir, now you said you want to follow Jesus.

(08:48):
The last thing you said is you want to follow Jesus. You can’t follow somebody if you don’t move and you don’t follow with your words, you follow your feet. So you need to put faith to your feet and walk it out. If you can’t walk it out, don’t talk it out because talk is cheap. Actions speak louder than words. And I’ll just use some phrases like this, which ultimately what I’m doing is flipping the script and saying that instead of this mentality of come to my church, come hang out with me, can be my friend, it’s about you. Now, you said you want to do this. You said that this is the life you said you want to follow. Let me help you do what you said you want to do. And that really, really helps creating a bridge for these individuals to walk across. And we do this through Jesus at the Door app where we have access to send the person. Just real quick, I’ll show you. So here we have,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:30):
Okay, so this is Jesus at the Door app, which is free. So how would you find it? You would go to the Apple app store,

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (09:36):
Go to the app store, type in Google, Jesus at the door, type in Jesus, Jesus at the door. And literally you just download that, it’s free and you can click onto, we have an equipping card and a follow-up card on the follow-up card we have. When this thing gets geofenced in a community, if we have a partner church there, right here with Nations, we can click on that button of the partner church, and we have a custom made follow-up card at a drop of a button we can send to a brand new believer that connects them to that local church. Now, what’s really important about this is the equity that I have with you is pretty much non-existent. You didn’t accept the Lord because I’m a nice guy. You accepted the Lord because through this picture, the Holy Spirit enlightened your soul to accept him.

(10:13):
So the equity lies here, not here. And what we’re trying to do is use equity. We don’t have be my friend, come hang out with me. We don’t have that, but this has it. So as soon as you say Amen, I say, I want to send you a picture of this image so you can remember the day you accepted Jesus. And then I send you, I get your name and number in front of you, and I send this image to you, but like a carrot with a stick hanging on the end of that stick is the carrot. And that’s what we want them to really have. And that’s all the information for the local church. And then we begin our follow-up process that way.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:43):
Wow. So this app is really valuable and people can go download it for free,

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (10:47):
Download it for free,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:48):
And then they can have access to the script, to the picture. They can use it on their phone. And I think this is brilliant. Everyone has their phone everywhere they go. And so maybe you’re in a line at a coffee shop and you feel prompted to share the gospel somewhere. You can pull it out and say, Hey, have you seen this picture before? Definitely. And the picture creates curiosity. So people start looking at it and then you can start the conversation. Amen.

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (11:10):
And a picture paints a thousand words here. And we have, if you go to a equipping card and the globe in the top right corner, we have multiple languages in many countries what individuals can use. We now have users in 129 nations utilizing this app with accounts. If you go to new Believer’s info, you’ll store the name and the number and the date of your last salvation, it will log it right here and it’ll log all of them in date form. And then if you go to Jad stories, it drops a pin of an apple in the location with accepted Christ. And we have pretty much most continents around the world, apples that have been dropped by individuals.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:45):
And so you’re the evangelism director here at Nation’s Church in Orlando, Florida, pastored by Daniel Kalinda from Christ for All Nations. And so talk to me about what you’re doing here in the church to activate people for evangelism.

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (12:01):
So what we do is we run trainings where all the everyday individuals, I mean our tagline is equipping everyday believers to win everyday people. That’s what Jesus the door is about. We’re not just equipping evangelists, we’re equipping Starbucks workers, single moms, doctors, bankers, dentists so that they can go back into their sphere of influence. This is not a hard presentation to begin with. It’s not offensive. It’s a picture that’s very anointed. This image was illustrated by a Manny woman and Oscar last year. This year the Oscars, Charlie MCee won an Oscar for the best animated story. He illustrated this image, very famous artist, people. We’ve seen people cry and say things like, I saw that in a dream and get saved just from looking at the picture. So what we do here is we train everyday believers in our church and then we send them back into their sphere of influence to be fruitful. And we have a new believer group. So when people get saved, we don’t just obviously leave them there, we invite them into our new believers groups. And in those new believer groups, we filter those people through into the Sunday service where we have a reserve section on a Sunday morning at Nations Church for all these new converts to come in and feel like part of the family.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:07):
And then you also go and travel to other churches, help train them in evangelism. And you have teams that have been trained in Jesus at the door and they go and teach other people how to get involved. So what does that look like if you go into a church and do a training?

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (13:23):
Yeah, so I would go in on a, we call it evangelism made easy weekend. I’ll go on a Saturday and we do an all day training on a Saturday that involves classroom training, involves role play. So the individuals get a chance to go through it to try it. And then we take ’em onto the streets for a couple of hours, do a breakout session. We come back, we have glory stories, share what the Lord did and people’s lives. And then I preach on the Sunday morning at the church as well. So that’s kind of like the evangelism made easy weekend.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:49):
And if someone wants to connect with your ministry, find out more about you, maybe download the card or support your ministry, maybe invite you to come to their church. What’s your website?

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (14:00):
So jesus@thedoor.com is the website. And then you can get us on Instagram, Jesus at the door, Facebook, we have a YouTube channel with many training videos just to Jesus at the door. Again, many resources available there.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:13):
And what would you say to someone who they feel like they know they should witness, but they’ve never really gone out there and actually talked to someone. How would you encourage them to take a step of faith and to actually start up a conversation?

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (14:28):
Well, first of all, I would look below the hood or look at the root level. Why should we share you? Maybe you hear evangelist saying, go and share. Go and share. But the person hasn’t really captured the heart of why should I share? Well, Jesus, when he gave the great commission, he didn’t give it to evangelists for starters, he gave it to disciples. So every disciple has been mandated, commissioned, and to share the gospel and to make disciples not just share the gospel, but to make disciples. So this is something that we all have to do and one day we’re going to look our Lord in the eye and we’re going to have to give account for the talents and how we stewarded that which he gave us. So Jesus at the door is the way that I’ve seen in my life the easiest way that is the most anointed, that you can share the gospel in a matter of minutes.

(15:13):
I’ve seen children who’ve read this thing and people have started crying and got saved. When my boy, my son was seven, he read this to a family of four. The mom was covered in tattoos. He got two steps down. The man started crying and my seven year old son led them all to the Lord. I baptized free of that family on the same day. I baptized my son in a parking lot from a seven year old boy shaking and nervous and whispering this card, but it was the power of the Holy Spirit that he released and that’s

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:41):
What happened. And so if God can use a seven year old, he can use anyone. Amen. What if someone that you’re talking to with the card is more antagonistic than I was? I was pretty acceptance saying yes. But some people want to get into argument or they want to start discussing more philosophically some of the different questions. How do you bring them back to the gospel?

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (16:01):
So first of all, it’s key to note that Jesus does what we call a reaping tool. Now, when I first entered onto those streets of Northern Ireland, I didn’t know what I was doing. I wouldn’t have called myself an evangelist. But the Holy Spirit spoke to me within the first two weeks. He said, imagine all these people are like apples on a tree. So I did that. I saw all these people walking around. He said, when you share, I’ll shake. And I had a revelation of what evangelism was. Up until that point, I thought it was about how good or bad or able I was, but the law was showing me. It was about how available I was willing to make myself. You see, some apples will fall, some will move a little and some won’t move at all. My job is not to make those apples fall or not. All I have to do is be willing to catch them when they fall. We’re all priceless apples that one day we were apples on a tree until somebody caught us. And the Lord is shaking people’s lives. And all he asked us to do, like the apostle Paul told Timothy, preach the gospel in season and out of season. So all we need to do is be willing to share faithfully. And I believe the Lord will do miracles in that way.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:01):
Amen. Well, I think it’s absolutely brilliant what God has given you, and it’s such an important tool for sharing the gospel. I think it’s a great way to start out for someone to just have the bullets. If you have something in your hand that you can read, even if you forget, you can look down and read it and go through the pictures with people. I think it’s a very powerful tool for people. And so if you’re listening and you want to be used by God, especially in personal witnessing going out, I encourage you to go find Jesus at the door, download it to your phone, get the app, go to the website, get the cards, and use them to lead people to Jesus. Amen. Thank you so much for being on the Evangelism podcast.

Scott McNamara | Jesus at the Door (17:45):
Thank you, sir. Thank you for having me.

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Transcript: 

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus Today. I have a very special guest with me, TTom Miyashiro.

Tom Miyashiro (00:11):
You got it

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:12):
From a great ministry on the East coast of the United States called Faith to Faith. That’s it. Thank you so much for joining me on the Evangelism Podcast. It’s a

Tom Miyashiro (00:21):
Lot of fun to be here in Africa.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:23):
Yeah, we are here together in Kenya, Africa, in the city of Murang’a. We have been here for several days already, and today is the, the third day of the festival. We had a little bit of rain yesterday and so we were a little disappointed with the size of the crowd. But today the sun is out, the sun is shining, and they’ve just started the festival. They just sent us a picture. It looks like there’s already a lot of people there and you’re giving, and as soon as we’re get done with this tonight, we’re gonna go over there and

Tom Miyashiro (00:57):
The gospel and you’re gonna, you’re gonna rip it up tonight, right? Yeah.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:59):
You’re the guy. Absolutely Awesome. Amen. Alright, so let’s let’s talk a little bit about Faith to Faith. Sure. Tell me about the ministry. Who are you, what do you guys do?

Tom Miyashiro (01:09):
Faith to Faith is 22 years old. I started it when I was 19 and we like to say we’re spreading the gospel through youth centered, community-based outreach and partnership with the church. So what does that mean? It means for a good chunk of the last 20 years, I didn’t travel that much. I worked in one community as a community evangelist, and I tried to work with the same group of pastors over and over and over again. So it’s only been recently that I’ve come further out from that space. So

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:46):
Which community have you focused on over these years?

Tom Miyashiro (01:50):
Well I’m from the New England States. Well, I’m from Connecticut, which is one of the six New England states. But in recent years there’s been some good data to suggest that New England is one of the least reached places in our country. And so as an evangelist it just makes sense to just dig my heels in and try and be part of the solution to the sliding decline in Christianity in the Northeast.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:18):
So you’re really on a mission field there. And what attitudes do you run into when you start talking about the gospel?

Tom Miyashiro (02:29):
Well, the Northeast is pretty liberal. I, I would say that Connecticut specifically is fiscally conservative and socially incredibly liberal. So so it is the people, you know, in some ways feel conservative and New Englanders tend to be closed. It’s not always been known as the friendliest of places. And we speak the language of sarcasm as our dialect.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:58):
No, <laugh> are you sure?

Tom Miyashiro (03:01):
So so it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, the average size church in New England is between 50 and 150 people. Now, there’s exceptions to the rules. Major cities like Boston and Greater New York, some, some parts of Connecticut are considered part of Greater New York, which we consider them the exception to the rule. But a lot of pastors in the Northeast are bi-vocational. They have to work two jobs, not unlike Old England. You know, there’s a lot of similarities in the way that you do ministry there. Very, it can be very challenging.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:36):
And so how have you as an evangelist come alongside some of the local pastors and local churches and help to strengthen then and then help them to reach out to their communities?

Tom Miyashiro (03:50):
Wellearly in faith to Faith, I was a missionary to England and I found that if there was any more, anywhere more difficult than living in New England, it would be that Old England. So I worked there and and did ministry there and did some education there and learned about how the UK has adjusted itself to not the Christian Church not really being valued or appreciated or relevant to culture. And actually one of the guys on this mission, Ben Jack, he’s part of that story and the organization he works for kind of saw the way the, the missions community was innovating to make Christianity relevant again to the next generation. And I thought, wow, if we could bring some of these ideas back to the United States, that would be really good for, for us. So I started importing as many of these ideas into the US as I could particularly to do with public schools ministry because in America we have the separation of church and state.

(05:02):
In England, the church and state is one, so they can do a whole lot of stuff in schools. Now granted you can’t proselytize in same as America, but you could actually tell the whole Christian story in school. It’s not a problem. So you could do quite a lot there. When we come back into the US context, you know, we left England to have religious freedom and yet I can’t talk about Jesus in school. It doesn’t make much sense. But we had to find ways to creatively engineer schools programming so we could still be there and still have relationships with students whilst finding a way to get the gospel to them. So it took, instead of doing things in one swift movement, we had to create steps, next steps, lots of next steps to like, create pathways for young people to engage us in school and out of school. This is the bulk of my career doing that. So

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:53):
Yeah, now sometimes it’s not easy to stay faithful to the calling of an evangelist. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And yesterday you and I were talking about a very tragic situation mm-hmm. <Affirmative> in the early years of your ministry. Sure. Tell me about your wife going to heaven and what that was like going through that and, and how you dealt with that. Yeah. And, and then what God has brought you through and into now.

Tom Miyashiro (06:22):
Yeah. So Amy was from England and we got married young 2001. And I started the ministry very shortly after us coming together. And and I followed her back to England. So that’s kind of the early years when we moved back to the United States, it wasn’t very long after that that she was diagnosed with a pretty rare form of brain cancer and speeding through, ’cause she was sick for four years, speeding through kind of the early trauma of all of that. When we landed back home in Connecticut, the local church heard about our story and, and I got to see the best side of the church for in one in this case, and churches in the county that I lived like within a radius of our house. As they heard about the story, everybody just started stepping up and helping us. And I felt very indebted and very very thankful for all those leaders. And I didn’t cheat on her. I didn’t run out and divorce her. Like I stayed with her till the end. It wasn’t,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:34):
And it was very difficult because

Tom Miyashiro (07:35):
It was very difficult.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:37):
She’s laying there in your house.

Tom Miyashiro (07:39):
Yep. four years of brain cancer, which means 11 brain surgeries, radiation, chemotherapy experimental treatments, sometimes simultaneously. So I was a full-time carer as well as trying to do evangelism in the community. And the community didn’t really know how to help us specifically. So in some ways faith to faith kind of bolstered itself up because people could see they could support me in that and that was helping her. And so that’s kind of when Faith to Faith got rooted and probably would’ve taken me a lifetime to build those relationships in a different, like, just in a natural kind of way. It aged my relationships with church leaders in a, a really productive way. And so especially you know, in that last year of her life we were full on shut-ins and she was paralyzed on one side of her body and I had to pretty much do everything for her.

(08:37):
But in return, after she’d passed away, I really dug my heels in to my community and tried to pay back the debt of love by using my evangelistic skillset to, and applied it within a local church context within a community of churches, you know, not just, and not just the community of churches, the community at large. And what happens when an evangelist has a very short leash? Well, I was a police chaplain, which means I had full mil police dress, a key card to the station access to ride with any officer in the city. I had keys to the public school and a master password to the power school database and could recall any records on any student in the vicinity in the city. I had access to the mayor’s office, I had access to community foundation dollars, I had access to all the local banks that partnered with me.

(09:37):
And really, it’s an issue of just being known and knowing people. And I stuck around long enough and served long enough for all that stuff to really matter. So within the community we saw that wow, if evangelist doesn’t itinerate heavily and really finds a way to partner with the local church it brings a spice to a region that is just not, like, churches don’t typically have that spice. And when the church really partners together, and it’s not just a one time seasonal thing, but a repeat, a repeat event, you know, it’s like this is the way we all do church. It’s a really nice relationship. And you know, in these last five or six years, we started getting calls from other communities asking me if I could do it there as well. And I was like, no, because there’s one of me and I can only be a member of one community, but I’m willing to come and like, see what kind of pieces you have in the community and see if there’s anything transferrable for your area that you can do. And if you commit to doing it, then I’ll walk with you a little bit. But inevitably you fall in love with people. So I have like little homes I stay in, in different regions and I come in and I call churches together and we walk through a process and we talk and we pray. And it’s not the same in every community, but there’s the same components.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:06):
Talk to me about that process. What are some of the components of helping build community in mm-hmm. <Affirmative> a particular community? Yeah. Between the churches and then to get the church to have a heart for evangelism.

Tom Miyashiro (11:22):
I like to talk about it is like the life cycle of evangelism. And, and it, and it is cyclical, just like breathing. And I think that a lot of times either evangelists or people who love evangelism or people who are put off by it catch the cycle and in, and it’s always in rhythm with itself, but where they are in their walk with the Lord may not be in sync with the rhythm of the community and they try and force it. So like, it’s almost like trying to take a double inhale or a double exhale. All, all you do is inhale, you’re gonna suffocate and all you do is exhale. You’re gonna suffocate. So either way it doesn’t work out for you if you only like one thing, but if you figure out the rhythm of the community and where they’re at in the life cycle of evangelism and you pay attention and then jump into where they are in their breathing pattern, you can move them towards mobilization for a season of harvest and then recovery and then repeat the process again and again and again, just like the seasons.

(12:27):
So usually there’s a a period of time where a community is pre mobilization, where like things are disconnected and maybe that’s a result of job changes, like pastors retiring or getting a new job and leaving the area. Or even in government and things like that. Like just being attention to like, it seems to happen more than once. It’s not just one guy doing it. It seems like there’s several key people all transitioning at the same time. That seems like a bad period of time to try and like push people into some kind of evangelistic effort. Like there’s a lot of transitions. You sort of have to reestablish baseline of relationships, call people together, be generous to them, and buy a lot of food and just create an environment where people can just be friends. Yeah. We miss that step sometimes in evangelism and just want to get to the good stuff.

(13:22):
And that can be a long season. Berkshire County, which is Western Mass, I’ve been stewarding a pastor’s network there for I think about seven years. And I have a unique role in that community because I actually am the facilitator, like the founder of the network as the evangelist, which I’m always ready to go, but they’re not ready to go and being patient and allowing them to raise their own temperature for evangelism, it’s a very slow and painful and disciplined process. Seven years and we still haven’t gone for it yet, what’s going on? But but sprinkling in activities that move them closer together, like National Day of Prayer, something on the calendar already that I can give them to give them a little boost. Like, see you can do something together. Okay then now let’s debrief that. Take a break, have some food, relax, no pressure, and then try again.

(14:18):
You know? So but it takes patience. And some communities are further along, like they already have a pastor’s network. They’ve been praying together for a while and you walk into a moving situation where like they’re gonna do something, anything. And you just happen to be the excuse that walked into the room that’s gonna make it relevant for go time. Those are fun places to walk into. Most evangelists roam the earth looking for communities in that phase. And and that’s a lot of fun ’cause you can just roll in with your textbook playbook and give them things to do and they will rock. And then you can take pictures and say, look what we did for the Lord. And then the final phase is sort of like this recovery phase, which sometimes evangelists to leave town too early and they don’t stick around to celebrate and help reset the program.

(15:11):
Thank everybody, thank people, and maybe even reward them and offer them rest. ’cause Like a lot of times even in the church world, even in church volunteerism, it’s like, well, Sundays are coming, so take Monday off, do something. ’cause We gotta do this all over again. And I think that’s why people burn out. They don’t have ample time to recover before you ask the next big ask. So I think being with the community through that celebration and recovery period makes them more willing to say yes as the cycle moves towards mobilization for the next season of harvest.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:53):
Yeah. Now recently you have started doing some things in Poland and now Ukraine. Yeah. Talk to me about that. ’cause That’s very different than, than Oh yeah, Eastern United States. You’re going into Eastern Europe now, you know

Tom Miyashiro (16:08):
We’ve been there actually for a long time, but the result of it is actually still community based. Our young people started growing up. Some of them came to work for the ministry, some of them graduated and went off to Bible college. Some of them started ministries of their own and some of them sort of graduated the faith to faith world and jumped into bigger ministries. And one young man who you’ve met on this trip as well, grew up in the ministry. I mean, he, I’ve known him as far back as maybe 15 years old. And when he got to age 18, he asked to meet me at a Starbucks and I assist one guy, no staff yet. And he comes in with a briefcase, puts it on the table, there’s nothing in it except one piece of paper. And he slides it across the table and says I think there’s many ways I can help you build your ministry <laugh>.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:06):
And I’m like,

Tom Miyashiro (17:07):
Oh, really? Young man, <laugh>. And he walks me through his strategic plan for how he thinks he can help me build faith to faith. I said, sounds great, let’s do it. And he was my first employee. Wow. but as God stirred his heart and his passion he’d done a church mission trip to Poland and he felt led to go and he asked for some time, then he asked for more time, then he asked for like a year. And I’m like, okay, this is ridiculous. I can’t have an employee gone for a year, but for some reason I’d let it go. And he went and and then it just like turned into this vibrant community-based thing over there. And it wasn’t me doing it, it was him and he built his own network and us working together. Like he figured out it’s not like he figured out his own way completely. Like he did it the faith to faith way, but he did it through his own personality and his own. And he’s not an evangelist. That’s what’s interesting about him. He’s more of a missions director, but he still like, rallied the community, did evangelism. And I was like, well that’s, well, I guess that’s what multiplication looks like. And he’s been doing that for 12 years now, so Wow. Amazing. Amazing to watch him develop. And now here, even on this trip, we have seven

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:24):
So what’s his name? It’s Kyle.

Tom Miyashiro (18:26):
Kyle Uba. Yeah. And he’s on this trip, but seven other young leaders on this trip accompany me here in Kenya. And the concept is that we do it all over again, again and we expose these young bucks to the world of evangelism, get them hungry, and then find a way to release them into the stratosphere.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:48):
That’s

Tom Miyashiro (18:48):
Awesome. So it’s a fun time and you get, you’ve gotten to be part of this. You got to speak into the life of David and Alan and Nick Hurst and, and others that have come on the street.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:58):
Yeah. You brought some real quality young guys that I really see God’s hand on them. I really love talking about evangelism coaching. And you’ve been doing that recently, especially with the ministry of Nick Hall. Yep. pulse, they had a Pulse 100, which was a hundred young people that they gathered together who have a heart for evangelism. That’s right. And Tim ett from Multnomah University who I took an evangelism class with, he was helping to to shape these young evangelists. And then you were one of the coaches for the Pulse 100. Yep. And, and so talk to me about that and what your heart is for coaching young evangelists and helping them to, to launch out into the ministry. Yeah.

Tom Miyashiro (19:47):
Closely related to what we’re doing here in Ken Kenya, but post 100 is two years old, and actually it’s a hundred kids a year. So we just finished our second year, our second cohort we’re calling it. And when they were starting it up, there was several, several evangelists that Nick pulled closer who worked with youth. We all pushed together to stock that first class and nobody really knew where we were going or how we were gonna do it. But we got that first group together and Dr. Tim was called in to write the curriculum for the masterclass that we would teach the kids. And Dr. Tim was all of our coach coaches Right. Within this Palau Global network world for so many years. Yeah. So when Jose Ziss got pulled in and I got pulled in Tim Enni, who used to be the Africa director Yeah.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:39):
Love

Tom Miyashiro (20:40):
Brother Tim Pullman, Reed Saunders gets pulled in. Wow. And, and you got

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:44):
Everyone but me, Brad

Tom Miyashiro (20:45):
Butcher,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:46):
But I was talking to Nick in Amsterdam Yeah. And we were talking about some possibilities.

Tom Miyashiro (20:51):
Yeah, definitely. We’d love to have you. So I mean, the, the thing is there isn’t isn’t that many of us in the world doing it full time Yeah. To, to lean on. So I think as we grow and as we get better at doing what we’re doing and as we get better as coaches, like the opportunities for evangelists to partner in and pour into the next generation is definitely there. But one of the cool things about Pulse 100 is you sort of, you have to go through this application process. You have to make a video preaching the gospel, and then you send it in. And if you make it in, you’re invited to this showcase. And when you show up, you’re given a time to show up. And Dr. Rob net and I, and about seven or eight other coaches are broken up into three rooms with no windows, very small room.

(21:39):
There’s young people come in one after another, like cattle, they have to preach to us and we grade their preaching. Wow. And it’s a very terrifying experience for them. And then we go through all the different young people and we pick the top three and they get to showcase for the whole program and preach to the whole room with the credit and the celebrity guest judging panel, just like American Idol. And Alan Stokes was the one that I picked and he preached to the, to the celebrity panel and to the whole room. Wow. Last year’s cohort. So that’s how closely connected all these things are. Nick Hurst was also in the Pulse 100, but, but anyways, what’s really exciting about it is I almost feel like Nick, you know, the world of evangelism is kind of resetting. Billy Graham’s passed away. Luis Pals passed away and others, and, and you know, so that commanding general who calls everyone together is sort of a little bit absent in the world of evangelism. So Nick pieced together some of those middle-aged guys who were coming up together. The younger guys who are now middle-aged guys got our coach back involved and he’s just taken this big sifter and we’re mining for gold. We don’t know what we’re gonna find. And on that finding incredible talent. And now we find it, we’re like, okay, now how do we disciple them and move them towards falling in love with evangelism like you and I have, and make that the goal of their life.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (23:05):
I mean, I think this program is so valuable what Pulse 100 is doing, because I think you can accelerate a ministry by at least a decade by getting them around other evangelists who be, because someone who has a calling, they could figure out how to do it all on their own. But, you know, they’d make so many mistakes, it’d be such a challenge. Yeah. But, but just being around other evangelists and someone who’s gone a little bit further, we can accelerate their ministries by at least 10 years, maybe 20 years, where they can launch out and do something big for God and they don’t have to wait and they don’t have to make the mistakes the last generation made. That’s

Tom Miyashiro (23:46):
Right. So this final piece of it, which brings it full circle right back here to Africa, is my new role in global network of evangelists, which is to be a catalyst for emerging evangelists, which is sort of a broad title, but it gives me the flexibility to come in and out of Palau, in and outta your ministry, in and out of Nick Hall’s ministry and like really identify and affirm and equip and train and, you know, as they kind of move into this world, that’s the mission of g and e actually. So, but once they’ve been identified to try and begin to assimilate them into our global network and give them opportunities that are far beyond their time, like preaching here at the festival and I in moringa and and exposing them to career evangelists. Guys like you pairing them up early so that we can accelerate. And

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:40):
Yeah, yesterday on the podcast I interviewed Nick Hurst. Yeah, that’s right. Who he was one of the pulps 100. He’s here in Africa. He had his first right opportunity to preach in Africa the other night’s. Right. That’s right. And did such a phenomenal job. Mm-Hmm. Did a great job. And he has such a heart for evangelism. God’s gonna use him in such a great way.

Tom Miyashiro (25:01):
It is. And it’s so cool to you know, I know that the plow team did so much to help me when I was starting. And so I feel like Desmond Henry, the director of g and e, has given me an opportunity to sort of give that experience back to the next guys. And it’s just a joy to be able to do that because I know how valuable all the guys who were ahead of me were when I was getting started. Yeah. You know,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (25:30):
Well, as one of the cabinet members for the global network of evangelists, I say thank you. Awesome. And I’m super excited to see what God will develop in the next few years. Amazing. I’m excited just to be a part of it. Yeah, definitely. So sometimes people who are listening, they wanna get involved with the ministry that we’re interviewing and so if someone has a heart for ministry in the northeast Yeah. Maybe they wanna support your ministry and maybe they wanna be a part of what you’re doing. Sure. What’s your website? Sure. How can they find out more about you?

Tom Miyashiro (26:04):
It’s https://www.f2fmi.org/

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (26:17):
Well Brother Tom, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism podcast. Awesome. I really appreciate it. Yeah,

Tom Miyashiro (26:23):
It’s awesome.

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The post Tom Miyashiro | From Faith 2 Faith appeared first on King Ministries | Evangelist Daniel King | Our Goal? Every Soul!.

Learn More About Evangelism Explosion: https://evangelismexplosion.org/

Transcript: 

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King, and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. Today. I have a very special guest with me, John Sorenson from Evangelism Explosion, one of the greatest evangelistic ministries in the world today. Thank you so much for joining me.

John Sorensen (00:20):
Well, thank you. It’s wonderful to be here, Daniel.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:22):
So let’s talk about Evangelism Explosion. I remember when I was young, I was wanting to learn about Evangelism. Well, this is when I was a teenager. Oh, wow. I I got a hold of your green book Oh, sure. Written by Dr. D. James Kennedy,

John Sorensen (00:37):
Dr. D. James Kennedy.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:40):
I went through that and I read all the illustrations about how to share your faith. And that really shaped the, the early years of my preaching, trying to lead people to Jesus.

John Sorensen (00:54):
Well, you know, he loved Dr. Kennedy, loved illustrations cuz he was, they said they were like windows. They allowed people to see in. And you know, I can tell you from my own experience that, you know, I’d been around the church my entire life. My dad was a preacher. I can’t even tell you how many sermons I heard in my life. And yet it was for me, right in the middle of the chair illustration, we used a very simple chair illustration that for the first time in my life at 26 years old, I understood it wasn’t merely knowing about Jesus that saved someone. It was putting your trust, like we’re trusting in these chairs we’re setting in now. This is an act that we took that moment of trusting in Christ. That’s when we’re saved. And and boy, what a difference it made in my life. I, I got up the next day and I, I didn’t even feel the same. I I was a totally different person and all from putting my trust in Christ. And, and you know what? I’ve been in that mode since. I’ve been trusting in Jesus firmly only holy and my life has been changed.

(01:52):
That’s awesome. So let’s start at the beginning. Okay. Tell me your testimony and how you came to Christ.

John Sorensen (01:59):
Well, again, my dad was a pastor. I was around the church my entire life. I was in church nine months before I was born every single Sunday. And and did all the kinds of Christian things that people do. I even went to Bible college to be honest with you, not too far from where you are in Joplin, Missouri, at Ozark Bible College. And I know there must have been quite a number of Christian around me, but I wasn’t a Christian. I had no idea how a person knew for sure that they were going to heaven. So for me, it was actually when a, a man asked me those two diagnostic questions, do you know for sure you’re going to heaven? And I said, no, I don’t. I don’t know that for sure. I don’t know anybody that knows that. And then he asked me the second question, suppose you were to stand before God this very night.

(02:43):
And he were to say to you, John, why should I let you into my heaven? What would you say? And I remember Daniel, I thought about it, it was a profound question. I knew it was, and, and I said, but you know what? I think my answer would be, I’m a pretty good person. I try not to do too much wrong. I hope that the good things that I do outweigh the bad things that I do. And that question is so critical, because what it did was allowed me to understand what I was trusting in to get to heaven. Yes. Right. Once he shared the gospel with me, because he had asked me that question, he was able to say, now, a few minutes ago you talked about a particular person. In your answer, it was, I’m a pretty good person and I try not to do too much wrong.

(03:21):
And I hope the good there was an I you kept, it’s you, you have a savior. His name is John <laugh>. What I’m telling you is there’s a savior named Jesus, and you need to put your trust in him. And so for me, that day, it, it changed my life. And so eventually God called me into becoming part of that ministry. Now, Daniel, I would’ve told you if ever there was a person that would never have qualified as a witness for Jesus Christ, I’d have been on that list. You know, I mean, I was sure I couldn’t do it. I had tried. And every time I had tried, I just made the person mad that I was talking to, you know, I felt like I was gifted at taking a normal person and turning them into somebody that was just hopping mad, you know, with only a few minutes.

(04:08):
And, and yet it was through EE that I learned that I can actually share the gospel with others. And so that same experience that you had and by the way, I think most Christians are in this boat. You know, I think I I’ve seen all kinds of statistics and some as high as 96% of people who bear the name of Jesus have never one time led another person to Jesus. Maybe they tried it worked out badly the first couple times, so they quit trying. And I’ve heard all kinds of reasons that Christians give. They’re afraid. Some say, well, you know what? I’m gonna goof it up for the next person. You know, I’m gonna, if if I try and then I’m gonna mess it up, and then I’ll just push ’em away. I won’t actually bring them toward, well, here’s the thing. This is the truth.

(04:49):
We as Christians actually can participate in leading our friends, our relatives, our work associates, our neighbors, and yes, even strangers that we meet, we can be part of, of sharing the gospel and leading others to Christ. And, and once we do it, to be honest with you, I can tell you that very first time that I was part of seeing, I can even tell you the guy’s name, I could describe the night you know, all the things about it. It was such an impactful moment in my life when God used me to lead someone else to Jesus Christ. And wow, that changed everything, you know? And in many ways, I would tell you, the ministry of EE has changed my life a number of times. The first in me coming to Christ, obviously that was a pretty big change. Secondly, in leading others to Christ, I never thought I could do that. And then thirdly, I found there’s even something more fun than leading people to Jesus until you might say there’s nothing more fun. Well, there actually is, there’s one thing more fun. And that’s training other people how to do that <laugh>. And when you start having spiritual grandchildren, spiritual great-grandchildren, when somebody, and again, I’ll tell you the, I can tell you the first time that my first trainee calls me up and says, I just let somebody to Jesus and listening to her excitement. And by

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:08):
The way, that sense joy that

John Sorensen (06:09):
Comes it, it is joy. And, and every single Christmas I get a letter from Marge. She was my very first trainee, her and another gal named Gwen. But anyway, every Christmas I get a letter and Marge to tells me every single person she has led to Christ this past year. Wow. And I get the joy of being, it’s, it’s like over 400 people at this point that I get to be part of, even though it was Marge who led

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:31):
Him to, can I share with you a testimony? So Sure. I have a son. His name is Caleb. He’s 13 years old. He just became a teenager. So we’re praying for wisdom, how to raise a teenager. Well on Saturday of this week, he went with one of my friends, his name is, is Ron Hood. And, and, and Ron has a great heart for evangelism. He took a, a truck, like a, like a trailer, and he wrapped it and it says

John Sorensen (07:01):
Two

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:02):
Are you going to heaven? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, two questions, reveal the answer. Yeah. And then he asks the same two diagnostic questions that someone asked you. And, and so anyways circuit writers from YWAM came to Tulsa and they’re doing some outreaches. And they were doing an outreach. And so my friend Ron Hood, he brought his truck to their outreach. And my son loves hanging out with his son. And so my son was sitting there in the truck asking every person who came by that, that two diagnostic questions. Awesome. And he was so excited. My wife was asking him, you know, what’d you learn today? He says, I can be an evangelist just like my dad. Dad is so and so. I’m so proud of him for being out there, sharing his faith. Yeah. Using those two diagnostic questions. Yeah. Which are a very simple method anyone can ask. And it just opens up a conversation, and then you can start to share the

John Sorensen (07:54):
Gospel. Amen. And they’re really not that hard to ask. And you know, we, we’ve got actually a number of what we would call questionnaires, questions you can put in front of those questions that, that make it very easy to have a ver just a regular normal conversation with a person that you meet. Turn that into a spiritual conversation through the use of just some basic questions like we learned. You know, you’re talking to somebody and, and they talk, they’re talking about their life. How’s your life going? What do you do? It’s very easy for you to say at some point in the conversation, well, it sounds like your, your life’s going pretty good. Or maybe you would say the opposite. You know, whatever it is you, whatever it is. And then you can say, you know what, I, I’m gonna ask you a kind of a funny question.

(08:34):
Scale one to 10, if you had to quantify your life, if 10 were the very best life ever, and one were the, the the worst life ever, where are you at today? And people don’t have any trouble answering the questions. I commonly hear 5, 6, 7. And you’re able to say, now can you tell me some of the things that make up that? Why is it a five or why is it a six? And they’ll tell you, usually they’re temporal that they mentioned, I’ve got a good job, you know, I’ve got this. I I have, I live in a nice house, you know, I’ve got a good girlfriend or whatever that happens to be. Yeah. But usually those are temp and you can say, but what that allows you to do now is you’ve started a conversation where now you can share a little of your testimony.

(09:11):
You can say, you know what the truth is, and think about this. It’s true. Before you came to Christ, you, you were a lower number than you are now. That, that you’re a Christian, whatever that is. And I can say, honestly, I used to be a one, but now that I, I know a guy shared with me this great news, I’m now a 10 every day. I know that sounds braggadocious, but it’s the truth. I used to be a one, now I’m a 10. Would you like to hear how that happened? I’ve never had somebody say, no, I’ve never, not one time. Wow. And so then I go, well, you know what, here’s what he shared with me. Five key things. And this is what you learned when you’re reading that green padded book. Yeah. There are five key. And you know, most people would say, traditionally, the gospel contains four things that, that really like it or not.

(09:56):
It’s, it’s truth that you have to hear and understand, respond to. Right. The, the gospel, these aren’t ee things. These are ju this is the gospel that everyone since Jesus’s ascension have agreed these four things. You have to understand where we are as humans. Right. The Bible says something very particular about us. It’s not all that complimentary. We’re sinners. We have all broken our relationship with God. Right. We’ve created this distance and divide through a thing called sin. You have to understand that now, you know, many people would agree they’re sinners. They don’t understand the scope of it, though they don’t get the degree in which they’re a sinner. The, the, the second thing that you would really need to understand is what’s God re God’s reaction to that? How does he feel about sin? Can’t he just push it under the carpet or something?

(10:43):
Well, no. Yeah. The very nature of God tells the city abor sin. And, and he, he, his his eyes are too holy to even look upon it. So that, that’s a real problem for us. On one hand, God loves us, but on the other hand, he cannot stand us sin. So what did he do? Well that leads us to the person of Jesus Christ, who he is and what he did. He is the God man. And what did he do? He came from heaven to earth. He lived an absolutely perfect life. He traded places with me. Right. This is the great substitute. And, and so that now I can be right before an all holy God, he took on my sin and died as if it were his own. It wasn’t his, but, and, and made a way for me to be right before God.

(11:25):
And then that leads us to the very final bit of that. If that’s all true, and it is, how do you get it? There’s, there has to be a moment when you appropriate that to yourself. And we understand from scripture that that’s called faith. And that’s that thing we were talking about when I put my trust in Jesus. That’s, that’s saving faith right now in ee we add a fifth item to that so as to not have to start the conversation on the bad news. You’re a center. You know, you can go try that right now. Go out on the street and just up to people and you are in a center, and you’re gonna find that some

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:56):
People, it’s a good way to start an argument.

John Sorensen (11:57):
That’s, it’s a good way to start an argument if you don’t wanna start an argument now, it’s, it’s, it’s true, by the way. It’s not an untruth. Instead start with the fact that heaven’s an absolutely free gift and it’s something that God wants to give to you. And so we start the conversation on heaven is an absolutely. So I was able to say, even in that first conversation, there are five things that I learned about how a person can know for sure. This is what changed my life from a, a one to a 10 was understanding these five things. And I’d say, say this, Daniel, you know, I’m, I am an extreme introvert, so I don’t your viewers, I, I don’t know. I’m sure that’s not what they think. It’s the absolute truth given the opportunity. I’ll go into a room and read a book every time by myself. So if God

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:43):
Can use an introvert like you That’s right. He can use anyway.

John Sorensen (12:45):
And that’s the truth. And, and, but it’s turned into one of the greatest joys of my life. And so I’ve decided to be different because I love seeing people come to know Jesus. And it’s become so such a an addiction for me. <Laugh> using that word in the positive way God has so invaded my life is to understand I can be used by him, he will he’ll use me. And that I get this immense joy of seeing people’s lives change. And there is no greater miracle. People love miracles. There’s no greater miracle than watching somebody go from death to life right in front of you. And I mean to tell you it’ll change some things.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:27):
Amen. And so one of the strengths of evangelism explosion is that you are training people how to share their faith. Yeah. Talk to me about that process and some of the results that you’ve seen. Yeah. From really equipping introverts and people who have never shared their faith before. How do you take someone who doesn’t know how to share their faith and and help them become competent Yeah. At talking to people about

John Sorensen (13:54):
Jesus? Well, the simple answer is through mentoring. You know, the model of EE is a one-on-one or a one on two discipleship model. EE is actually not an evangelism program. It’s a discipleship program where we’re discipling people in how to share their faith. Right. And so, if you are my training in ee, we’d go out together sometimes 7, 8, 9, 10 times, depending on which tool or product that we used with ee. But, but let’s say it seven times. And I can tell you, I’ve watched this happen thousands of times. The first time you don’t say anything, you know, I’ve taught you this basic outline that I just shared with you, grace, man, God, Christ, faith. And I’ve said to you, now, watch how I use that. Watch how I start the conversation. Just watch. And so this time you don’t actually have to say anything. We go out, we meet somebody, we have a conversation.

(14:39):
Maybe we’ve invited a friend to come join us for coffee. And and you watch how this happens. So then the next time I say, now Daniel, you saw what I did. Probably the shortest section that we did was on the, on God. It’s, it only takes about 30 seconds to say it. You, I’ve, I’ve shared with you what it is, the Bible verses you’ve learned them, the story you learned, the two main points that he’s loving. But also just, you know what, when we come to that spot, I’m gonna just say, you know what this comes into sharper focus when we understand what the Bible says about God. Now Daniel, would you mind sharing what it is that we know about God? And then you are just going to give it a go. And if you mess up, or if you start getting to the point where you forget something, just still look at me and smile and I’ll pick it back up and, and I’ll tell you what the nick, you do that.

(15:25):
Then the next time I say, you know what, just keep going. Go on into Christ and go on into faith. And, and I’m telling you that by about the fourth or the fifth time that we went out together in an incredibly safe way, because never were you put on the spot if you messed up, you just looked at me and smiled and, and I just picked it back up. Little by little, you would’ve picked up all of the pieces and learned to have that conversation. And so usually it happens around the fifth or sixth or seventh time, a person will look at me and go, I don’t need your help. I got this. I can do this. And so that’s the cool thing. And if I’ve given it to you in an understandable enough way, you can then turn around and pass it on to the next guy. And for us, this is called spiritual multiplication. And it’s the greatest joy that we as Christians get to have this side of heaven.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (16:14):
And now you’ve multiplied all over the world mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and, and you have evangelism, explosion people. And how many countries now? Well, we

John Sorensen (16:22):
Were the first Christian ministry to be in every single nation of the Earths Wow. Back in 1996. And we still are. And we have about 150 nations or so on earth that we are substantially working in every day. And the rest we do things in, but, you know, not as often or whatnot. But so he’s a and we’re in over 400 different denominations of the church. So that’s the, I love that the church can agree on the gospel and can can even go out together. We were just, we just did an event in Santa Ana, California, and I wanna say there were 12 different denominations that were there. And, you know, they’ve decided they’re gonna do their evangelism training together as a group, all these different churches and denominations showing up, learning to share the gospel and going out together.

(17:09):
And I just think that’s a hoot. I I love seeing that and kind of unity happen around the gospel. But yeah, so ee works all over the world, and we trained this past year just at 2 million people to be witnesses for Christ. Wow. Just at 2 million little over 900,000 children, ages four or fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, 9, 10, 11, somewhere in that range. And then about 1.1 million adults that we trained how to share the gospel. And and they went out. And in the process of going out, led 17 million people to Christ. Now here’s the thing. I cannot qualify, you know, you learned e ago use it all the time. That’s nowhere in my number. I I, there’s nowhere I can account Yeah. For people that were trained in the past, you know, that use it in their life, but you know, aren’t in some method to give it report.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:03):
Yeah. And at my home church, a victory church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it’s an independent, charismatic church. We have an EE group. They go out and they tell people about Jesus. They love that. And just go into the apartment complexes nearby and knock on the door and, and, and start witnessing to people as

John Sorensen (18:19):
We Yeah. No, I’ve actually heard of, of this church, and I’ve heard stories about what God’s done through y’all for years and for a long time. And I praise God for you. Yeah. Thank you.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:30):
Yeah. So I have a question. You know, times are changing very quickly. Yeah. And today’s generation still deals with the sin problem, but they’re asking different questions than we’re asked 50 years. Yeah. Or even 20 years ago. How are you navigating Yeah. Changing culture and, and changing media and the, the different landscapes of, of how to share the gospel.

John Sorensen (18:55):
Now, firstly, I’m gonna say this quickly, the gospel hasn’t changed and people haven’t changed. The lost really haven’t changed. Now they’re asking different questions, which is what a very good, good word that you said, lost are still lost. The gospel still is the only method by which lost people get saved. But period, full stop. And Jesus, when he stood on that hill in Galilee, looking out at all of the generations and all the lives, the, the people groups and the ages that would come, he’s the one that prescribed this idea to us. Right? And so we know it’s relevant, we know it’s valid. Now, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do everything in our power to be as culturally relevant as we can possibly be. And so, to answer your question, we’ve changed, we have a number of tools that we’ve developed through time. XE is a, a for, for generation X and Y instead of it being more of a legal argument which is kind of like what I’d heard, that’s far more of a relational argument based on John 10, 10, Jesus saying, I’ve come that you may have life to the full.

(19:55):
What does that mean to have abundant life? And what is it that stops us from having that? Well, we know that that’s when we have broken this relationship with God. And of course that’s called sin in, in, in, but we don’t talk about sin in the same way. Now I will tell you this, we’re in the process right now of developing a new tool for high school age today, and that’s forcing us to have conversation about identity and about, you know, all things that we’ve just never had to talk about in the past before. But that being said, please, anyone listening, please, please believe this is true when I’m telling you there’s an openness to the gospel today that we’ve never seen in 60 years of ministry. And so I would encourage people, do not believe anybody who tells you it can’t be done today. We’ve seen so in the history of ee you know, in the seventies, and you’ve gone out to do questionnaires out on the street, and, and typically if you would’ve approached 10 people, one of those 10 would let you share the gospel. This is the seventies. Do you know what it is today? It’s six out of 10 today. Wow. On the street.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:05):
And so that’s showing more openness in today’s generation towards

John Sorensen (21:09):
Than has ever been in the last 60 years of this ministry. And, and, you know, and we’ve proven that not just in places like the Southeast in America, we’ve proven that in, in, in the northeast. We’ve proven that way out west in the, in the southwest west and in the northwest part of the United States. We’ve done these Equiped America events all over the United States. That number rings true. We, we actually did a full on study with lifeway to see if it was just our experience, or if it was, if, if a researcher could find, and you know what they found? Six out of 10 Americans are open hearing the gospel. Wow. At 5.1% from an absolute stranger. They’re willing to hear it. But here’s the last thing that I, I, I would encourage Christians to understand. When we put the, i, the the idea into that study about them searching it out on the internet and reading a website, the, the interest in evangelism went down dramatically.

(22:09):
So it is this one-on-one, or it’s this personal explanation. The other thing that was in the study that really surprised us was that four out of the 10 that had come to Christ said they never would’ve sought it if somebody wouldn’t have approached them. That the point being, it was so critical that a friend started that conversation. Now, look, you, you can either believe what I said or not. It’s up to you if you’re willing to try it. All you have to do is to go up to 10 of your friends and ask this question. I just heard this crazy person today who said, six outta 10 people are open to having a spiritual conversation. And I, I just have to tell you as your friend, I, I’m, I’m a believer, but I’ve never thought to ask you if you want to have a conversation about spiritual things, are, are you open to that?

(22:59):
Just ask that question. And if you find that none of your friends are, well then, you know, I was wrong. If you’re seeing what, what we were seeing all across the country, you’re gonna see six of your friends go, you know what? I really would like to have that conversation. Now. Listen, ask good questions like your son was doing, Caleb, way to go ask questions and listen to their answers and then build on what it is that you’ve heard. And, and the most important thing is, as a believer, please be ready to share some of the things that are going on in your life that is why you are so in love with following God. You know, be willing to share testimony about what God’s doing in your life and, and how he’s given you joy and how he’s given you peace, and how he’s given you patience and, and you know, all these things which he promised he’d give you. By the way, if you don’t have those, you need to call us. And we’re gonna help you come to know Jesus. Because if you have Jesus in your life, he’s given you amazing things that you can talk about as you share your faith.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:01):
That’s awesome. Well, if someone is listening and they want to learn more from some of the resources that you have, or they want to get trained by one of the evangel evangelism explosion trainers, or maybe even to help support your ministry, what is your website? How can they access more information about

John Sorensen (24:22):
It? Well, that’s, that’s awesome. So if you come to evangelism explosion.org you’ll find all of our training tools and you’ll find when they, those trainings are, and you can kind of let us know you’re interested and we’ll connect with you. The, the study that I mentioned, we put on a website called equip america.org. So if you go to that, go down to the bottom, you’ll see the live way study. You can download the whole study and read it for yourself. Every single question we ask and what the answers were. And so, you know, and then every day I put tools up on a, a, another, a third website I’ll mention called Share life.today, share life.today. Every day I put tools up there like this week we’re focused on memorizing God’s word. Well, what would that look like? And how would you share that with a friend? Something like that. And so we’re constantly putting tips up there, just little encouragements about how you can share your faith. And so people can use those absolutely free. And our, we get joy when we see Christians become bold witnesses for Jesus.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (25:21):
That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast.

John Sorensen (25:25):
It is my joy. Thanks for doing the podcast.

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