King Ministries | Evangelist Daniel King | Our Goal? Every Soul! https://kingministries.com Missionary Evangelist Daniel King is dedicated to telling people about Jesus. Discover what God is doing around the world. Mon, 09 Sep 2024 08:09:17 +0000 en hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.10 https://i1.wp.com/kingministries.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/KMI-Favicon.jpg?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 King Ministries | Evangelist Daniel King | Our Goal? Every Soul! https://kingministries.com 32 32 196138601 Paulo Lopes | World Methodist Evangelism https://kingministries.com/podcast-episodes/paulo-lopes-world-methodist-evangelism/ Thu, 05 Sep 2024 04:08:40 +0000 https://kingministries.com/?p=8426 Paulo Lopes is the Emerging Leaders Director for World Methodist Evangelism. On today’s episode of The Evangelism Podcast we talk about the rich tradition of evangelism in Wesleyan Methodist movements going all the back to John Wesley and Francis Asbury.  The goal of World Methodist Evangelism is to be a connection point for the worldwide […]

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Paulo Lopes is the Emerging Leaders Director for World Methodist Evangelism. On today’s episode of The Evangelism Podcast we talk about the rich tradition of evangelism in Wesleyan Methodist movements going all the back to John Wesley and Francis Asbury.  The goal of World Methodist Evangelism is to be a connection point for the worldwide Wesleyan Methodist family offering training, gathering opportunities, and resources that empower Christ followers to share their faith in the context of today’s realities. We talk about the importance of evangelism and the need for revival in the church. Paulo Lopes shares his observations on the current state of the church and the signs of awakening and hunger for God that he has seen around the world.

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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Sean Dunn | Reaching Millennials and Gen Z With Innovative Digital Strategies https://kingministries.com/podcast-episodes/sean-dunn-reaching-millennials-and-gen-z-with-innovative-digital-strategies/ Mon, 26 Aug 2024 22:04:31 +0000 https://kingministries.com/?p=8413 Today’s generation is not worried about going to hell when they die because they often feel like they are living in hell right now. So how can we reach them for Jesus? Sean Dunn is reaching Millennials and Generation Z with innovative digital strategies. First he interrupts their social media time using paid advertising and […]

The post Sean Dunn | Reaching Millennials and Gen Z With Innovative Digital Strategies appeared first on King Ministries | Evangelist Daniel King | Our Goal? Every Soul!.

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Today’s generation is not worried about going to hell when they die because they often feel like they are living in hell right now. So how can we reach them for Jesus? Sean Dunn is reaching Millennials and Generation Z with innovative digital strategies. First he interrupts their social media time using paid advertising and Hollywood produced content. Then he uses online chats to provide answers to the real questions young people are asking about the pain they feel in their lives. They present the hope that comes through Jesus and ask people to make a commitment to follow Christ. You are going to love hearing about Sean’s innovative method of evangelism on today’s episode of The Evangelism Podcast.

Learn More About Sean Dunn and Ground Wire: https://www.groundwire.net/home 

See how Sean Dunn reaches people who are hurting: https://www.jesuscares.com/ 

Transcript: 

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Today’s generation is not worried about going to hell when they die because they often feel like they’re living in hell right now. So how can we reach them for Jesus? Sean Dunn is reaching millennials and generation Z with innovative digital strategies. First, he interrupts their social media time using paid advertising in Hollywood produced content. Then he uses online chats to provide answers to the real questions. Young people are asking about the pain they feel in their lives. They present the hope that comes through Jesus and ask people to make a commitment to follow Christ. You are going to love hearing about Sean’s innovative method of evangelism on today’s episode of The Evangelism Podcast,

Evangelism Podcast Host (01:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast with Dr. Daniel King, where Daniel interviews full-time evangelists, pastors, missionaries, and normal everyday Christians to discover how they share their faith, their powerful testimonies and amazing stories that will inspire you to reach people with the good news. And now here’s your host, missionary, and evangelist, Daniel King.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:24):
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, Sean Dunn. Thank you for joining me on the Evangelism Podcast.

Sean Dunn (01:36):
Well, thank you sir. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:39):
Now you have a very unique ministry reaching out to Generation Z. Tell me about it.

Sean Dunn (01:47):
Yeah, actually our focus is really millennials and Gen Z. I’ve been a youth ministry guy since I was 18, and as the generations continue to flow through, my focus is continue to stay right in that spot. So we specialize in 15 to 34, 39 is really our specialty.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:05):
And you are using innovative strategies to reach out to this demographic, mostly here in America. Tell me a little bit about some of what you’re doing to reach out.

Sean Dunn (02:20):
Yeah, well, we in the church and parents and grandparents, we look at our kids who are staring at their phone all day and we wish that they’d put ’em down, engage with people. And I’ve had pastors pound the table and say They won’t come to church. And my response is, but they won’t put down their phones either. So it’s either a problem or it’s an opportunity. We’ve seen it as an opportunity to really engage with them and go after them. So our strategy is really not to invite them to a location where they can hear the gospel, but it’s really to interrupt them as they’re living their life on their phone every day with messaging like Jesus cares dot God likes you.com. What’s the point? Do I matter? I feel broken.com. Invite ’em into a conversation through marketing. Our tagline is often when life hurts, Jesus cares.

(03:13):
Chat with somebody who understands, and we have this massive team of online volunteers that are engaging with the lost. They don’t come online and say, Hey, I need to go to heaven. They’re saying, Hey, I’m going through hell. And we’re able to help them understand how Jesus interacts with them to give them peace, hope, joy, perspective, purpose, but also let’s talk about what he does eternally as well. So really it’s a marketing play with a backend call center that’s not on the phone like our generation embraced, but it’s really through text, instant message with volunteers all over the world.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:47):
Okay. So you mentioned the word interrupt and that seems to be a really important term that you use. So you are going after people, they’re on their phones. I know my son and daughter 14 and 12, they love screen time, they love getting on the phone and we have to pry it out of their hands sometime. But this generation is spending all their time on phones. And the challenge that a lot of churches have is how do we get people into the four walls of the church? People just aren’t going into the four walls of the church anymore, but you’re trying to reach them on their phone and you use this term interruption where you’re interrupting them in the midst of whatever they’re doing. They’re on TikTok, they they’re scrolling doom, scrolling over, just watching videos and how do you interrupt their random search for entertainment and bring them to a point where they start thinking about spiritual things?

Sean Dunn (04:45):
So the same way that if you start thinking about getting a new car, all of a sudden the Jeep dealer knows and he starts targeting you. So it’s really through strategic advertising where we’re leveraging the algorithms. We are going after young people that are, they’re walking past the church, not into it, and they’re struggling with some form of depression, suicidal ideation, purposelessness. They’re showing those signs in the way that they’re behaving online and our messaging finds them. And so we don’t approach them in that moment and say, would you like to have a theological discussion with me? We approach ’em and say, life’s hard. How are you doing? Come talk to us about it.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:36):
And so these are kids, they’re going through depression, they’re thinking about suicide, they’re having issues with their parents having issues at school, and you come to them in that moment where they’re experiencing pain. And what do you say to them?

Sean Dunn (05:52):
It depends on the campaign, but like I said, some of the campaigns are when life hurts Cares come to Jesus cares.com. Some of it’s God likes you. I had people wrestle with me and say, no, God loves you, but God loves you is almost white noise to them. They believe that God loves ’em. They don’t believe God likes them. Some of it’s I feel broken.com, some of it is one of the young ladies logged in and she said, do I matter? And she instantly connected one of our online volunteers who said, you absolutely matter. You matter to me. I’m sure there’s people in your life that you matter to, but most importantly you matter to God. So we teach our online volunteers. You have to transition the conversation because if you let people, they will talk around the true issues for days. And so she said, you matter to God. Has anybody ever shared with you what God sees when he looks at you? And she said, no. Can I share? Absolutely. So she said, just eight, like one-liners out of scripture says, you are created in his image. You are fearfully and wonderfully made. You are precious in his sight.

(07:01):
You are. The apple of his eye just started to layer these things and you could just tell the young people today, they just want, they need to know because they’ve been beat down so much. If they know that somebody’s there for them, that God loves ’em, they just eat it up. And so she was eating it up and the coach, the online volunteer takes it and transitions and says, not only does he say those things about you, but he thinks you matter so much that he can’t imagine eternity without you. Did you know he made a way so that he could spend eternity with you? And she said, no. She ends up praying to give her life to Christ. It was beautiful. And at the end of the conversation, the online volunteer says, Hey, you came online and you asked me this question. You said, do I matter? But now that you know what God sees when he looks at you, now that you have a hope and a future in him, I’m going to ask you, do you matter? And her response, she came on with a question mark. She left with three exclamation points in all. She said, I do matter. So that’s just one of literally the thousands of stories of young people that are just coming to us because the marketing captures their attention and they end up having these amazing conversations with somebody who will take the time for ’em.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:14):
And so you are actually marketing to people. You’re doing advertising campaigns. Which platforms have you found the most success on? Are you advertising on TikTok, Facebook, YouTube? Where have you found the most success?

Sean Dunn (08:30):
Well, as you know, technology shifts, platforms change. Right now our top two platforms are TikTok and Instagram. So TikTok is very unique in that TikTok, TikTok will not let you succeed if you take people off of their platform. They want to keep everybody on their platform. So we had to figure out how. So our old call to action on all things meta is come over here and chat with us. In TikTok, we had to figure out how do you share the gospel, give a call to action, start follow inside of their app. And so we have videos that just like we have an animated video that just starts with this animated person just says, Hey, you got a minute. God’s got something he wants you to know. And just pure gospel for a minute, 27 seconds long. I thought it was too long, but it worked.

(09:19):
And at the end of it, it says, if you recognize that you’ve sinned and that sin has kept you from being close to God, you want to be, if you realize Jesus paid the price for your sin, it takes care of the eternal, I mean walks through the gospel, then go in the comment section and just make a declaration. I just gave my life to Christ. It is a public profession of faith because everybody who follows them on TikTok can now see that we’re seeing between five and 600 people every day on TikTok make a public profession of faith on there. So each platform has its own unique nuances, but man, it’s just been so fun to see what God’s doing.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:57):
That’s awesome. What are some of your TikTok channels that you’re sending people to?

Sean Dunn (10:02):
Yeah, so just off the top of my head, it’s the campaigns, but I don’t know how they’re worded, but Jesus cares. Jesus changes everything. I feel broken, do I matter? What’s the point? According to him, which is a website where we’re just encouraging people to say, Hey, come explore what Jesus sees when he looks at you. When I ask somebody, what do you think Jesus sees when he looks at you? I get two answers usually. First one I get is He doesn’t see me, he’s ignoring me. He’s not paying attention. Or the second one is he doesn’t like what he sees. And either one of those we can interject. Let me tell you what Jesus really sees when he looks at you and he adores you. He created you intentionally. You can just, so yeah, so those are some of the different URLs and the different campaigns on TikTok that you can go and explore.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:55):
That’s awesome. And are you putting out multiple pieces of content per day? Yes. Because I know that on the TikTok algorithm, they love it when you just pump out a ton of content. And tell me about some of your content. What is it that’s catching people’s attention? What hooks are really resonating with the younger generation?

Sean Dunn (11:17):
Well, so TikTok is different. TikTok has, we had to create a whole new strategy around TikTok, but meta for what’s been working for us for years is it truly is we need them to see themselves in the content. So we’ll have a picture, an image of a girl she’s sitting in a car and slow motion, just a tear dropping down. Her who of us hasn’t just had a bad day.

(11:46):
So it dropped because of the slow motion, the artsy piece of it, it’s dropping. And then as soon as it hits her leg, you hear a honk and you realize she’s sitting at a green light and she’s not moving. And it just says, when life hurts, Jesus cares. People say, Hey, I feel that pain too. Or there’s an African-American girl who she’s getting in her car and she’s talking to her phone and she just says, why is life so hard? I try so hard and I keep failing. I just don’t know if anybody cares about me. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get this right. When life hurts, Jesus cares through that content, we know that we’ve hit it, hit it perfectly. When people log in and they say, Hey, I just saw this piece of content and that’s me. That’s how I feel.

(12:35):
And so again, unfortunately young people aren’t waking up saying, oh no, I’m going to hell. They’re not asking the right questions. We have churches out there that we talk about the seeker sensitive model. They’re not seeking, they’re not asking the right questions. They’re in survival mode. So we have to help them ask the right questions, suggest Jesus is the answer, and then give them an opportunity that’s safe for them to walk in. So again, the attitudes and the perspectives of younger generations, especially Gen Z when it pertains to the church is very negative. 70% believe the American churches irrelevant. But here’s the one that really gets me. 26% of Gen Z trust pastors, that means 74% of the younger generation, they drive past the church and they think, I don’t trust them. That’s not safe. So if we help them ask the right questions, hoping that they’ll walk into a church, most of them won’t, but we know that they’ll live their life and they’ll dig into deep conversations on social media. So that’s what we offer ’em as the stepping stone. The old model of ministry used to be, let’s get ’em to a building so we can tell ’em about the man. Now let’s introduce ’em to Jesus and then move him towards the local community.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:50):
So once you capture someone’s attention, then you bring them to one of your websites where they can actually chat with someone who will minister to them via their typewriter. And so these young people, they’re not worried about going to hell because they feel like they’re living in hell right now. And then how do your counselors, the people that volunteer to help, how do you train them? Is this something that anyone can do? Do they have to be, do they have to go to seminary in order to answer questions? What do they need in order to actually help some people?

Sean Dunn (14:29):
Yeah, so our training is actually, we call it the Groundwater Training Academy. It is pretty extensive because there is both message as well as methodology, meaning we’ve learned a lot of things. When you don’t have tone, you don’t have eye contact, you don’t have body language, all you have are words. There are some really there, there’s some things that you need to understand. You need to understand how to language things so it doesn’t come across as aggressive. And so we take you through all that. It’s about a six hour training, but you can’t do it in one setting. But it covers everything from the technology behind the ministry to the heart behind the ministry, to how do I deal with the suicidal kid, or how do I minister to a Hindu, or how do I minister to a Muslim? So we train you on all those things and you’re assigned a mentor to walk with you through it.

(15:21):
Our team of volunteers both 24 hours a day in English and Spanish both, and it’s about 15 to 1800 people that are active on that team, ministering to people all through the day, 24 hours a day. And it’s amazing because the models of ministry I’ve been involved with is you had to show up at church at seven o’clock to be able to engage. If you wake up at three in the morning and you can’t sleep, there’s people who want to talk to you. If you have time at three in the afternoon, there’s people who want to talk to you. And so it’s always moving and always flowing. And one of our greatest needs is more of these volunteers so that as our traffic continues to increase, which it has been, we have enough coverage to make sure that we can do a good job with them.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (16:08):
Now, I have a lot of evangelists and people that really care about the Great Commission who listen to the Evangelism podcast. So if someone’s hearing this and saying, Hey, that is the great opportunity for me. I would love to be a keyboard warrior for Jesus. How can they get connected to you and find out how they can volunteer to be a part?

Sean Dunn (16:30):
Yeah. Let me tell you a quick story. First. I had a new volunteer just join, it’s probably been six months now, but he called me and I think in the first month he led eight people to Christ. And he said, this has amazing. He said, it reminds me of going fishing with my grandpa. And I thought it was a great analogy. He said, when I used to go fishing with my grandpa, I loved it because he loved it. My grandpa loved to fish. And he took it a step further and I thought, that’s beautiful. He said, when I used to go fishing with my grandpa, my grandpa did all the work and I got all the credit. He baited the hook, he cast it, he reeled it in. Eventually he’d clean it, but I got to stand there and take a picture like I did something. He said, I feel like the harvest truly is ripe. People are more open to the gospel right now than they’ve ever been. They just need to be approached in the right way and invited into kind of process what’s going on with them. So if you’re interested in learning more, the best place to do that is to go to ground wire.net/coaching. It will take you to a place where there’s frequently asked questions, some interviews with some online volunteers or a place where you can begin with an application. But that’s ground wire.net/coaching.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:41):
Let’s talk a little bit about your history and how you got started doing this. What is it that drives you? What gives you this passion for evangelism? Where’d that come from? And then how’d you get started in doing this type of ministry?

Sean Dunn (17:58):
Yeah, well, thanks for asking that. I was a weird kid. I’m a weird adult, but at 14 years old, the Lord called me to ministry. It was so clear that I actually wrote in the back of my Bible, contend for a Generation was the phrase he gave me. And I just assumed that meant youth pastor because that was the only model of ministry at the time. Nothing entrepreneurial was encouraged. And so at 18 years old, I go to Bible college, I get hired the first week or the second week I was there at a church to be their youth pastor. At the time, my arrogance thought, wow, they recognized God’s hand on my life. Looking back, I’m thinking they were stupid and desperate. I mean, they did not. I was 18. They didn’t check references. They needed some help. And so I stepped in and I just say that to say I’ve been in full-time ministry since I was 18 as I stayed in the local church and started to travel full-time as a speaker and an author in 97, and I was the guy traveling with the bands, the bands could get ’em in the field.

(18:58):
It wasn’t about my name, it was about the band, but I got to share the gospel with them. And I learned very quickly, I’m an evangelist. I am not a pastor. And so I thought that I would do that my entire life. I mean, that filled my cup. My ego was out of control. I thought it was all about me and I was loving it. And it was December, 2002 and I was climbing the ladder and it was on a Tuesday. I’m sitting in my office and I’m adding up the number of people I’d spoken to that year. And that year I’d spoken to 156,000 people and I was patting myself on the back thinking that I was pretty great. And two days later, I was deflated because two days later I started reading a George Barna book, and George Barna never leaves you feeling good.

(19:41):
He points out the problems, he points out the trends. He says, we are losing. But the thing that got me was, and we all know that there’s times when God amplifies something and whether it’s a scripture that you’ve read so many times before this particular time, it was a statistic that I knew, but it grabbed my heart differently. On Tuesday, I’m excited about 156,000. In the first paragraph of this new book that I’m reading to prepare for the new year, it says that there are 33 million teenagers in the United States. And I went from feeling, really, I’m sorry,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:16):
That’s a huge number. It’s it’s a great harvest field that Jesus says, pray that God would send laborers out into the harvest field.

Sean Dunn (20:25):
And I went from really excited about 156,000 to being deflated. And it put me into this kind, a little bit of a tailspin for three months where nobody knew what I was struggling with, but I was struggling with my model of ministry because God was doing something different in me. And I had three epiphanies that came out of this. Number one is my model won’t meet the need. There is no way, even if I can triple what I’m doing and get it to half a million people, it’s a drop in the bucket. Second thing I realized was in the western world, heathens don’t go to Christian events. So I’m an evangelist who’s speaking to people who agree with me. And I was saying, God, where the lost? Where are the lonely? Where are the discouraged? I started to ask questions like, God, how do we reach a generation?

(21:13):
Doesn’t want to be in the same room with us. How do we reach a generation that plugs their ears every time we disagree with them? And the third one was scripture says, go into all the world. And I kept saying, come to me. And I was really wrestling with that. And three months in, as God tends to do, he just gave me a statistic that set us on a new journey. And that statistic changed my paradigm immediately. And the statistic is no longer relevant, but it simply said that 97% of the students in the nation listened to the radio at least five times a week in 2003. And I went to my board and I said, if we know where they are, why do we keep asking them to come where they don’t want to be? Let’s go to them. Let’s go buy time on these alternative rock stations, hip hop stations, country stations.

(22:05):
And so we started on traditional media. We started on radio. We added tv. We were on MTV, vh one Adult Swim. We were buying time on those major platforms. We added billboards. But our biggest pivot came in 2017. I went to my board and I said, young people consume media differently than we do. I love telling people my age that we’re talking about Jesus on MTV because we remember what MTV used to be, but it no longer has that influence, and the audience has changed dramatically. I said, they look at the small screen, not the big screen. I said, if we want to be relevant, we have to figure out how to invade their phone. And that’s really what we started to do, and that’s really when our scale began to grow. Can I share with you some of our numbers from last

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (22:53):
Year? Yeah. Please tell us what results have you seen?

Sean Dunn (22:57):
Yeah. So first of all, let me tell you that the numbers seem like I had a friend tell me, they’re like video game numbers. They don’t seem real. I had another guy in Houston look at me and say, Sean, I want to believe you, but I don’t. He said, because I know how difficult it is, the Western world Church doesn’t know how to reach young people in mass. And he said, I know how expensive it is. And so he challenged me. He said, don’t come back and talk to me until you get your numbers validated, but if you get them validated, please come back and talk to me. So we took that as a challenge. We called the Ranon Foundation, said, who do you trust to do non to do nonprofit metric evaluation and make sure that they’re not fudging the truth? And so they gave us the name that everybody trusts. And so we called ’em and said, Hey, we need you to do a deep dive. So they do that every couple of years for us. I can provide that if anybody has questions, but they basically validate our numbers. So here’s our numbers. In 2023, our commercials were seen 1.3 billion times.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (23:58):
Wow.

Sean Dunn (24:00):
And the way you measure if your marketing is effective is how many people take steps of the 1.3 billion? We had 6.8 million people take the next step and visit one of our websites. George Barnes, as the average church in the United States sees one person a year come to Christ. Last year we saw 567,545 pray to receive Christ.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:24):
Praise God.

Sean Dunn (24:26):
And here’s another one too. Churches and denominations in the US will tell you that it costs ’em over $35,000 on average to see one person give their life to Christ. Last year, our all in costs was $6 and 51 cents.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:41):
Wow.

Sean Dunn (24:42):
So it’s been mind blowing. And I talk about when I was traveling and speaking and people were asking me to sign things, my head was just, I thought it was all about me. This is really a humbling place to be because we know that God is doing this, and our job is just to make sure we stay as close to him as possible. He’s got the strategies, he’s got the messaging. We just need to be faithful and not get in his way.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (25:07):
So with all the advertising you’re doing, that’s a pretty significant budget. How do you raise money to put into evangelism? Do you have people that help to support you?

Sean Dunn (25:20):
We do, absolutely. Yeah. And it really is just about telling our story. There’s people out there that are saying, man, I care about my kids, my grandkids. I care about culture. I care about the morale in our nation. Some of ’em truly care about evangelism, and they say, man, I want to invest in something that’s effective. And so, yeah, it has become easier and easier to tell our story as we’ve continued to see more and more people come to Christ. And so people know that, okay, so for every $7 that came in last year, somebody walks the island, gives their life to Christ, and we have people say, Hey, I think I want to take care of 10, or I want to do a hundred, or I want to do a thousand. And so yeah, we continue just to let God bring in the resources and we invest it well when it’s given to

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (26:07):
Us. That’s amazing. So if someone wants to support you, how do they find out more information about how they can do that?

Sean Dunn (26:15):
If you go to ground wire.net, that is really the best website for that. So all of the other websites are facing the young people we’re reaching. So we don’t have donation buttons on those sites. We don’t. Here’s who we are about us. We just have messages. We’re trying to funnel them directly into the God conversations. But if you want to learn about us, go to ground wire.net and you can request request those financials. You can request our metrics audits that we’re happy to share with you, whatever we can, but you’ll probably find most of it on that site.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (26:54):
That’s awesome. Now, you mentioned this big number of young people that are giving their lives to Jesus, and as an evangelist, one of the questions I’m always asked, I’m sure you’ve been asked a thousand times. What do you do about follow-up? How do you get them to the next step?

Sean Dunn (27:11):
Yeah, so we have two primary goals this year. One is on the evangelism side, one ISS on the follow-up side. Our evangelism goal is to see a minimum of a million professions of faith in the calendar year. We are on track. We’re very, very close to that. As we approach the new year, we need to pick up just a little bit of steam to hit that goal. But the second one is to see 30% of those who make a profession of faith take a meaningful and measured step in their spiritual journey. So that can be everything from signing up for our, we have a discipleship drip that we call Hope Connection, where for 16 days it’s delivered to their cell phone. It’s basically spiritual discipline, but young people don’t want to be told what to do. They want to watch somebody else’s story about how did reading the Bible change their life?

(28:02):
And then they get to decide if they want to do it. We are building an online community on the app called Discord, which is an app that young people are very familiar with because it was built for the gaming community to have community. And we’re building a community there called Chasing Christ. That’s another one of our growth tracks that they can opt into. We have a group of people who will walk with them for four weeks after they come to faith to figure out how do I grow closer to Christ? So we give them different options. There’s about five or six things that we offer them, and we invite ’em. We have partners. Most of what we do is in the US when we do something internationally, it’s because we have a discipleship follow-up partner in that country that will take the follow-up. And so in Kenyan, India, some countries in South America, we are partnering with some ministries that are boots on the ground to move them forward as well.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (28:58):
Now you said that you do it in both English in Spanish with your Spanish track. Are you doing some things in Central and South America?

Sean Dunn (29:07):
Yes, sir. Yeah, on the Spanish track, we’re in five other countries in, so we’re in Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, Columbia, and Argentina. I think I could be wrong, but that’s roughly what we’re doing. But yeah, we’ve found that it’s a model that’s working very, very well, even in these other countries. And so when we have the right partners on the ground, we take our expertise in the marketing space and we take our massive coaches and we move in and buying marketing in their country.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (29:43):
That’s awesome. And I think that’s very innovative. Every country I go to around the world, I mean, people all have very nice cell phones. They spend a lot of time on cell phones just like kids here do. And so I think that your strategy will work well in many different countries and even in some Asian countries where here you would pay a significant amount for each impression. In some countries, I’ve done some advertising and it can be pennies to reach thousands of people. And so there’s just so many people and the advertising isn’t expensive in some other parts of the world like it is here. So I think the years to come as you strive to reach your million and even beyond that, I really pray God gives you a strategy that will work around the world.

Sean Dunn (30:43):
Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. Our board said a couple of years ago, we weren’t going to even begin to think internationally until we hit a milestone of a thousand or a hundred thousand Professor of Faith in the US in a calendar year. Because the quickest way to destroy momentum is to try and grow too quickly. So when we hit that a couple of years ago, we began to explore internationally. But our focus continues to be the us. This is where we believe, this is my calling. It is Western world predominantly us young people who have everything, and yet they have nothing because they don’t have Jesus.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (31:18):
That’s awesome. Well, Sean, it’s really wonderful to talk to you today. Thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast. Really appreciate it. And I love your strategy. I love what you’re doing. The young people of America need a touch from Jesus, and you’re connecting them to Jesus right where they’re at. So thank you for what you do, and thank you for being on the Evangelism Podcast.

Sean Dunn (31:45):
Thank you, Daniel. I appreciate you having me.

Evangelism Podcast Announcer (31:48):
Are you called by God to be an evangelist? Do you want to lead millions of people to Jesus? Do you desire to be trained in the practical side of building a ministry? Then check out the Daniel King’s School of Evangelism. Learn how to be an effective evangelist from Dr. Daniel King’s 20 plus years of experience. Daniel King has done crusades all over the world in over 70 nations and is seen over 2 million people give their lives to Jesus. But it wasn’t easy. There was no crusade school. So Daniel traveled the world learning from and observing top evangelists, noticing how they successfully won souls for Christ. Now he wants to share decades of knowledge and experience with you. Topics of the Daniel King School of Evangelism include what is an evangelist, how to be a master soul winner, how to give antar call, how to organize a crusade, how to raise money for your ministry, and much more. If you want to be an evangelist, but don’t know where to start, the Daniel King School of Evangelism is for you. Enroll today in the School of Evangelism by going to Daniel King ministries.com/evangelism.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (32:50):
Thanks so much for listening today. I am excited about telling people about Jesus, and I want to invite you to be a part of helping us to rescue people from Hell and take them with us to heaven. There’s two things you can do to help. First of all, can you go find the Evangelism podcast on Apple iTunes and leave us a positive review by giving a review, you will help other people find these valuable resources about sharing our faith. And second, would you become a financial partner with King Ministries. Every single dollar that people give us enables us to lead at least one person to Jesus. And so that means for only $1, you can help start a party in heaven. And so today, I want to invite you to become a monthly partner. You can start out for just a dollar, but if God puts it on your heart to do more, of course you can do more. But please go to king ministries.com and become a monthly partner with us today to help us to lead more people to Jesus. Thank you so much, and God bless you.

Evangelism Podcast Host (34:10):
For more information about how to share your faith or to financially support our worldwide evangelistic outreaches, visit king ministries.com. Again, that’s king ministries.com.

 

 

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The post Sean Dunn | Reaching Millennials and Gen Z With Innovative Digital Strategies appeared first on King Ministries | Evangelist Daniel King | Our Goal? Every Soul!.

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Congo Meets Christ the Healer https://kingministries.com/lives-changed-forever/congo-meets-christ-the-healer/ Fri, 23 Aug 2024 16:00:38 +0000 https://kingministries.com/?p=8382 At all of our crusades, we see God do amazing healing miracles. Our crusade in Gandajika in the Democratic Republic of Congo was no different. Here are some testimonies from people who were touched by the power of God.  

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At all of our crusades, we see God do amazing healing miracles. Our crusade in Gandajika in the Democratic Republic of Congo was no different. Here are some testimonies from people who were touched by the power of God.

 

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Bret Sipek | Crusade Planning in Africa https://kingministries.com/podcast-episodes/bret-sipek-crusade-planning-in-africa/ Wed, 21 Aug 2024 04:58:57 +0000 https://kingministries.com/?p=8326 Today on The Evangelism Podcast, Daniel King interviews Bret Sipek, a Christ for All Nations Crusade Director, about their recent successful crusade in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They discuss the challenges and miracles they experienced during the organization of the crusade, including the logistics of transporting equipment and the overwhelming response from the people. […]

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Today on The Evangelism Podcast, Daniel King interviews Bret Sipek, a Christ for All Nations Crusade Director, about their recent successful crusade in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They discuss the challenges and miracles they experienced during the organization of the crusade, including the logistics of transporting equipment and the overwhelming response from the people. You will learn the secrets of organizing a successful crusade in Africa.

Learn more about Christ for All Nations: https://cfan.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 here today, Brett Pac. And thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast.

Bret Sipek | CFAN Crusade Director (00:12):
Thank you so very much evangelist Daniel. It’s so, such an honor for me.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:16):
So we are here in the Democratic Republic of Congo and we have just completed a very successful crusade in Ika with Christ for all nations. And you’ve been working with Christ for All Nations for many years, helping to organize crusades, and you have helped to organize a series of crusades across the nation. Tell me what have been some of the biggest challenges and also the biggest miracles that you’ve seen here in Congo.

Bret Sipek | CFAN Crusade Director (00:51):
Well the Congo, as you can see, democratic Republic of Congo is a very different level than many other African countries. Even some of our African coworkers, directors said, we never ever in our life seen so much poverty. So the infrastructure is very, very, very low. There are people living in the houses, there’s no water, no electricity, electricity comes from only from Gensets, which are expensive and water is distributed in the barrels and people have to buy. So there’s a lot of challenges in just a pure staying in the country. And first of all, we are amazed of the hunger of people, the response of people. People are very hunger, very responsive. We see so powerful response for altar call. I know that in Gda gca, you had almost every hand raised, I was looking at the numbers and I was like, oh my almost everybody in the crowd wants to receive Jesus. And that’s true. The country is Christianized, but many people has very more prodigal sense relationship or sleen relationships or more like a nominal Christian relationship with Jesus. So it is so important to preach gospel and we are so excited to have you here in gda gca. Yeah, it’s a great honor for us.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:26):
Well, I want to say thank you to you and to the entire staff of Christ for all nations. I know that it has been a lot of work organizing here in Congo. Great challenges. I was watching the trucks, the pictures of them coming across the country to get to this place. It took several weeks and at one point they’re only going like 30 kilometers a day because the roads are so bad.

Bret Sipek | CFAN Crusade Director (02:51):
It is, yeah. It was really a new challenge, a new level of challenge for us. And we have experienced drivers like Vinny Wetland, our chief driver. He’s very well experienced. He crisscrossed Africa, all the roads that you can imagine, and he really believed that he will be able to, he would be able to make it, but they had to stop and they had to go back to Mumbai after three, four days, pushing forward, pressing forward. It was simply impossible because they have 20 meters, 60 feet, long track, very heavy, like 40 metric tons. And you can go on the road and suddenly there is a big, big bump down, maybe one and a half meter, five feet deep, and in between are another bumps. So the trucks, they had to use beams to support the wheels. It was so difficult, so much dust because it’s a dry season. It was very a load load of dust. So we had to and unload, unload and load everything to the local, they call it hobo trucks. It’s more like kind of construction side tracks or kind of military truck with higher, higher chassis and bigger wheels. And that’s how we finally get it to the crusade locations. That was the biggest logistics challenge probably in so many

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:23):
Years. I mean this is true pioneer crusading. It is, yeah. But it’s very rewarding because in Ganja where I was, there had never been a crusade there before. The people were so hungry and they came from everywhere and they were ready to receive Jesus.

Bret Sipek | CFAN Crusade Director (04:44):
Yeah, I’ve seen the photos. It was powerful crowd and all our stuff on ground, they were amazed. And you are very right. There was never, ever international evangelist crusade, like maybe some local crusades. We sometimes call it like church yard crusade, which is good. People can come, but typically like one 2000 people know your number. I was looking like 50, 60,000, maybe even bigger. I was so amazed. It never ever a day, never ever heard in this city. And it was the same for we do all, actually we already did four ess including Yor, inand, gca in every place. We were amazed like

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:22):
This. And you have two more coming up. We have

Bret Sipek | CFAN Crusade Director (05:24):
Two more. We have two more in another big, big city called Kanga, probably 1.2 million people. So we expect another great

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:32):
Harvest. And my good friend Nathan Morris is coming for that crusade. You’re

Bret Sipek | CFAN Crusade Director (05:35):
Excited

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:36):
To have the nation. It’s wonderful. And Ruben’s, Kya will come as well this coming week. And so it is really exciting to see the teamwork between different ministries, different evangelists working together.

Bret Sipek | CFAN Crusade Director (05:49):
I believe that that’s the part of end time vision that we are really standing together. Evangelists are like lone runners. You want to go and you want to press forward, push forward. But we need to understand that some territories are too big for one ministry, even for two ministry. So we really need to strategize how we can make it. And Congo, Congo is over 110 million people and the territory of Congo is 2.4 million square kilometers, which is like six times bigger than Germany in Europe. It is huge territory. And as there is no logistics, we need to go to some region. Now we are in the region called Kasai, Kasai Central Car Oriental, and it’s just a little part of Congo in a way. But still we need combined four like yourself, evangelist Nathan Morris, evangelist Ruben. That’s the beauty of it. End time harvest, let’s press forward, let’s push forward.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:51):
Together everyone achieves more. We can do it by working together. Now you have come from the Czech Republic and you were friends with one of my friends, Terry Hinshaw and Terry and Brenda Hinshaw many years ago went to the Czech Republic to plant a church, a victory Christian Center. And you knew them all the way back

Bret Sipek | CFAN Crusade Director (07:17):
All those years ago. It was more than 30 years ago. As you know, evangelist Billy Ty, he did a crusade in St. Petersburg, Russia in early nineties after the fall of regime.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:30):
That was the first crusade I ever went to. Really? I was 14 years old. I went to one of the Crusades in St. Petersburg, Peter Praise. And I remember 30,000 people ran as fast as they could to the altar call when he gave the altar call. They were so hungry for God, they just ran forward. And I think that had a big impact on my life and is one of the reasons that I’m so excited about being an evangelist.

Bret Sipek | CFAN Crusade Director (07:52):
It was kind of like Holy Spirit outpouring in Eastern Europe and Soviet Union right after the communist regime collapsed. We’ve seen it in many countries in Czech Republic, in Hungary, in Bulgaria, most very much in Russia, Soviet United at this time. So it was, people are so hungry for God. And at this time we connected with, as you mentioned, with missionaries Terry and Brenda Hechos. We helped them to relocate from St. Petersburg to Czech Republic and then help them to start a church. It was great. We have great memories. It was so beautiful time.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:31):
Then how did you get connected with Christ for all Nations?

Bret Sipek | CFAN Crusade Director (08:33):
Well, I always admired Evangelist Rein Haron from early eighties when I seen him pushing forward in Africa. And it was kind of like my dream to meet him sometime and to be around him. And it happened in 2002 when he came to Prague, Czech Republic for a small Christian conference, and I happened be his driver driving evangelist Bunker. It was a great privilege and great experience because he was sharing his heart and his heart was evangelism. His life was what he was preaching, just so winning. So winning, so winning. I asked him whatever question I could ask. He always end up with evangelism. So many. I was like, oh my. He’s so much focus at this time. I realized focus in your life is something that will take you way higher. So evangelism was like embodiment of focus. Focus on the soul’s focus on Africa. Africa shall bee. So it was my first connection in 2002, and then I ended up to go for on Cruise eight one, cruise eight in Aki Nigeria. And it was mind blowing. It was time of huge opening and outpouring of holy the Spirit after 10 years of closed in Nigeria. And it was time of super, super great harvest and powerful miracles.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:52):
And what is your role with Christ for all nations now?

Bret Sipek | CFAN Crusade Director (09:55):
I am a crusade director and in a way, crusade Director is somebody who’s preparing the stage for evangelists like yourself or evangelist Reinhard Bonky and or now evangelist Daniel Kolenda. My goal is to see the powerful harvest. I’m praying for harvest. It is like mobilizing all the local churches. We are meeting hundreds of churches sitting with bishops, these pastors, and face-to-face, sharing the vision. It may seem easy to get several hundred pastors together, but I can tell you it’s not that easy as it may seem. They have so many different opinions, so many different church backgrounds. So it’s a lot of work. As Evangelist Bunker used to say, you have to drink a lot of coffees to cast the vision. So that’s what we are doing, casting division. And then of course we need to do a lot of logistics things and mobilizing training the volunteers. We are training for your crusade. In gda gca, we trained well over 10,000 local volunteers, giving them teaching what we want to do, how we want to reach out to people on ground. And after that, when you have to make the bridge from the crusade to the churches. So that’s the big part. And then of course the event management itself that you experience. We are on the meeting, we have everything on spot. Generators are working like sound is working on. It may seems easy when the show runs, but the

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:26):
Backstage, there’s a lot of logistics behind it. It is, it is. They say with the military, they run on logistics. And I think it’s true of crusade evangelism too. The logistics is so important. It’s not just the preaching. There is so much that goes on behind the scenes to make a successful event.

Bret Sipek | CFAN Crusade Director (11:47):
I always say to our directors, if you want to fire fall on some ground, you need to prepare a lot of material, which is flammable like a lot of wood. Everything that you can bring together. And this is our task, prepare everything, make sure that people would come definitely for the first night or for the whole crusades, because when people are there and evangelists preach gospel and the Holy Spirit come, there is thousand or tens of thousand people that are ready to hear because we are preparing them for it. And if you do a lousy job as a crusade director, you have just few hundred people. Evangelists can do his best. He can preach his heart, and it doesn’t have too much impact because there is just few hundred people. But if there is already 10, 20, or in your case, I would think that the first night it was already like 70,000 people. It was mind blowing. In other crusades, we typically see five, 10, maybe 15,000. But in here in Congo, everything is twice or three times bigger. And we are really excited

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:49):
Now. Something very special happened this last week here in Muji Maya. Your daughter preached a woman’s crusade. And tell me about that and how that came to pass.

Bret Sipek | CFAN Crusade Director (13:01):
No, Yana, Ava, our daughter, she’s here with her husband David. He’s working as a technician. She had a dream to preach gospel in Congo. She was preaching now in Uganda and in many, many different places in churches doing kind of this crusade director’s work. Now she’s transiting, although to being evangelist, and she’s doing I believe very, very good. And the dream was like, I want to preach gospel in Ji Mai. But when we shared with a local bishop, they were like, yeah, well, we don’t like women to preach. They should rather sit at home and maybe do cooking or cleaning of the house, all these old school mentality. So you cannot change the whole culture in one shot. But we didn’t want to just submit. We were like, okay, okay, what we can do, what the woman can do. Okay, she can sing. She can prophesize. She can teach ladies. Oh good. If she can teach ladies, she can preach like the ladies conference or ladies crusade. Yeah, for sure. No problem. So that was the discussion. So that’s how we jumped into this ladies crusade. Of course, many children and many husbands came, so no doubt.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:16):
Well, I heard her preach the other night and the adulterous woman, and she did such a powerful job. Amen. Your daughter is a great evangelist. Amen. You were sitting on the platform with your wife and I could see you are a very proud papa.

Bret Sipek | CFAN Crusade Director (14:29):
Proud, proud papa. Yeah, definitely. Honestly, when I was young, it was my dream to preach Crusades. Now my dream is a little bit different. I want to train crusade directors. That’s my dream to see that there are evangelists trained by evangelist Daniel Kolenda or other evangelistic ministries. But we also need to train crusade directors because without crusade directors, the impact of evangelists is limited. So that’s my dream. So we are now training teams of these crusade directors, and that’s how we can do six crusades in three weeks because we have six teams. And that’s the beauty

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:04):
Of it. Well, I say thank God for that vision. Every crusade evangelist needs a good crusade director. And so I believe that as God raises up more evangelists, more people that have gifts with administration and organizing and meeting pastors and all of the logistics of doing the crusade, God will raise them up as well. Praise God. We need them

Bret Sipek | CFAN Crusade Director (15:25):
All. Amen. Thank you so very much for,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:27):
Well, brother Brent, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast and thank you for your work here. And thank you for organizing such a beautiful crusading. It was wonderful.

Bret Sipek | CFAN Crusade Director (15:38):
Daniel, thank you for coming. We really honor you. We appreciate your hard work. We know that it’s not easy to come to travel in and out to fundraise. Thank you so very much. We really honor you and let’s pray and strategize for the future, how the impact on the territories can be even bigger. So thank you so very much and God bless you and thank you for having me.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (16:00):
Amen. Amen.

 

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How to Take a City for God | Evangelist Daniel King https://kingministries.com/podcast-episodes/how-to-take-a-city-for-god-evangelist-daniel-king/ Wed, 21 Aug 2024 04:57:25 +0000 https://kingministries.com/?p=8329 How can we take a city for God? As evangelists we want to take cities and regions and nations for the Kingdom of God. But as we find out today in an Old Testament story, sometimes it is not easy to take a city for God. Recently I was asked to give a devotion to […]

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How can we take a city for God? As evangelists we want to take cities and regions and nations for the Kingdom of God. But as we find out today in an Old Testament story, sometimes it is not easy to take a city for God. Recently I was asked to give a devotion to the organizing team for a crusade in Gandajika, Congo. On today’s episode of The Evangelism Podcast, you will find out that the people who take cities for God are heroes in heaven.

 

 

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!.

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Evangelism Bootcamp Graduates On the Field https://kingministries.com/podcast-episodes/evangelism-bootcamp-graduates-on-the-field/ Wed, 21 Aug 2024 04:45:59 +0000 https://kingministries.com/?p=8332 At our crusade in Gandajika in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I had the opportunity to sit down with some of the graduates of the Christ for All Nations Evangelism Bootcamp. They all came to Congo to help with organizing the crusade. Today on the Evangelism Podcast they share about what they have learned as […]

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At our crusade in Gandajika in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I had the opportunity to sit down with some of the graduates of the Christ for All Nations Evangelism Bootcamp. They all came to Congo to help with organizing the crusade. Today on the Evangelism Podcast they share about what they have learned as evangelists and about the calling that God has on their lives. You will be inspired by their stories to do great things for God.

 

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 am in Ngandajika. Congo DRC, and we have a tremendous team here that has been helping to organize everything. And so I have with me some of the graduates from the Christ for All Nations Evangelism Bootcamp. And so they came to Orlando to be trained and now they are sent out and we are together here in Congo. And so let’s just begin by each of you introducing yourself and telling me who you are and where you’re from. My

Jasper Kim (00:41):
Name is Jasper Kim, and I am from Los Angeles, California.

Anastasiia Dvoinikova (00:47):
My name is Anastasia Awa, and I was born in Russia, but now I live in Orlando, Florida.

Grace Smith (00:53):
My name is Grace Smith. I was born in Zimbabwe and I now live in United Kingdom.

Maxie Smith (01:00):
My name is Maxie Smith. I live in England, but my parents come from Jamaica. I live in London, England.

Jacob Habiye (01:08):
My name is Jacob Habiye. I am from Tanzania. ausa.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:14):
Well, let’s start with you Jacob. What did you learn in the Evangelism Bootcamp? How did you end up at the Evangelism Bootcamp? And then what did you learn while you were there?

Jacob Habiye (01:27):
So the bootcamp, I learned about to have a heart for the lost, and I know I did before I preaching in the local church. But from there I just thinking now I’m going international and thinking about the loss. That is what I learning. And then as evangelist to have a personal relationship with God, that is really what are learning and yeah,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:54):
Can say that. So Maxie and Grace, the two of you are married. How many years have you been married Now?

Grace Smith (02:00):
We’ve been married 28

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:02):
Years. 28 years. Congratulations. And so how did you end up at the Evangelism Bootcamp?

Grace Smith (02:11):
Okay, I think he gives me the mic. Personally, I’ve been following Reinhard Bonnke’s ministry, Christ for All Nations for years. So I’ve been stalking the ministry and eventually there was a time that they were actually asking if anyone wants to come to the Crusades to sit in the crusade. And we were dreaming of that. So I told Max we were dreaming of that. So one day I saw on the website bootcamp, that was the first bootcamp. So my husband applied for that. He was accepted, applied for the second one. He was accepted. But we didn’t have enough faith to step out financially. But eventually this year’s bootcamp, we went for it and that’s how we ended up there.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:01):
And so the two of you are really a power couple. God has called you together. What did you learn while you were at the Evangelism Bootcamp?

Maxie Smith (03:13):
Yes, we learned practical evangelism that could be applied on the road. We’ve been so empowered, impacted to go out and preach the gospel. It’s been so excited. We’ve learned the need to pray and be constantly before God. We’ve learned how to apply ourself and the things that we’ve been learning. We’ve come out to DRC to practically use them. And we’ve seen through the training of bootcamp that we have been able to apply the stuff. And for myself personally, it’s been so life transforming and changing, and I’ve learned so much practical things that I’ve been able to apply and I’ve seen lives so changed and transformed. It’s been awesome.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:03):
Anastasia, you came to the Evangelism Bootcamp and you feel called to be an evangelist, and God’s really put the Slavic people on your heart. What were some of the big things that you got out of your time at the Evangelism Bootcamp?

Anastasiia Dvoinikova (04:22):
One of the things, the biggest thing which I get out of the bootcamp, it’s no compromises when you’re preaching the gospel because this is what many people doing when they’re preaching the gospel. Either they’re not mentioning sin or something, but this is a critical in the gospel to mention sin, to mention repentance. And in the Slavic community, it’s often you can see that they’re not preaching about that stuff. And so when you’re growing in your faith, it’s not really mentioning. And in the bootcamp, the big part for me, it was preaching the clear gospel, not only simple gospel, but the clear gospel and the true gospel.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:01):
Jasper, it has really been tremendous to be a teacher in each different year that the bootcamp has been running. And so I’ve had the opportunity to come and do several days of training for each bootcamp. Do you remember anything that you learned in my class that really impacted

Jasper Kim (05:23):
You? Oh man, Daniel, you know what I really remember was when you came and you were critiquing all of us, when we were giving our stories, I believe it was a boat story. And you really gave us really practical advice on what we need to do to do things better and what we could add, what we could take out. And these little tips are critical tips that only like an experienced evangelist can really see and identify. So I believe that part of you coming to bootcamp was awesome. Also, just your story and your testimony when you told us about what you do, how long you’ve been doing it, and just seeing someone with such a heart for evangelism, it truly inspires us to see that, to see someone actually living what we aspire to do for the Lord. So I think that was a big thing,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:13):
And God’s brought us together here in Gica one more time. And so it’s just been wonderful to spend time with each of you, and all of you have had a very significant part to play in helping with the outreach here. And so Jasper, one of the things that you were helping with, which was a big hassle here, was generators. Talk to me about the generators and what happened here in Conica trying to get the generator to the crusading.

Jasper Kim (06:43):
I’m going to try and do this in just a little jam packed kind of explanation. But yeah, so the roads out here in DRC are so just treacherous and rugged. It’s probably the most difficult terrain that I personally have seen, and I’ve driven in snow, I’ve driven in mud and all these different terrains. DRC is on another level. So logistics is really a nightmare to move things from one city to another. And yeah, we have big semi-truck that need to get things across. So my personal responsibility was getting power to our sound system, getting power to our lights through these generators. But finding a good generator and being able to transport it across cities has been such a big task. It’s been really difficult, but the Lord’s really been making it possible. We do everything we can on our end, Daniel, but in the end, the Lord is the one that really, really comes through and really pulls miracles

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:45):
For us. On Wednesday night, we were in Muji Maya and one of the generators stopped working. Yes. And that’s a horrible tragedy for a crusade because suddenly the people cannot hear. And that’s the whole reason we’re here, is so that people can hear the gospel. Exactly. And so for 25 minutes it wasn’t working, and finally the repairman came and he fixed it and it got working again. But he was supposed to be there all the time. And he’d wandered off. Yes. And he wasn’t supposed to. Exactly. And you talked to him. What did you tell him?

Jasper Kim (08:20):
Oh man, I, I don’t like having to raise my voice unless I don’t have to. But in this moment I had no choice because we literally had no power, no sound for 30 minutes. And that’s probably the worst case scenario when it comes to what we do, mass gospel crusades. So yeah, I had to really tell ’em like, Hey, you cannot leave. You have to stay here. And I had to say it in a kind of a loud tone, so that’s what I had to do.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:49):
But it’s worked every night since. It’s worked

Jasper Kim (08:51):
Every night since. And he’s been great and I apologize to the guy. And we’re on great terms now. So

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:58):
Here in Ika, there was a need for a generator and you found one that was actually built into a house. And so you had to rent a backhoe, a big shovel truck to actually lift the roof off the house and then lift the generator out of the house and put it on a dump truck to bring to the crusade. Exactly. So it is quite the challenge to have power. So your job is to get power to the sound system. My job as the preacher is to get the power of God to the people. Hallelujah. Come on. But both are needed. We need both kind of

Jasper Kim (09:38):
Power. That’s so

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:38):
Amazing. Alright, so I want to ask each of you, what has been your big role that you’ve played here at this crusade?

Anastasiia Dvoinikova (09:47):
So my big role here, overall, I’m interning with the senior director, but in Gada Gica, I’m a crusade photographer.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:57):
I gave you my camera. You’ve been running around getting pictures. I told you to take lots of pictures. I think the other night you came back with over 500 pictures and many of them were so good.

Anastasiia Dvoinikova (10:08):
Praise God. Praise

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:09):
God. So you just jump in with your talent.

Anastasiia Dvoinikova (10:11):
Yeah, this was happening when you on the crusade, you need to fill the need where it’s the most needed.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:19):
Yeah. Now Grace, you have a couple of different roles here. You are one of the scribes that is recording everything that happens. Why is that important? Tell me about what you do there and why it’s important.

Grace Smith (10:35):
Okay. So I have to make sure that I’m there when the service starts, and then I’ll record every moment of what is happening on the stage in from when you come on the stage, the mc. And it’s so important because then it allows everybody to know what is actually happening in. So it’s like a live scribe of what is happening. So anyone who is in the United States can actually know that, okay, we are starting the worship, the the worship team is there. So that’s what I’ve been doing. So it’s been important, but the most important thing is the testimonies as well. So if there’s no picture, if there’s no’s, no story. So I take the picture and then I write literally I have to type as the testimonies are going on. But I think one of the most challenging was trying to get the names because the names are French,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:36):
They’re hard to understand,

Grace Smith (11:37):
They’re very hard to understand, hard to spell hard. The pronunciation I, I’ve done my best to actually make sure that everything is in place up until the evangelist leaves the stage and leaves the field. I think of that time I have to be really focused in what is actually going on on the crusade.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:00):
And then you also are in charge of hospitality, and so you have been helping with the meals. You can’t go to the supermarket to buy food. Where do you find the food to feed everyone? Mama Grace.

Grace Smith (12:13):
That has been very challenging. I mean, this hotel that you’re staying in is quite a new hotel. So there’s no kitchen, there’s no food. But we’ve got another hotel that some of the C fund stuff are staying. There’s food there, but you cannot go to a supermarket or a store and buy stuff. So the lady who actually cooks there has to buy things from Ji Mai. So all the transport that goes to Ji Mai comes. So I’ve given her, which

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:41):
Is a challenge because Muji Mai is four hours away over very bumpy roads, is very difficult to travel from there to here. So you have to send a shopping list and then they send the food back.

Grace Smith (12:54):
So before the crusade I had to sit down with her. We went through a list of what we need, things like a burger. They don’t eat hamburgers here. They don’t eat chips here. So I had to actually take a picture to mama and show her what chips are,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:10):
What are chips, because we don’t know what those are in the United States either. Fries, french fries. In the United States, we call them french fries.

Grace Smith (13:18):
So in United Kingdom we call them chips. So the fries. So we made a list prior to the crusade and then she had to buy those things in Jamay and bring those things over. Wow. Yeah. Wow.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:31):
Brother Maxie, what have you been in charge of here?

Maxie Smith (13:34):
Yes, thank you. Yes, I’ve been in charge with working with committees. I’ve been involved with the prayer committee. People of DRC have a passion for prayer. They pray very powerfully. I’ve been organizing them and having meetings to see how best we can pray for the crusade and pray for the salvation of the people of DRC. It’s been awesome. It’s been challenging at times, gathering people from different churches, but God has been faithful and we’ve been able to gather very powerful prayer team who have prayed throughout the crusade and it’s really been an awesome time.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:12):
Brother Jacob, what have you been doing while you’ve been here?

Jacob Habiye (14:16):
Before Crusade, I was helping in promotion. So to put all material

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:22):
Posters for How long have you been here in the city

Jacob Habiye (14:24):
For three weeks here, inand

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:26):
Chica. Okay. And so you were helping to put up the posters?

Jacob Habiye (14:29):
Yes.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:30):
You have done a good job. The wall in front of our hotel, it’s a big wall. Every inch of the wall is covered in a yellow poster. It looks like a billboard. And so you were helping to coordinate the local teams that were

Jacob Habiye (14:47):
Putting out the publicity? Yeah, so the local team, we start with a three by two billboard and then we come with light poles. And then the last week before crusade we put some posters. And so that is before crusade. And during the crusade I’m helping in security and technical.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:05):
Wonderful. Yeah. Well, God’s call is upon each one of your lives, and I want to hear a little bit about what you feel that God is calling you to do in the future. You’ve got your training, you’ve come here and you’ve done work on the ground. What do you feel God is calling you to in the future?

Jacob Habiye (15:28):
For me, this is what I feel, and I already start even doing is for youth ministry. That is what God called me to do to evangelize with youth. So I did like for 10 years ago, before even I meet with Han, so I was doing in the local, preaching the schools is what God put in my heart to do. So when I go to the bootcamp, I’m learning also, it is not about going to the maybe pulpit to preach. You can evangelize, you can do evangelism, even one by one, everywhere in the bus, everywhere you can do that is really what I learned before. It’s like, okay, maybe I need to go on the stage to preach, be Avengers. But when I went there, no. So there’s Jesus at the door one by one. And then so for me, everywhere I go, even when I came here, when I saw those youth and kids, and it is really touched my heart is what God’s called for me to really put to help youth to know Jesus,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (16:36):
Maxie and grace. What do you see God doing in the future in your ministry?

Maxie Smith (16:42):
Yes, we feel called to crusades and we would hope to step out and do some mini crusades. We’re learning all the time, learning how to,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (16:51):
Where do you want to do crusades? You’re from Great Britain and Jamaica and Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe. So those are three good countries to start in. Do you see yourself doing crusades in those countries?

Maxie Smith (17:05):
Yeah, we would love to go to Zimbabwe to do a crusade and looking at Jamaica also. But the first goal would be to go towards Zimbabwe.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:15):
My wife and I, we did a crusade in Jamaica in Montego Bay. One week after our honeymoon. We took a big team with us and we took all the money that people gave us at our reception and we used it to pay for the crusade. That’s amazing. And the team was out to ministering every day. But we were just home from our honeymoon and we mostly stayed in the hotel. We were not interested in going out and ministering. We came out to preach at the crusade, but we pretty much stayed inside the hotel the rest of the time. But I believe God will use you in Jamaica. Jamaica needs a touch from God and Zimbabwe and even Great Britain. When you see what is happening in the news in Great Britain right now, it needs a revival. So many people there are in a post-Christian world, they don’t even consider themselves to be a Christian heritage anymore. And so I believe God will give you an opening in each of those nations and to other nations across Africa and around the world. In Jesus’ name. Anastasia, you speak Russian, you have a heart for the Russian speaking world. Tell me, what has God put on your heart to do in the future?

Anastasiia Dvoinikova (18:43):
So after finishing bootcamp, I’ve really felt to organize not only a massive crusades in the countries where nobody wants to go, like Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Stan, even South Korea, North Korea, in the countries where I don’t hear people doing a crusades or if they had a crusades. It was long time ago, and I don’t hear anything at this point, but I really want to see not just like a cities coming to Jesus, but like a nations, a massive transformation of a whole nations coming to Jesus and just coming to him and finding him again because for the Slavic, we have an inheritance in the Christianity, but the more generation is going, the more people forgetting about it. And I want just to see them coming back to the feet of

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:42):
Jesus and to have the fire of the Holy Spirit.

Anastasiia Dvoinikova (19:44):
Amen.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:46):
Amen. Jasper, what’s God put on your heart?

Jasper Kim (19:50):
Oh yeah. I believe the Lord has put on my heart just really like Asian nations. I just always felt like a, now

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:00):
You’re Asian in

Jasper Kim (20:01):
Heritage

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:02):
From South Korea.

Jasper Kim (20:03):
Yeah, my parents are Korean. But

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:05):
You grew up in

Jasper Kim (20:06):
Born and raised in America.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:08):
America, born

Jasper Kim (20:08):
And raised in America. So

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:09):
You’re American by culture, but you look like you’re

Jasper Kim (20:12):
South Korean. My blood is Korean, but I am actually born and raised in California. So

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:19):
Yeah. So God’s put Asia on your heart.

Jasper Kim (20:21):
Yeah, God’s put Asia on my heart even I kind of feel even Asia, Africa obviously, because here now, and I’ve been here for the past couple years with C fan kind, I feel like this is a preparation season for me, but also our home nation of America. I know the Lord is going to, there’s going to be a time where the Lord calls me back to our home and really start evangelizing out there because the Lord knows America needs it. Amen. Really bad America needs him right now.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:52):
Amen. Especially la, the area you. Exactly. California. They need Jesus.

Jasper Kim (20:58):
Pray for California.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:59):
Amen. Amen. Well, let’s finish with a word of prayer. I want to just pray over each one of you a dear heavenly Father, I thank you for these mighty evangelists. They’ve graduated from the Evangelism Bootcamp and they are pursuing your call upon their lives. Lord, I pray that you would open up great doors of ministry for them. Lord, I pray that through their ministries, through their influence, many thousands of people all over the world would come to know you. Lord, I thank you that you are raising up an army of evangelists that will go all over the world preaching the gospel. In Jesus’ name I pray, amen. Amen.

 

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8332
Mike Kasonde | Crusade Organization in Gandajika, Congo https://kingministries.com/podcast-episodes/mike-kasonde-crusade-organization-in-gandajika-congo/ Wed, 21 Aug 2024 04:44:40 +0000 https://kingministries.com/?p=8335 What is the process for setting up a crusade? How long does it take to organize a crusade? What are the vital phases of crusade organization? On today’s Evangelism Podcast, I speak with Pastor Mike from Zambia. He has just finished organizing a successful crusade in Gandajika, Congo. If you want to learn how to […]

The post Mike Kasonde | Crusade Organization in Gandajika, Congo appeared first on King Ministries | Evangelist Daniel King | Our Goal? Every Soul!.

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What is the process for setting up a crusade? How long does it take to organize a crusade? What are the vital phases of crusade organization? On today’s Evangelism Podcast, I speak with Pastor Mike from Zambia. He has just finished organizing a successful crusade in Gandajika, Congo. If you want to learn how to organize a crusade, today’s episode is for you.

 

 

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 Mike Kasonde.

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (00:10):
Oh yes.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:11):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast.

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (00:13):
Thank you very much, evangelist. I’m so excited.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:16):
It is very special being here with you. We are in the city of Ngandajika, Democratic Republic of Congo, and you have been living here since last February as a crusade director for the Crusade, which we have done here this week, and we have seen God do amazing things. Tell me what excited you about what you saw God do this week.

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (00:45):
Wow, wow, wow. I think first and foremost, it was really, really an honor to have you come as a guest evangelist to Gica and just how God uses you, especially when it comes to delivering the gospel. It was more than I expected to see. I’ve been in different crusades, but this one I really want to really, really keen into one particular thing, the delivery of the gospel, how people receive the gospel, how connected they were, and we could see instant transformation. I would set an example when you did the children’s crusade, how before that, how the children were so they could move around. They were so

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:41):
Yeah. One night the kids were at the front, they were pushing, they were fighting and the people from the back were pushing them and it actually was a little dangerous. It looked like in a moment, very, very dangerous. It could all get out of control. But then we did the children’s Festival Festival and the demeanor of the children completely changed. Exactly.

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (02:01):
It completely changed. And when they came in the afternoon for the bigger crusade, they were calm. They were just there enjoying what was happening. And of course, talking about the great miracles that God did, healing the people, especially the brother who had an injury in his chest because he had an accident of the motorbike.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:23):
Yeah, he was driving down the road on his motorbike. He hit a hole in the road and it threw him off the bike. He hit his chest and for one year he had trouble breathing. One

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (02:32):
Year he had trouble breathing and you could even tell the excitement after God touched him. And also not forgetting the fire conference man, when you did that, the pastors rejoiced the bishops. It’s something that they’ve never experienced, where pastors come together and experience the move of the Holy Spirit filled with the Holy Spirit where we could see people speaking another tongues. And in the evening you did the same on the crusade. I saw this guy sl under the Holy Spirit speaking in new tongues. So God has really, really did wonderful things on the field. I’m super excited.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:17):
So you are working with Christ for All nations. Yes. Tell me, where did you first get connected to CAM?

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (03:24):
Alright, so way back in 2022, CA came to Zambia to do five crusades. They plan to do 10, but because of one or two things, they scheduled for five. So now our city was among the five that they concluded.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:41):
In which city were you in?

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (03:42):
That was in Zambia, the city called soi, the north part of Zambia. So the city called soi, that’s where I’m coming from. So Chan came, did a crusade. I was just the vice, I mean the secretary for the youth committee because they have different committees. So I was helping out as a secretary in the youth committee, and I remember working, just gave myself to just work to see people saved. And after that I joined the protocol team during the crusade so I could ritually get on the field early leave. I would be the last person to leave the Sade field because I needed to make sure that everything is done, the evangelists are well taken care of, and they leave the field and everything is done. So from there now Chan came back to Zambia last year. They wanted to do do 10 crusades. They ended up doing 11 crusades.

(04:50):
So they were looking for local people whom they saw really had put in, sacrificed, like they really worked. So they were getting recommendations from the five cities prior to that year, last year where they did those crusade. So they were getting recommendation for local people who will be trained by C fund and they work as managers, which means that last year they had a director and the director had a manager. So they were looking for 10 people. And by God’s grace I was picked to be one of the 10 people they were looking for to work as a manager. So it was last year that I was fully, fully direct connected. I worked as a manager where I was helping the director. When the director is away, I was literally doing anything. And my director last year had two cities, one big city and a smaller city.

(05:55):
So we were two managers under him. So he took this other manager to the big city because it had a lot of concentration. Then this smaller city said, Mike, I want you to manage this ritually directed. So he just gave me what to do. He gave me what to do. So basically I could give him reports where I got stuck, I could call him, hear from him. So I literally directed and managed the crusade. So from there it is where Chan saw something and they asked me if I am willing to help in different crusades because of the outcome. Then we did the fire camp with them. So I’m a graduate for fire camp, which they did last year.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:44):
And so you were chosen to come here to Ngandajika you came in the month of February. Exactly. And now it is August. So you’ve been here for a long time. Many months. You’ve been working very hard. And first I want to say thank you so much for your hard work. I know that it is not easy to organize an event like this. There are many challenges, but I’m very grateful for you because you have done a good job. You can always tell the first night if the manager, the director, has done a good job because the number of people that come the first night is up to the organization, the posters, the flyers, everybody knowing about it. And then I always tell the crusade director, how many people come the second night is up to the preacher. If the preacher preaches good, then many people will come the second night after that, it is in the hands of the preacher, but the first night is in your hands. And every night here we have just seen God do amazing things. So tell me a little bit about the process each month, what were you doing to prepare for it? So you got here in February, what was the first thing you did?

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (07:56):
Alright, so the first thing we did is to scout the place, like go around the place, be familiar with the city. Then you do a Google mapping of all the churches. You ritually go around, you try to map the churches. How many churches are there? So the first thing we do is you do that. Then you must make sure that you find a hotel, a place to live. That’s the first thing you really want to do. So when you are settled, then you create a relationship with the big fathers of the city. So you literally ask around how many fathers are here? So

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:34):
You went and met with them, you ate with them, you became friends with them, and you began to share the vision of doing a crusade. Yeah.

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (08:44):
So when you meet those fathers, then you organize a meeting for them, and then the senior director who is Voer would come to the city and Mr. Brett probably, if he’s around, they’ll come to the city to meet these fathers. So that they’ll be the one really just emphasize on what already you’ve been talking to them about. So they really emphasize about the vision of C fund. They really need to ask them from a personal level, do you really want the crusade here? And then it is from their response and their involvement that the crusade will be chosen

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:24):
To you either say yes or no for the city.

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (09:26):
Exactly. Exactly. So once,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:28):
If there’s disunity among the pastors, I think you shake the dust off your feet like Jesus said, and go find a city that really is ready for a move of God. But thank God this city said yes, yes,

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (09:39):
Yes.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:40):
The bishop was ready,

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (09:41):
So excited. The fathers were so excited. So when we did that, then we had to break. Then we had to come back again for the second phase. Now the second phase is where now you need to run because now the BOA, the board of advisors who are the fathers of the city, they needed to give us the person we call the ECC executive committee chair person. So the executive committee chairperson needs to have his vice. So there are two people, these people are pastors. You want to choose a pastor who is young, not like a bishop, a young pastor, but well respected, well connected and has got influenced over the pastors and over the city. So when the bureau, the board of advisor gives you that person, that is the person we call the engine of the crusade because he’s the one now that needs to supervise different committees. So the first two committees that we start with is the prayer committee like Evangelist Rena Bon always said one leg preaching the

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:49):
Phe,

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (10:50):
One leg prayer. And we have a successful crusade. So you have the prayer committee, which consists of 10 or five to 10 people. So now when you have that prayer committee, they need to begin to pray for the crusade. They need to begin to pray for churches. Then the important committee that you form immediately is the church mobilization committee. So remember in the first time you did the scouting and mapping of churches, so you have an idea. But now these people comes to give you now the reality of what is on the ground, how many churches are on the ground. So you have 10 people in that committee. So those are the people who go around the city to ritually mark the churches. They get the phone number for the pastor, they get the name of the church, and at least they get an approximation of how many people are in that church.

(11:45):
But what we’d want them to do is to get all the churches, small, big, large, all the churches in the villages. So you work like with them just marking the church, marking the church. Then when they bring these churches together, then we do now what we call planning for the FTM, which is the all pastors meeting, where now we need to bring these pastors together in one big place and so that we can sell the vision to all the pastors. So these two committees are very critical in the second phase as you’re preparing the crusade. So when they bring the contact of pastors, you now come up with what we call a call center. So the same committee begins to call the pastors the same committee. You come up with letters like letters, invitation letters to the A PM. So they need to go to give letters they need

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:46):
To find And do they take them by hand to each church and deliver them to the pastors?

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (12:51):
Yes. So you divide the city in zones like this. JI was divided in four zones. So we had kaban, kaban, jiji and Luga commune, we call them zones. So you divide these guys into each zones. So this person maybe let’s say three of them in one zone. So they’ll ritually go and hand over the pastors in that zone, the invitation letters. Then you do calls. Then we do bulk SMSs where you send messages to these pastors, the invitation for the A PM, then I did radio. You need to go to radios to make an announcement. All the pastors, we are calling you to this important A PM. So now when the pastors come for the A PM, that’s when it’s like now the crusade begins to run. Now the executive director comes, the senior director comes and all top C fund officials, they come to meet these pastors. They sell the vision to them. And what do in that all pastors meeting, we ritually give them testimonies of their past crusades that we’ve done. And then we encourage them about volunteers, about counselors. We tell them we need your counselors, we need your,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:15):
How many counselors did we have trained for this crusade?

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (14:18):
Alright, so registered counselors, we had 8,000. Then I did training for those counselors. I did 4,000. I trained like 4,000 because the other 4,000 actually discovered that they were counselors from the far villages.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:37):
So they didn’t know if they could make it.

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (14:39):
Exactly. So in the A PM, the old pastors meeting, we discovered that 40% of the pastors came from these villages around because the radio message could reach them. So they had to come

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:55):
Do people from those villages, are they coming to the crusade? Yes, yes,

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (14:58):
Yes, yes. I had one lady give the testimony, I can’t just remember the testimony that she gave. She said she literally came from one of the five villages. She literally came from there. So we trained counselors. So we encourage the pastors to give us volunteers. And so what follows after the all pastors meeting is now to begin to run with the volunteers committee to go and get now the names of these counselors, they begin to call pastors or we want names. So what I did is that before we can push the pastors to give you counselors, we needed the pastors to give us two key leaders in their church. These are the people we trained as captains and we trained about 400 captains. And this time around CfAN had introduced a very wonderful thing. They gave them certificates. So if you’re trained as a captain, we give you a CfAN certificate signed by Daniel Kolenda.

(16:02):
So to them it was like an owner, they felt this, they bought into the vision. So when we train those two people, those people are very key because they’re the ones who will give you volunteers from their church. The pastor is busy, can’t start writing down names. So those two are the point of contact to that church. So they’ll give you counselors, they’ll give you volunteers, and then after that is done, you think of forming. Now the different committees. So the committees we have apart from the prayer committee, church mobilization volunteers committee, we have what we call the youth committee, youth promo committee. We have the women’s promo committee, then we have the promo committee itself to help us to do the promotion and everything.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (16:54):
That’s putting up all the posters. Exactly, the banners, the billboards.

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (16:58):
Exactly.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (16:59):
When do you put those out at what point?

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (17:02):
Third phase. So the third phase is for promo. So when you have those committees and you have all the committees put together, then you need to look now at the promo budget. So now Chan will tell you, okay, we are doing prints from this company, the poster, this is the prints that we are doing. So when C fund gives you the budget, then as a director you really want to sit. You look at the city, how many banners do I want? Should I go for three by four? Should I go for two by one? Should I go for posters? So you have to really sit down and have plan for the city

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:46):
And to know where you’re going to put the publicity.

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (17:48):
Exactly,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:48):
Exactly. And so do you remember the numbers for ganja dica? I’ve seen posters everywhere. I mean even in front of the hotel where we are, there’s a wall and there are hundreds of posters on the wall covering the entire wall. So the whole wall is yellow? Yes. And I think this is very good. Instead of just putting one poster on the wall, you make the wall into a billboard and then if someone tears down one, they cannot tear down all.

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (18:18):
And the idea behind that is also to attract people. Because from a father looking at this, what’s that? What’s the So they really want to look at it. So got gca, if I can remember very well, we had about 40,000 posters. Then I had ordered for 252 by one. Then I had 53 by two. Yeah, I mean one 50. And then I had 24 by three the big ones. Yeah.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:56):
Well you have done a good job when you come into the city, you cannot miss it. So there’s a lot of anticipation. You also go on the radio and you’re telling people and you’re running radio advertisements. Yes. And so is there one station or many stations?

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (19:12):
Okay, so in Gand, GCA is three station. We’ve got the main one in the second, then the third. So you pay for all those radios. So in this city they did 28 jingles per day for three weeks.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:27):
Wow. So how much would one jingle cost?

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (19:30):
Okay, so one jingle would cost probably a dollar. But because you’re paying for a long

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:36):
Time, you negotiate for a good deal, you negotiate for a

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (19:38):
Good deal.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:39):
So you’re running all day long. Yes, they play a song, then they play your jingle. So it’s like

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (19:44):
Every after one hour at

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:46):
The radio, everyone knows

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (19:48):
The jingle plays in all the three radio stations and it runs for three weeks. From the three weeks before the day of the crusade. And you do interviews also at the radio.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:02):
How long before the crusade do you start to train the counselors?

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (20:05):
Alright, so we do three weeks before the crusade. Then we also do a second training two weeks before the crusade.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:15):
And the counselors have books. The books for the adults are given to the adults and they capture their name. And then we also have books for the children as well. And so how are the counselors trained? What are they told to do?

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (20:31):
Okay, so the counselors, they’re told about field logistics where we tell them ritually what the field looks like, what happens on the field, when do the evangelists come on the podium to preach? Then the most important thing is about on how to use the book. So we tell them this is what we do. There are three important things you don’t want to miss in that sleep. So we show them the name. You need the phone number, which is the most important thing because your pastor need to do a follow up.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:07):
And so the name and the phone number is used to follow up on the new believers? Yes,

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (21:10):
Exactly. Exactly. So the phone number and the address. And then when they do that, then they have to take off that slip and they give the book to this person. They keep that slip, but the slip is also divided into two. The lower part is just the signature and the date. So that is for chan to do the counting. Then that which has got the name, phone number and address goes to the pastor so that the pastor comes up with a committee because we also train the pastors to do follow up. So they come up with a committee so that they can begin to call those names.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:54):
Well you’ve done a wonderful job through all this process. I know there’s so many details, but you have worked very hard and I can see that your work has been successful. Amen. And tell me what have you thought about the crusade? Are you happy with the results that we’ve

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (22:11):
Seen? I’m so excited. I’m super excited. The second day I literally wept. I was on the stage, then I went behind looking at the people, looking at how they were involved just to receive Jesus Christ. It is so emotional. You like

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (22:30):
Even people crying, being touched by Jesus.

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (22:34):
Yes. So you saw that, okay, thank God that God that to use me to put in my effort. And this is more than we expected. So I’ve been super happy, super excited.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (22:47):
And would you say that Congo is more difficult than Zambia for organizing?

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (22:53):
It’s more, it’s like triple difficult.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (22:55):
Triple difficult. Yeah.

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (22:57):
It’s like Congo is.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (22:59):
What are some of the challenges of organizing? What have been the biggest challenges that you faced?

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (23:04):
Logistics. Things are super expensive.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (23:09):
The roads are not good. The roads are not good. So if you buy anything, it must come from far away. Exactly. Over bad roads.

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (23:17):
Exactly. And here, inand gca, you discover that they don’t have a lot of stuff. So you want to get them from Bji Ma. And you could literally go with a bike on the bike. You are five hours on the bike with this road full of sand. It has not been easy. It has not been easy. Congo has not been easy. And people ritually.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (23:46):
Now this is the first time anyone’s ever done a crusade in this city. And because of that there is lots of excitement. But there are also some very significant spiritual challenges here. And each night we’ve been praying to break every curse. Yes. As you’ve been living here, you have learned about some of the spiritual needs of the city of Ganja dca. What are the needs of the people here?

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (24:14):
Alright, so two needs. I’ll talk about the most. One lack of development. The city needs development. This city needs just God to make a way. There’s this too much of lack of development, poverty

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:30):
That will come tonight is blessing night. Exactly. We’re going to pray for a blessing on Ika. And when the blessing of God comes, God will elevate the prosperity of the city. Exactly.

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (24:44):
But the other thing is the premature death of young children. When I came to this city, it is my first time to see small coffins like carpenters are ritually, making small coffins to sell out. And you’d see when you’re going in the roads, those small coffins, actually they are more than bigger coffees. So that would tell that they usually have these deaths for young children.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (25:16):
And so there’s a very high childhood mortality rate here.

Mike Kasonde | Crusade Director (25:20):
Mortality rate is very high. So I asked the pastors about that. They said, yeah, the child mortality is that high. It’s like every week they have to bury a child.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (25:33):
Wow. Well, we broke the curse of childhood mortality. And I believe that Jesus is working here. We did the children’s festival, which was something I thought the pastors found very interesting because they saw us minister to the children. And I believe that as they minister to the children, that we will see many children get saved here in the city. And I also believe that as prosperity comes, the childhood mortality rate will go down. A crusade like this brings God’s blessing upon the entire region. And so I think this will have a significant impact on ganja dika for many years to come. Definitely. So Pastor Mike, I want to say thank you so much for your work. Thank you. Thank you. You have been a great blessing. I am very honored to work together with you. I know that the crusade does not just happen because of the preacher.

(26:31):
There is a lot of work that it must be done. It’s like an iceberg out in the Arctic Ocean. A small bit of the iceberg can be seen above the water, but under the water there is so much. And so in the months you’ve been here, you have put so much work into the crusade. But we have seen God honor your work. Thank you. And it is an honor to serve God with you. And I want to say thank you. And I hope that we can work together again to do more Crusades. Yes. Let’s go for it. Let’s bring all of Africa to Jesus. Amen. Amen. Amen. And thank you for being on the Evangelism podcast. Thank you very much.

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The post Mike Kasonde | Crusade Organization in Gandajika, Congo appeared first on King Ministries | Evangelist Daniel King | Our Goal? Every Soul!.

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Peter Youngren | It’s All About Jesus! https://kingministries.com/podcast-episodes/peter-youngren-its-all-about-jesus/ Tue, 20 Aug 2024 20:00:53 +0000 https://kingministries.com/?p=8362 For fifty years, Peter Youngren has been reaching people for Jesus. His ministry reaches out to people from many different religions through his Friendship Festivals. He is known for pointing people to Jesus. On today’s episode of The Evangelism Podcast we talk about the importance of reaching unreached people, the role of grace in evangelism, and […]

The post Peter Youngren | It’s All About Jesus! appeared first on King Ministries | Evangelist Daniel King | Our Goal? Every Soul!.

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For fifty years, Peter Youngren has been reaching people for Jesus. His ministry reaches out to people from many different religions through his Friendship Festivals. He is known for pointing people to Jesus. On today’s episode of The Evangelism Podcast we talk about the importance of reaching unreached people, the role of grace in evangelism, and the central message of preaching Jesus Christ. Pastor Peter Youngren also talks about his global mission center in Kenya and his goal to train young evangelists. He emphasizes the need to strip away “Christianese” and adapt the Gospel message to different cultures while keeping the central message of Jesus Christ. Pastor Peter also shares some of his greatest memories and victories in ministry, as well as the challenges faced.

Learn more about Peter Youngren’s ministry: https://peteryoungren.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, Pastor Peter Youngren. Thank you for joining me on the Evangelism Podcast.

Evangelist Peter Youngren (00:12):
Well, thank you, Daniel. It’s my pleasure and I haven’t seen you for a while. It’s good to see you again.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:17):
Well, I want to start by saying how grateful I am for you and for your ministry. I was attending Pastor Charles Neiman’s Church down in El Paso, Texas as a young evangelist. I told him, I really feel this call from God on my life to be an evangelist says, you need to meet my friend Peter Youngen. So I called your office up in Canada and asked if I could come meet you. And you said, no, I don’t want to meet you in Canada, but if you want to come meet me in the middle of Africa, I would love to see you in Africa. And so I went all the way to Goma, Congo and got to see a great gospel crusade there, a festival. And God moved in a tremendous way. And that was where I met my beautiful wife, Jessica, who was working for you. And so I apologize, I stole her away, but she is a great worker there. Jessica is a great blessing.

Evangelist Peter Youngren (01:16):
Lemme give me, give you the first impression. I knew that this man, Daniel King, was going to meet me in Goma. We somehow arrived in the city and I saw this, obviously you look different than the locals with your white skin, but you were all dirtied and you had been really in the trenches. And I said, who’s that man? They said, oh, that’s the Daniel King. I said, I like him right away. He’s not afraid of getting his hands in the dirt and doing the job. So that was a good start for both of us, I hope.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:48):
Yeah. So just this week I got back from Congo. This was the first time I went back to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since I met you there about 17, 18 years ago. That’s a

Evangelist Peter Youngren (02:00):
Long time ago. Yes.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:02):
Yeah. And we had a great, great gospel festival in Ganja Dika, and God is moving in the nation of Congo. That’s

Evangelist Peter Youngren (02:11):
Beautiful. I saw the pictures that look really wonderful. So

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:14):
Tell me a little bit about what you’ve been doing and what you’re planning right now.

Evangelist Peter Youngren (02:20):
Well, we continue to do the festivals. I call them festivals instead of crusade. A lot of them are in areas we are trying to reach out to people of other religions other than the Christian religion. And so the word festival works very well and parallel with that of, because we have our Bible schools, we have Bible schools in Myanmar, which is formerly Burma. We have a many East Africa. We have two in Indonesia, one in the Sumatra on the one side of the country, another one in Papua, the other side of the country. But we’ve been working on our school in Africa, in Kenya and creating a global mission center there where we train to train evangelists. And we are also just about to start inviting pastors, evangelists, believers who feel called to evangelism to come and spend 10 weeks in Africa. Years ago, a dear friend of mine, he had a tremendous idea.

(03:20):
He bought a hotel in California and invited students from all over the world, India, Africa, come to San Diego. I’m talking about a person who had profound influence of my own life by Morris Cerullo, inviting people to come and study in San Diego, be empowered by the spirit. And that was a tremendous idea to spend three months like that. But there was one little problem, which I think he discovered that was once all these folks from Africa and India and Pakistan and had come to San Diego, they didn’t want to go home again. They wanted to stay in California. Who can claim that, Daniel? I think I would’ve stayed as well. California is beautiful. So what we are saying is that come and join our students for 10 weeks or eight weeks in Africa and be trained and then have your own campaign, your own crusade or festival in Africa. We will help you set it up and then we’ll send you back to wherever you came from, whether that was California or Europe or wherever you came from. Because we need to train workers for the harvest. We need to train people. And I think our particular gift maybe is to reach people, communicate the gospel with Muslims, Hindus, Buddhist, people of other religions. And so I want to pass that on to others. I’ve been doing this for 50 years now, so I’ve been doing this for a while.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:40):
Well, let’s go back to the beginning. How did you know that you were called to be an evangelist? How did you come to know the Lord as your savior? And then how did you get started doing evangelism?

Evangelist Peter Youngren (04:51):
Well, we just got 20 minutes or so. So let me say that I received Christ, it was obviously very meaningful. I was baptized in the Holy Spirit. That was a big change for me, made me very bold so that we could talk a long time about that. But then for me, one of the great influences of my life was the late Dr. T.L. Osborn, who by the way I got to know later on, spent time. He came and celebrated my 50th birthday spending a week with me here in Toronto. So we became friends. So, but he influenced me a lot. And I heard him one time say, all you need is a call, is Mark 1615, go into all the world that preach the gospel and some of that. That really touched me in a profound way. It may seem like it is a statement, but it touched me very profoundly.

(05:40):
So what I did, I started to just share the gospel. I always said that in the town where I was raised, there was a lot of alcoholics and they gathered in a certain park and I would go to that park and preach, you have to start where you are. I wasn’t looking for a ministry. I wasn’t looking to start any great ministry organization. I was just sharing the gospel with Pete. Well, one thing led to another, some pastor heard about it, said, can you share on Sunday night in our church? And so that led to that and that led to other things. And so I, I’m a firm believer is just start where you are, do what you can. Don’t wait for some great opening, don’t wait for some great opportunity. Start with what’s in your hand. Because as I look back, this wasn’t some plan I had at the time. I just looked back on it what caused doors to open for me. I was just doing what was before me to do and the one thing led to the other. So that’s the advice I give to young men and women who are starting in ministry. Don’t wait for some great opening that you’re going to be invited to the world’s largest church and suddenly it’s going to put you on the map. Just love and reach people where you are.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:53):
Amen. Well, you are a very innovative thinker and you have brought some great innovations to evangelism and there really is a huge need for evangelism. I was looking at one page on your website and you have some statistics there. It says, of finances that are given to foreign missions, 87% goes for work among Christians. 12% goes for work among already evangelized. And only 1% of money given to foreign missions is used for work among on reach people groups. And then 0.1% of all Christian giving is used for mission’s efforts into 38 least evangelized countries. Christians spend 95.4% of offerings on home-based ministry, 4.5% on cross-cultural efforts among already reach groups and only 0.1% to evangelize the on reach. The average Christian only gives an average of about one penny a day to global missions. And so your whole life, you’ve been talking to the body of Christ saying, we need to change our methods and our focus. We need to put more resources into actually reaching people who are unreached. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Evangelist Peter Youngren (08:09):
Yeah, because it is very natural. We don’t need to beat ourself up about this. It’s true about all of us evangelists and pastors. We tend to go where we’re invited and if we are invited to a certain place, it means they’re already believers there. Sometimes somebody contacts me and says, oh, we can guarantee a hundred thousand people. We’ve done it before. I’m thinking I don’t want to go there if they’ve done it before, if they’re so sure, they just have such masses already, that doesn’t appeal to me so much. And so to go to areas where there’s not a lot of people to celebrate you, but to break into those areas, you need more money because the television station owner doesn’t feel led to give you a special deal or the radio station has it. So you have to believe God for the finances and then seek a way into these areas.

(09:02):
What I have developed is an approach I call simply the friendship approach, which sounds innocent enough, but we search out religious and governmental leaders that are people at least open-hearted, whether they’re Muslim or Hindu or whatever they are. And we try to make an inroads with them. And once we get to know the leaders, and your wife used to work in this area and she was like, so good. Let me tell you, you took a good worker there, Jessica, I can still see her. She was so good in organizing these things. And once you meet the leaders then and you’re able to, and the people see, oh, this foreign preacher here, he’s here with our head of the Buddhist Monks Association, so then he mustn’t be too dangerous so I can go and hear him. So my friendship approach to these people of other religious is not for the purpose of religious dialogue in the conventional sense.

(10:04):
I stand for a hundred percent for Jesus. I’m not dialing it down. I’m just creating friendship approach. And thereby I eased the way for the people in the certain city to come and listen to my message. After all, I’ve already befriended their leaders. So some of the things we work on and it takes a little bit more effort and we try to work with, I’m just going to be in Madagascar in a couple of weeks time. And so when I was there last year, the Lord really opened the door to the President and to his advisors. And so we are looking for openings to really touch the whole nation, not just have a church meeting or a church conference.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:45):
God has given you a powerful revelation about the grace of God. How should God’s grace flavor the message of the evangelist?

Evangelist Peter Youngren (10:58):
Well, I say, I know people say you preach grace. Well, I preach Jesus Christ. Really. I say to people, we don’t preach miracles. We preach Christ, but miracles follow the proclamation of Christ. And so to preach grace is to preach Jesus Christ, who he is, how he reveals God and what Jesus has done, we call it the finished work of the cross, is one theological expression, the finished work of the cross. So we preach Christ and people say that’s a message of grace. And I think that’s true. Jesus Christ is the personification of God’s grace. So that’s very accurate. And my focus there in preaching that is focusing on very Christ-centered. I make that very clear when I train other evangelists, I was training someone and he was preaching and he was telling all the miracle stories. So it is good to tell the stories of what God has done in other cities, but don’t build your whole sermon on those stories. Preach Jesus Christ and let the miracles fall of the proclamation of the gospel. And in some parts of the world, I don’t need to tell you, but maybe your listeners don’t realize how much they talk about miracles, miracles, miracles all the time. So I want to really make a distinction. We don’t preach miracles. We preach Jesus Christ and miracles follow.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:26):
So what does it sound like to preach Jesus?

Evangelist Peter Youngren (12:30):
Well, I published a book called You are There where I published eight of my most favorite sermons that I preached. And so I usually start the first night and I receive this I think with the watching TL Osborne, I preached Jesus Christ the same yesterday and today and forever because I find that message introduces the city to the concept that we expect to happen today. What happened 2000 years ago. So that’s the first installment of my series of sermons in the festival. I want to introduce the people to Jesus Christ today, not just Jesus of history, not Jesus of the future in heaven, but Jesus today, I say, if you are sick today, it’s wonderful to know that he healed people 2000 years ago. It’s wonderful to know you’re going to be in heaven one day, but if you have cancer right now, you need to know that Jesus Christ is today. So I see my producer brought me this book. You Are There is the book that I published with about eight messages. I give it to future evangelists. I said, listen, these eight messages, some of them I got on my own. Some of them I probably got from listening to somebody. I can’t remember after 50 years I got them. But I tweaked them and I said, take these sermons, preach them. They will work for you. So I have different questions.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:57):
Well, I know I’ve preached a few of your sermons, so thank you for lending those to me.

Evangelist Peter Youngren (14:03):
Well, I probably received them from others. And so our message, people say, well, what do you preach in different countries? What do you preach to Buddhist? What do you preach? I preach Jesus Christ. It’s not that complicated really. You don’t have to adapt your message and make some fancy new formulation. People all over the world understand sin, shame, guilt, fear, bad karma. These are all negative emotions and beliefs that people have. And Jesus Christ answers all those problems. Guilt, shame, fear, bad karma, whatever you want to call it. Jesus Christ responds to all of that. So if you preach him, you don’t have to worry about, well, what do I say to this group? And what do I say to that group? Now, your illustrations of course adapts to your circumstance, but the central message is the same.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:54):
So you’re launching this global mission center in Kenya where you’re bringing evangelists in from different parts of the world to train them. What are some of the key things that a young evangelist should know before they launch out in their evangelistic ministry? Well,

Evangelist Peter Youngren (15:14):
Our emphasis is on reaching people without Christ. So frankly, some young preachers who start, they have to be stripped of their christianese. They’re so full of

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:26):
Hallelujah

Evangelist Peter Youngren (15:27):
Church language.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:28):
Hallelujah. Praise the Lord.

Evangelist Peter Youngren (15:29):
Yeah, so Africa, east Africa won. They’re so full of that that they can’t communicate with someone who is outside their realm. They’re so used to God’s going to send a reliable God’s making a way where there’s no way, and he’s opening the Red Sea. 40 people, Buddhists don’t know what you’re talking about. So we want to help them. And I think that act, chapter 17 to me, is a great teaching chapter for anybody who wants to evangelize outside of the church realm. How Paul, though he initially was grieved by the idolatry of the Athenians, he initially was disturbed, probably felt like rebuking them, like maybe we do. But he somehow simmer down and he didn’t. And instead he commenced them. He says, oh, I see you Athenians. You’re so religious, so you have these altars. See, his approach really teaches us a lot about how to approach people that are not from the church world. So act 70, that’s just one thing. But there are many things that we teach people. I’ve written a whole book about menacing to Muslims, how to present Christ to Muslims. That’s the answer for everybody.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (16:52):
Yeah. I have a copy of your book here, my Muslim friend, which I have read through many times. I also have your book Triumph on the Enemy’s Turf, which tells about some of the early victories over in the former Soviet Union. I mean, you’ve been doing evangelism for a long time. What are some of the greatest memories and greatest victories that you’ve experienced? And then what are some of the greatest challenges that you’ve faced in ministry?

Evangelist Peter Youngren (17:24):
Although that’s very nice, you obviously are in this work yourself. That’s why you ask us good questions, Daniel. But to me, not to another person name is, oh, I saw this person who was paralyzed in a wheelchair or carry it in. That will be the greatest thing. And that is a great thing. I’m not taken away from that. But to me, our greatest victories have been on the occasions where we have gone to a, not just where they haven’t had a festival or a crusade before, but where there are so few Christians that you really couldn’t do it. And we have seen a great breakthrough in a place like that that I consider the highlights where we were allowed to go in somehow got the permit because you always got to work with the politicians and the police to get the permit. And we’re able to do that.

(18:13):
And with our friendship approach, we kind of paved the way for any future resistance. For example, in the Muslim community, by the third, fourth night of the festival, when there are Muslims coming up, Mr. Muhammad is on the stage saying, Jesus has opened the blind eyes of my daughter here, and it can cause quite a ruckus in the community. So if I’ve already taken the leaders to dinner, I’ve already spoken with them, it gives me that opening. So I consider the greatest, I’m thinking of Kuta Pakistan, which is right on the border of Afghanistan where we had an enormous campaign and several like that in Burma. Some places where the total number of Christians, if you count every Anglican, every Catholic in these big cities will be three, 400. And where we see tens of thousands of people come, that got considered great. Now, the greatest challenges have been when we, for some reason, maybe it was a time limitation or whatever limitation, we didn’t maybe communicate adequately with people about the religions.

(19:18):
So we’ve been stopped, like I was in one city in Indonesia. We had, according to the chief of believe, 14 death threats against me personally. I have no way to verify. He was showing them to me, but they were in the Indonesian language. It was a here, 1, 2, 3, 4. That’s why I know it was 14 because he counted them out for me. And of course then they say, we have to cancel your permit for your own safety. And it’s very hard to argue with that because I’m saying I’m willing to go, you don’t have to cancel it for me.

(19:51):
You don’t know whether they’re playing a game with you or whether in that case it probably was actual threats, some of those things. Because I hate to waste the partner’s money. So we have already advertised, we have the stadium, we have the printing. We’ve already spent a lot of money as you know, spend that upfront. And so then suddenly you are faced with these kind of challenges. I find that very frustrating. But my partners, I mean this happens rarely. And our partners have been very understanding. I try to tell ’em the truth. Listen, in our kind of work one time Paul had to escape over the wall and a ladder. So it’s not a defeat just because we have to chased out of town, which happens rarely. But it does happen maybe once every five, six years. So our partners have been very good in understanding on the risk with the work that we,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:48):
Amen. Well, if someone is listening and they want to partner with your ministry, or if someone maybe wants to attend your school of evangelism in Kenya, how can they find out more information about you? What’s your website?

Evangelist Peter Youngren (21:06):
Our website, like everyone peter youngin.org, and there’s phone numbers there that takes some people to what we call the Grace Prayer Center. But this information there, including what we call the Global Evangelism Institute, just to paint a picture of that, we have purchased a very nice facility. There’s even a nice swimming pool there, but I don’t promote that a lot. It just came with the property already. And our Bible school assessment, there’s students from all over East Africa, they’re already, they’re studying a two year program. So when we invite people international to come, they come for eight weeks of studies where we give some very key courses for evangelists and they study some of them side by side with the African students and some will be separate. And then at the end of that, we’re saying if you want to test your own wings, so to speak, you say, I feel a call of God.

(22:00):
We will set you up, we will help you. We’ll facilitate you with a pastor or a group of pastors to have an outreach campaign and connection with a local church. And we’re not going to send them out in the booty, so to speak, and they can test it. I’m a firm believer that theory is very good, seminars are good, but when somebody experiences Jesus Christ working through their eyes, their hands touching people and they see a miracle that changes a life. Many people come with me and 20 years later I meet them and I say, now, when you were with me in such and such situation, what do you remember? Or they say, I remember the time when you sent us out on some street evangelism and this mother brought her the death boy and I prayed. And Jesus healed the, that’s what they remember the most. They don’t remember all the Americans in our meeting. And that’s okay. They remember Jesus working with them. That’s the experience I want to give to people.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (23:07):
Well, one of my memories from Goma was we got to go to a Pygmy village. I think you and I went and minister to the Pygmies, gave them some food to be a blessing to them because they’re very hunted there and you preach Jesus to the pygmies. I remember it was a very short sermon, which is appropriate for Pygmies, but it was a great experience, something they should

Evangelist Peter Youngren (23:34):
Explain to you, the audience that Pygmys are kind of short people. So I remember that very well because there was a very, their plight, I remembered well, they were poor people, very poor and suffered a lot. Of course within their culture there’s racism in every culture and the pygmies are kind of looked down upon, and I always like to root for the underdog. So I’m glad we could maybe be a little small blessing to them in some way that day.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:07):
Yeah. Well, pastor Peter, I honor you for your many years of dedication, serving Jesus and proclaiming Jesus to on save people around the world. What a great impact your ministry has had in so many lives. And I want to thank you again for giving me your great staff member, Jessica, she has become a great wife, and you actually performed our wedding ceremony. And so we have many wonderful memories. Jessica really greatly enjoyed her time working with your ministry and you’ve had a big impact on our lives, and I’m very grateful for you. So thank you.

Evangelist Peter Youngren (24:49):
Well, let me just respond by saying that Jessica was a great blessing. She was a general, I mean, when she took charge of something, she took charge of it. I’m sure you ever seen much blessing in many ways from her, but also in that area. And so she is, I always think very fondly about what a blessing she was. And then I want to say I rejoice, Danny, when I see you post something on Facebook someplace in the world where you are, it brings great joy to my heart. So God bless you and thank you for this opportunity to share with your listeners.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (25:24):
Thank you for being on the Evangelism Podcast.

Evangelist Peter Youngren (25:26):
Thank you, brother.

 

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The Democratic Republic of Congo https://kingministries.com/crusades/congo-drc/ Wed, 14 Aug 2024 20:06:23 +0000 https://kingministries.com/?p=8338 Gandajika Gospel Crusade It was the biggest crowd in the history of our ministry. How big was the crowd? What message caused thousands of people to come to Jesus? What are the three biggest miracles God has ever done? Watch this video above to find out. Tears came to my eyes the first time I […]

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Gandajika Gospel Crusade

It was the biggest crowd in the history of our ministry. How big was the crowd? What message caused thousands of people to come to Jesus? What are the three biggest miracles God has ever done? Watch this video above to find out. Tears came to my eyes the first time I watched it.

Power to Preach the Gospel

To preach the Gospel you must have POWER…first you need the power of the Holy Spirit but you also need the power of a generator to run the sound system. Yesterday, our generator got stuck in a muddy rut in the road so the crusade team was scrambling to find a replacement.

In the town of Gandajika, Congo DRC they were able to find only one generator powerful enough to run the sound system. But the generator was built into a little building designed to protect it from the rain. So our crusade director had to rent a shovel truck to lift the roof off the building and then to lift the generator out of the building to put it in a dump truck to haul the generator to the crusade.

Tonight I preached on the paralyzed man who was LET DOWN through the roof. But for this crusade I have a new story about a generator that was LIFTED OUT through the roof. To make a crusade happen we must often go to great lengths and fight great battles, but this is the first time we have literally lifted the roof off a building.

As I preached on the paralyzed man we had an actor play the part in an illustrated drama. The bed he was laying on was carried to the stage by his four friends. The sight of the bed being lifted above the heads of the crowd attracted lots of attention. The friends laid the bed at the front of the platform and we read the story from Matthew 9. Jesus says three things to the paralyzed man.

Strengthen Your Heart

First Jesus said, “Be encouraged.” The local language of Gandajika translates this verse as “Strengthen your heart.” Jesus encouraged the man because he was sad, worried, and lonely. I told the people, “Jesus wants to encourage you tonight. Jesus wants to strengthen your heart. Jesus will take away your sadness and give you joy. He will take away your worry and replace it with hope. He will remove your loneliness and give you His presence.”

Your Sins Are Forgiven

Second Jesus said, “Your sins are forgiven.” I explained, “Jesus came from heaven to earth to forgive our sins. Everyone has sinned and the price for sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ. Jesus dies on the cross to pay the price for our sins and tonight Jesus wants to forgive your sins.”

Get Up, Take Up Your Bed, and Go Home

Third, Jesus healed the man’s body. Our actor on the stage stood to his feet and began to dance. “I’m healed!” he shouted. The entire crowd clapped because they were excited to see that Jesus is a healer. After the drama was over, I prayed for three things.

First I explained the greatest miracle is when Jesus forgives your sin. “If you want Jesus to forgive your sin, lift your hand,” I told the crowd. Across the field, thousands of people lifted their hands. I led them in a prayer of salvation. Our counselors immediately got to work recording the names of the people on decision cards so the local churches can follow up on them later.

Second we prayed for emotional healing and third we prayed for physical healing. Many people were touched by God and we had a variety of testimonies to share with the people.

Let the Little Children Come

Here in Congo ministering to children is unheard of. Typically, pastors tell the kids to sit in the back of the church and to be quiet. So when we announced we were doing a “Children’s Festival” at the crusade grounds on Friday morning the children began to cheer.

Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me.” That’s exactly what happened. The children came running from all over the city. They had big smiles on their faces.

We sang with them. We played games. We had a dance competition. Several of the graduates of the Christ for All Nations Evangelism Bootcamp told stories to the children. Hidden in each story was a Gospel truth. Repeatedly, the children heard the message, “Jesus loves you!”

Before I became known as an international evangelist I was a children’s minister. In my teenage years I dressed up as a clown as a tool for reaching children for Jesus. So, even though I am here to preach at the crusade I jumped at the opportunity to juggle for the children. As I threw balls high into the air, the kids laughed and clapped.

I balanced a pole on my finger. The key to keeping it balanced is to look at the top of the pole. I told the children, “If you keep your eyes on Jesus, your life will stay balanced. But if you take your eyes off Jesus, your life will fall apart.”

Then I told a story about a monkey who lived in the jungle. Some monkey hunters trapped the monkey using bananas. In the same way, Satan uses a sin trap to capture us. But Jesus came to set us free from the trap of sin. All the children shouted, “Jesus sets me free!” After the altar call, we gave each child a mini-book written by Daniel Kolenda. The book uses fun illustrations to teach the children how to follow Jesus.

 

The Father of Hugs and Kisses

On the third night of the crusade I preached on the Prodigal Son. The story is one of three stories found in Luke 15. First is the story of man with one hundred sheep. He loses one and he leaves the 99 to look for the one. Then there is the story of a woman who has saved ten silver coins. When she loses one, she searches the house until she finds the lost coin. Finally, is the story of a lost son.

In this story Jesus reveals God the Father to us. Many people think of God as an angry judge who is ready to condemn people who sin. But Jesus reveals that God is like a father who is searching for his lost son.

The son asks for his inheritance and then he wastes the money by living a sinful lifestyle in a faraway land. The son runs out of money and is stuck feeding pigs. He remembers his father and he decides to return home and beg for forgiveness. But as he walks the long road home he wonders if his father will be angry at him.

But the father (who represents God the Father) is out in front of his house looking for his lost son. He sees him coming from a long distance and the father runs to his son. The son falls to his knees in shame, but the father lifts him up and gives him a hug and kisses him. He gives his son his coat and puts his shoes on his son’s bare feet. He puts a ring on his finger and calls his household together to celebrate the return of his son.

In this story, Jesus reveals the Father of Hugs and Kisses. I told the crowd, “God is not angry at you. God loves you. God is looking for you.” I asked the people, “Will you come home to the Father’s House tonight? Will you turn away from your sin and come running home to your heavenly Father?” The crowd shouted “YES!” and I led them in a prayer of salvation.

Jesus said that all of heaven rejoices when one sinner gets saved. Tonight thousands of people came home to their heavenly Father and heaven is rejoicing!

 

I Will Pour Out My Spirit on All People

We invited all the local pastors and church leaders to a Fire Conference on Saturday morning.

Here in Congo many of the churches do not believe women can preach. Because of this religious doctrine, they have silenced half of the body of Christ. Also many of the pastors are older because they tell the young men they are not old enough to preach the Gospel.

So I preached on Acts 2 which tells about what happened on the Day of Pentecost. After the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit Peter began to preach. He quoted from the book of Joel, “In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit.” I asked the pastors, “Do you want God to pour out His Spirit.” They all shouted “Amen.”

I continued to read, “God will pour out His Spirit on all people.” I posed the question, “Do you believe God can pour out His Spirit upon all people? The pastors shouted, “Yes!”

“Your sons and daughters shall prophecy,” I read, “Your young men will see visions…Even on my servants, both men and woman, I will pour out my Spirit in those days and they shall prophecy.” I asked the pastors, “Do you believe God can use the women and the young men?” They pastors were a little hesitant this time, but a few replied quietly, “Yes.”

I told the story about the time Reinhard Bonnke was asked, “Do you think God can use a woman to save someone?” He replied, “If I was drowning, I would not care if it was a man or a woman who threw me a life preserver.”

I explained, “God says, ‘I will pour out my Spirit upon all people.’ God can use your sons and your daughters if you will let Him.” I asked the pastors again, “Do you believe God can use the women and the young men?” This time they answered with more enthusiasm, “Yes!”

Then I invited two of the women evangelists who are on our team to share. Their names are Grace Smith and Anastasiia Dvoinikova. They both shared a powerful word and by the time they finished, the pastors were all shouting, “Amen.”

At the end of the Fire Conference we laid hands on every pastor and the fire of God fell.

 

Holy Spirit Night

Saturday night at the crusade in Gandajika was Holy Spirit night. I preached on the three greatest miracles in the Bible. Creation, Calvary, and Pentecost.

Creation: At creation is where we see God the Father’s greatest work. I told the crowd, “God created you. You are made in the image of God. You are God’s special creation.” I explained that God created the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, to be His friends. Every day God walked and talked with them in the Garden of Eden. But one day they disobeyed God and this sin broke their fellowship with God. I told everyone, “You were created to be God’s friend, but your sin separates you from God.”

Calvary: At the hill named Calvary, we see God the Son’s greatest work when Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay the price for our sins. I announced, “At Calvary, Jesus saved you.” Jesus, the Son of God, came from heaven to earth. Every day he walked and talked with His disciples. Then Jesus gave his life so we could once again have fellowship with the Father. The price for sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus. The crowd listened intently as I explained, “If you will call of Jesus, He will forgive your sin and you will be saved.”

Pentecost: The day of Pentecost is where we see God the Holy Spirit’s greatest work. One hundred and twenty disciples were gathered together in the upper room when suddenly a mighty wind began to blow. Tongues of fire rested on every head and they were filled with the Holy Spirit. Now, the Holy Spirit wants to come walk and talk with every believer.  I prayed for everyone to be filled with the Holy Spirit. As the thousands of people began to pray in the Holy Spirit, it sounded like the roar of a mighty lion.

 

Jesus Breaks Every Curse

People in Africa are intensely aware of the supernatural world in a way that the Western world often does not understand. They believe in curses and they often go to witchdoctors in search of a cure or a benefit. For example, a businessman might go to the witchdoctor and pay her to cast a spell upon his business rival. A barren woman might ask the witchdoctor for a potion to help her get pregnant. The witchdoctor makes money off of curses, so there is often a spiritual struggle when a Gospel crusade comes to town.

On Thursday night a witch doctor came to our crusade. She intended to walk through the crowd and place a curse on Christian believers. But as she walked around she found that her magic was not working. She stopped to listen to the message and she heard about how Jesus has the power to break every curse. She was convicted by the Holy Spirit for her evil ways of living and she decided to cry out to Jesus for salvation. She repented of her witchcraft and she was saved!

I pointed to two big barrels on the field and said to the crowd, “Tomorrow night we are going to burn every work of Satan. I want you to bring your juju beads, your witchcraft charms, and anything that represents your life of sin. We are going to burn everything in the barrels and send the devil’s curses to the fires of hell.”

The following night the former witchdoctor brought a paper with the names of all of her curses written down. She came to the front and threw the cursed paper into the barrel.

We doused the contents of the barrel with gasoline and threw a match in. Woosh! The fire burned hot. Our team of intercessors danced around the burning barrels and shouted, “Jesus! Jesus!”

From the platform I proclaimed, “Jesus breaks every curse. When Jesus died on the cross, He destroyed the power of sin and the power of Satan. Be free from every evil curse in Jesus’ name.”

 

Night of Blessing

The final night of the crusade in Gandajika was awe inspiring. The crowd size increased substantially. No one in the city wanted to miss the final night of the crusade.

The theme of the night was Deuteronomy 30:19 “I set before you life and death, blessing and cursing, therefore choose life!”

I gave the crowd a list of words. Some of the words were God words and some of the words were devil words. I asked the crowd to point up to heaven if a shared a God word and I asked them to point down to hell if I shared a devil word.

The first word was “LIFE.” Everyone pointed to heaven.

The second word was “DEATH.” Everyone pointed down. I explained that Satan comes to steal, kill, and destroy, but Jesus comes to give us abundant life (John 10:10).

“BLESSING” It is a word that comes from God.

“CURSING” It is a word from the pits of hell.

The next word was “SALVATION.” Every index finger on the field pointed up. “SIN” Everyone pointed down. I repeated the word “SALVATION” and listened to my translator say the word in the local language. I tried to repeat it after him. I must have messed up my pronunciation bad because everyone laughed at me. “Do you think I should learn your language?” I asked. “Yes,” they all replied.

“HEALING” comes from God. “SICKENESS” comes from the devil. The people knew the right answer even though some theologians get this concept wrong.

“PROSPERITY” is from God. “POVERTY” is from the devil. “LOVE” is a God word, “HATE”  is a devil word.

I preached, “Everyone must make a choice. You can choose to go to heaven or hell. You can choose to trust in Jesus for salvation or you can walk away from God. There is a broad road that leads to hell and many people are following it. There is a narrow path that leads to God. The name of that narrow path is Jesus! If you cry out to Jesus, and turn from your sinful ways, you will be saved.”

“Do you want to choose to follow Jesus?” I asked.

“Yes,” roared the crowd. I led them in a prayer of salvation and the councilors moved through the crowd giving books to all the new believers.

Everyone chose blessing instead of cursing. At the end of the evening, we burned two barrels full of the curses of witch doctors. Then I prayed a powerful prayer of blessing over the crowd. “You are blessed, blessed, blessed!” The whole crowd went home full of God’s blessing and thankful that the crusade had come to their city of Gandajika.

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Chance Walters | Best Chance to Receive Christ https://kingministries.com/podcast-episodes/chance-walters-best-chance-to-receive-christ/ Fri, 19 Jul 2024 17:48:42 +0000 https://kingministries.com/?p=8308 Evangelist Chance Walters joins Daniel King on the Evangelism Podcast to discuss his passion for sharing the gospel. Walters shares that his passion for evangelism came from his own salvation experience and serving with Teen Challenge. He has been involved in various types of evangelism, including street preaching, door-to-door evangelism, and school assemblies. Walters also […]

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Evangelist Chance Walters joins Daniel King on the Evangelism Podcast to discuss his passion for sharing the gospel. Walters shares that his passion for evangelism came from his own salvation experience and serving with Teen Challenge. He has been involved in various types of evangelism, including street preaching, door-to-door evangelism, and school assemblies. Walters also discusses his experiences in Pakistan, where he has witnessed God pouring out His Spirit.

Learn more about Chance Walters: https://chancewalters.org/

Check out the EMT (Evangelist Missionary Training) School: https://chancewalters.org/emt/

 

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. Chance Walters. Thank you so much for joining me.

Evangelist Chance Walters (00:10):
Thanks Daniel. It’s my joy. We

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:12):
Are together at a conference in Indonesia where we’re talking about reaching everyone on earth with the gospel of Jesus Christ, the power of the Holy Spirit. And you have been an evangelist for many years. You’re passionate about reaching people for Jesus. Tell me a little bit about where that passion came from. How did you get started telling people about Jesus?

Evangelist Chance Walters (00:37):
Well, Daniel, that’s a great question. I was in jail. I was 23, my fourth DUI didn’t have anywhere to go, and I stepped into Sandhills Teen Challenge on April the 29th. I went to sleep and I woke up. I walked into a chapel service and I got saved. I was raised in church. I tell people the best drug, the best drug I’ve ever done is my parents drug me to church. And so I was kind of born you to church. Yeah, I was born and raised in church, but I wasn’t looking for God, but God was looking for me. And at 23 years old, I encountered the love of Jesus and the largest, most successful faith-based recovery home in the world. I had never heard of Teen Challenge, but there’s Teen Challenge centers all over the world. But they were there when I needed them the most, and I got saved.

(01:35):
I tell people I made a commitment. I made a commitment to graduate that program, and a year later I felt called into ministry. I love to say somebody helped me and now I want to help you. I want to help the next person. But I got saved and my spiritual father was an evangelist and I served him. I was in the program for a year, but then I stayed on staff and I served him for three years. I signed up for a six month internship and it turned into three years and traveling church to church, school to school, doing school assembly, sharing my testimony. It got in my DNA and I just love to see people get saved. There’s no greater thing to live for, I don’t think.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:25):
Amen. It’s always exciting to see someone give their life to Jesus. So tell me a little bit of some of the different types of ministry that you’ve been involved in. What type of evangelism? I mean, there’s many different types. Some people go out on the street and preach, some people are going door to door, some people are preaching big crusades. What types of evangelism have you done over the years?

Evangelist Chance Walters (02:47):
Well, I love my journey because people ask me, chance, who are you? What do you do? They want to put a label on you and me. I’m like a denominational mutt. I was born Baptist, if you will. I went to Teen Challenges and Assembly of God affiliated program. Then I went to Lee University, the Bible School, which is Church of God. So I’ve just kind of bounced around, but I just love the global church and I’ve been able to serve in different capacities. Before we started our nonprofit, before we launched our evangelistic ministry, I served on staff at a local church as youth pastor and associate pastor. And so looking back, I’m so glad that I had these stepping stones, if you will. So I have a greater perspective of the church and a deeper respect for people and their positions. And so I’ve been a part of all different types, as you say, of evangelism. For me, it all started in a nursing home and I was in Bible school. I would go to a nursing home and preach on Sunday mornings at 8:00 AM and I’d just be laying hands on everybody, but it was my Jerusalem. It just kind of started at home and sharing my faith with my family. I’ve watched my whole family tree get saved. I’ve watched so many of my old friends that I usually get high with. They got saved. And so it’s just been this journey of just growing in my faith.

(04:27):
And so I don’t think it’s everything. I don’t think there’s one answer. I think it’s just starting where you are. And I love the tagline of the conference that we’re at right now. Reaching everyone requires everyone, and

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:42):
Amen. You’re good friends with Teron Anaya, who is also a friend of mine working in the nation of Pakistan. I’ve been there several times to Pakistan with Tamran. You’ve been there several times with Tamran and the United Family, have been dear friends for many years. Love him. In fact, I’ve interviewed Tamran on the Evangelism podcast. So if you’re interested, go back and find his episode and if you want to hear about what God’s doing in Pakistan, but tell me some of what you’ve seen God do when you’ve gone to Pakistan.

Evangelist Chance Walters (05:14):
Well, God is pouring out his spirit in Asia. We’re in Asia right now. I think we heard last night 65% of the world’s population is right here in Asia and God’s doing something. I minister all over America. I’ve been to 49 states. I’m missing North Dakota.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:34):
You got to go there. There’s got to be someone in North Dakota that needs Jesus.

Evangelist Chance Walters (05:38):
Amen. And I’ve been to 36, 37 nations, but probably my favorite place to go is Pakistan because people are hungry for the gospel. Mass crowds coming to experience miracles, always say, Muslims are my special guests. I mean, they come to pray and they come for healing and God meets them right where they are. When Tamron opened the door for us to go to Pakistan, we’ve hosted Crusades and a lot of different places. But when Tamron and I met, sparks began to fly. He had been praying for eight years. God sent me back to Pakistan and we met. He lives about 20 minutes from me, and it’s just been a great experience to see what God is doing in that nation. But we’re in Indonesia right now, the largest Muslim nation in the world, but Pakistan is the second largest Muslim nation in the world. And we have to believe Daniel, that God’s raising up evangelists and missionaries in Pakistan to send them into the Middle East. I believe that. Amen. Yeah. This something is about to spark in the Middle East and we’re going to see this billion soul harvest that everybody’s talking about. It’s got to happen there. So that’s where most of the people live. And so now

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:05):
You just recently did a crusade with my friend Alejandro Hondo Arias, who I met in Costa Rica at a TL Osborne Crusade. He was probably about 12 years old at the time, known as a boy preacher of Costa Rica, but now he’s a great evangelist. And Alejandro set up crusades in about 20 different countries this year at Pentecost. And you did one crusade in Dominican Republic, the city of San Francisco. What did you see God do in Dominican?

Evangelist Chance Walters (07:38):
Well, I believe that the key to the Great final Harvest is unity is the missing link. If we would all come together for the sake of the gospel, there’s nothing that we could not accomplish as the church. And I love the initiative that they launched this year as the P 24 initiative. Their goal was 10 countries, 10 crusades with collaborating with 10 different ministries, reaching a hundred thousand souls. And I think they came close to their goal.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:14):
Okay. Maybe I misspoke. Spoke about 20, but 10 is great. Okay.

Evangelist Chance Walters (08:18):
I’m sorry.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:18):
No, it’s good.

Evangelist Chance Walters (08:19):
I like

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:20):
What a blessing evangelists, but I was just talking to Werner Al with the Go Movement, and I think this year they want to expand from the time of Easter into Pentecost This year they want to expand and do more countries. So I think that’s what I was thinking of.

Evangelist Chance Walters (08:39):
You’re right.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:41):
But you’ve also done stuff down in Brazil, lots of different places. Give me some testimonies, some pop testimonies from different parts of the world.

Evangelist Chance Walters (08:49):
I know I’ll give you a testimony from our most recent gospel crusade in Pakistan. My definition of revival is when God comes down

(09:07):
And when God comes down, there’s nothing that’s impossible. And we’ve just seen so many miracles, David, Daniel. People ask me all the time, why doesn’t God do miracles in America? And God does do miracles in America for those who believe. And it’s the same God. He’s the same Yesterday, today, forevermore and miracles. Matter of fact, if you’ve never seen a miracle, I tell people to go look in the mirror because you are a miracle. And the greatest miracle is salvation. And it seems that we’re living in the greatest harvest in the history of the world. Many times we get stuck and we can’t see the forest because of the trees. We’re just so busy in our own little routines. But when you look at what God is doing on a global scale, and I think that’s what we do as evangelists, is we get to see what God’s doing across the board. And we’ve just seen so many miracles. I mean, the blind eyes open, the deaf they hear. I think we’ve seen more demons manifest here recently. That’s what I wanted to say in the most recent Pakistan crusade. It just seems that when God comes down, that I think the devil knows his time is short, and he’s doing all that he can to deceive us, but we know the truth.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:45):
Amen.

Evangelist Chance Walters (10:46):
Yeah.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:47):
So if someone’s listening and they want to find out more about your ministry or maybe even support you and help send you to the nations, what is your website that they can find out more information about you?

Evangelist Chance Walters (10:57):
Just real simple. Chance walters.com. And we have a podcast that’s called On the Revival Road. It’s kind of our tagline, where in the world are the Walters is. And so we’re on the Revival Road, and that’s our podcast. You can check it out. And we have an email blast. If you go to our website, you can put in your email. And we send out email every Wednesday with just an update of where we’re at and what God’s doing. Very

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:25):
Cool. And you also have a training program for evangelists. Tell me about that.

Evangelist Chance Walters (11:32):
We do. It is called the EMT School. God spoke to me back in 2020 and all the churches closed. We were seeing so many people get saved. I mean, for the evangelists, it was the heyday. I mean, the world was just perturbed and we were preaching, and so many people were getting saved and with the Holy Spirit. And I prayed, God, what do we do with all these people? Because my schedule, everything was canceled, all my trips. So I was at home and we were ministering locally, and we saw so many people give their life to Jesus that I was praying, God, how can we disciple these people? And he spoke to me and he said, I want you to start the Evangelist Missionary Training School. And so that’s what we did. It’s nothing new.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:18):
I like the name EMT, evangelist Missionary Training. What a great blessing.

Evangelist Chance Walters (12:22):
Yeah. When somebody’s in trouble, who do they call? E-M-T-E-M-T, they show up on the scene. And so it’s been fun. It’s a three month school to help you become more confident in sharing your faith. Just real simple. All that’s on our website.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:38):
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast. I love hearing your story and just love your heart for Jesus. It’s awesome.

Evangelist Chance Walters (12:45):
Thanks Daniel. You too. I love to see what God’s doing through your ministry. And you don’t know this, but I’ve listened to a lot of your podcasts episodes. Oh,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:53):
Really? Wow. That’s

Evangelist Chance Walters (12:54):
Great. So if you’re listening today, share this. Be an evangelist and share this podcast.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:01):
God bless you.

Evangelist Chance Walters (13:02):
Amen.

 

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