Bob Lenz leads the largest Christian music festival in North America. God has also given him a powerful message on the dignity and value of every human being that he uses to teach an anti-bullying program in public schools. Every year, he shares his message with over half a million people through community outreaches, festivals, school assemblies, church events, tours and conferences.
Website: https://lifepromotions.org/bob-lenz/
The Dignity Revolution is a comprehensive, customizable, and interactive bullying prevention program that provides culture change to improve overall academic learning.
Connect with Daniel King, host of the Evangelism Podcast by calling: 1-877-431-4276
Transcript:
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Bob Lenz leads the largest Christian music festival in north America. God has also given him a powerful message on the dignity and value of every human being that he uses to teach an anti-bullying program in public schools every year, he shares his message with over half a million people through community outreaches festivals, school assemblies, church events, tours, and conferences. You’re going to love his humor as you listen to Bob Lanz.
Evangelism Podcast Host (00:44):
Welcome to the evangelism podcast with Dr. Daniel King we’re 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.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:08):
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, Bob Lenz. Thank you so much for joining me today. It’s great to be here, man. Now you have been an evangelist for many years. Can you tell me, how did you start being used by God? In the area of evangelism?
Bob Lenz (01:29):
I never wanted to be an evangelist. I wanted just to drive a dump truck and then, but I found Jesus or he found me and I’m like, people got to know this, but I still want to be in full-time ministry. So I went to a Bible school just to share just to learn how to share Christ. And then it came back. The job I wanted as dump truck driver wasn’t open. So I sold pizza door to door, helping a ministry. And I led for families to Christ would tell them about our 24 hour hotline. And it just became apparent that I was supposed to share Christ. So I never wanted to, it was more like a call. It wasn’t something like I aspired to be.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:04):
And God has used you in such tremendous ways. Tell me some of the various projects that your ministry is involved in.
Bob Lenz (02:12):
Well, you talked about how long I’ve been. This is my 40th year in ministry, so it’s only 30, 30, some sounded like a veteran 40 sounds old, but I can’t stop. I feel like I have as much fire as when I was 28 years old. I’m on fire for the letting people know about Jesus. So we do different ministries. We have four, four basic outreaches from us. We have school assembly programs. So in this public schools, we can talk about Jesus. We call a dignity revolution. We talk about value, courage, and respect. And then we invite people back at night to share Christ with them. So that’s one area, that’s dignity revolution. Then we have life Fest. We have one of the nation’s biggest festivals. We have over 25,000 people over four days, close to a hundred thousand people in Ash. Gosh, but gosh, Wisconsin. And then we have quake quake, youth encountering the gospel. We have a boat 12 across the country, youth conferences, where we just train youth in encountering Jesus and how to share them with others. And then we have my evangelistic work where we go around the world and preach. And do you know festivals like we’re doing here right now? This is live from Milan.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:20):
Yeah. This has just been so wonderful being together with you in Malawi and getting to spend some time with you. And this morning, we got to go to a school here in Malawi and you did such a beautiful job. Just sharing your story and talking about value and respect. Let’s talk about the message that God has given you for schools, especially schools in America, where there’s such a desperate need.
Bob Lenz (03:47):
I hope we see my story that Daniel, you may not even know. I was raised with two siblings. One had mental retardation, scoliosis curvature of the spine. Half his body grew half had stopped plus plus epilepsy. And then my other sister was special needs as well. And it was both. I always want to make sure people know it wasn’t genetic, but I think that’s just because I was always afraid of being handicapped myself. But it was, it was because at birth defects are at birth. And so I always searched like this. Every life have purpose. Like we all like to come back stories, but my brother never walked. He never did a full sentence. And so I was in a religion class one time and I asked why my brother and sister were handicapped and I was quote normal. And the teacher in her ignorance had God loved me more than them.
Bob Lenz (04:39):
And I’m like, I got up to kill her. I didn’t know how I was going to do it. Number two pencil, you know, but I, I really did. And it had a stop. And then they got a coach next door to her to come and I cried. And she said, he said, Bob, she was wrong. But I was afraid. She was right to see if God loved me more than them. Then if you’re more athletic than me than God loves you more. And if this person is loved, has more money than God loves them more. And I had to come to the point, go did my brother and sister’s life had value. And when I came down, yes, their life has value than I thought. Then we’ve got to go tell the kids because 1,800 kids a day under 18 in America attempts suicide. And if my handicapped brother has value, so you, no matter what you’re going through, you have value and I will not stop. I do about a hundred schools a year in public schools, bring value and hope in dignity for all. And that’s what we gotta do. We gotta reach them.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:34):
You developed a curriculum that schools can use. T tell me about the curriculum.
Bob Lenz (05:39):
What they did is they took my talk called value, courage and respect living life to the fullest, a dignity revolution. If you look at the word revolution, it says love in it backwards, right? And so love is this revolution. And so what we did is the teacher of the year, Deb tack went from the teacher for the whole country. She’s in the teacher hall of fame, a teacher for 40 years. She has made this material around our program and came up with a curriculum, the dignity revolution, it’s evidence-based, if you’re a teacher out there, you know what I’m talking about? It’s proven that it’s effective. It meets all the standards from local and state and national criteria. And if you’re a teacher listening, you can go through this training called DRT dignity, revolution, training, and get continuing credits from Jetson university because every school has to have continuing learning, right?
Bob Lenz (06:35):
And so we can come in and do a whole school assembly program for the kids. And we can do a inservice for every teacher in the public school. And it meets all the criteria. But what it does is it brings value and it brings purpose indignity. And it, it, in the pledge, you go to dignity, pledge.com and it doesn’t have to deny anything you believe it’s just to, to love kids and show them how to work through bullying. Anti-Depression cutting suicide anxiety, what the kids are going through today. It addresses and we have a curriculum from K through fifth grade and six through 12. So we are covered. There’s a there’s 64,000 schools in the country. We need to get this material in every single
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:24):
Let’s talk about what’s happening in the lives of young people in America, because it, it feels like there is a crisis among young people in it’s been even increased with, with COVID people being isolated. Why is it so important to instill these values in our young people?
Bob Lenz (07:43):
Well, we understand the pandemic, but scripture makes it clear that a fool separates himself and we were not meant to live our life alone and is as wonderful as some of the things are in social media. I’m not an anti-social media guy, because it can be used for the gospel. It can be used for connecting people, but it separates people. And since COVID Daniel suicide cost, the hotlines have increased 800%. You did not hear that wrong. It is more than a crisis. It’s an epidemic. If you look at the statistics, more people are dying from the effects of anxiety and depression and suicide than COVID. We have backed the back in areas like in California, where the lactone is so bad and I’m not trying to be political, but we have to understand that we need to address the mental health of our youth in America.
Bob Lenz (08:36):
Today, they are dying, they’re starving. And this program has something for the parents. It has something for the teachers and has something for the students. So we have the dignity, dignity, revolution, assembly program. We can bring the sprinkler to your school. We have dignity revolution training for the parents and the teachers. And then we have dignity revolution curriculum, so that it’s not just a hit and miss. And they had programs here. It can be supplemental to like a health program in the school, or it can be the whole unit and it is supplemental, or it can be a comprehensive in itself for the whole school. We’ve been to the apartment of education to white house. It’s time that we get this out here.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:20):
Let’s talk about life Fest. As you said, it’s one of the largest musical festivals in the United States. How long have you been doing it? And what are some of the testimonies that have come out of doing this tremendous musical festival?
Bob Lenz (09:37):
So we are 22 years old, minus one. However you do that because of Covance. So we actually made a shirt. Daniel said the last year, and we had all the artists list on it. And then it said postponed. And then it had canceled. We sold $15,000 worth of t-shirts for the last year. So it was really fun. But life Fest is this. I used to think it was just about evangelism. But my team challenged me. We brought in a consultant in everybody had a different reason because God does so much at a festival. And I said, no, it’s evangelism. We’re an evangelist organization. But when we waited through, after a couple of days of praying, it wasn’t, you know, what the purpose is, is to, is to celebrate the love of Jesus through music and unite the body of Christ. But guess what that is, that is an answer to Jesus’s priestly prayer in John 17, that father may they be one, even as you.
Bob Lenz (10:32):
And one why that the world may know it results in thousands of people every year, given their lives to Jesus. But guess what our goal is to celebrate the love of Jesus and to unite the body of Christ. So I think the highlight for me is two things, a unity. We see all denominations like Catholics and Pentecostals and, and Lutherans people like are there real Christians in those denominations? There’s Christians in everyone. It doesn’t mean I agree with all their doctrine, but if we agree on this, essentially, we can come together and celebrate Jesus. Amen. That’s what we need to do. But my highlight was on our 20th year, we built a million dollar stage. Now we don’t own the land. So we built it. People are raising money to help us pay this off, but here’s the cool thing we’re going to. After 10 years of using it, we’re going to give it to the county.
Bob Lenz (11:26):
We want to be a part of the community. But when we had the dedication for it, we gave glow lights to everyone there. And we have 25,000, not exaggeration evangelistic numbers, right? But real people that come in 25,000 people a day and we gave them each a glow stick. And we said, if you were here during mud Fest where we got eight inches of rain and your tent got swamped, break it and waive it. If you are here for everyone, wave it. And it was so cool to see different. If you met your spouse here, we thought nobody, there was, there was tens of twenties, 30, 40 people at mentor sponsor. But then we said, if you surrendered your life to Jesus, if you received Jesus or we surrendered your life to Jesus here, break your stick. And I got that picture of 25,000 iPads at 20 20,000 were broken, waving them.
Bob Lenz (12:17):
And the whole place was lit up. And I’m like, that is my highlight. That’s why we do it. And so now we that one’s in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the second week of July. But this last year we started life Fest, music, city, and home of Johnny Cash. Hideaway farm in yes, just 20, 30 miles out of Nashville, Tennessee. And so now we’re doing a second one there. And then this March, March 26th, I don’t know where this all goes. But down in Naples, Florida, we’re going to do a life Fest one day down in Naples, Florida, and bring the hope of Jesus there.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:52):
It sounds like God is really multiplying your efforts and giving you more work to do. Isn’t that amazing that when you do something good for God, he gives you more to do well, thank you so much for being on the evangelism podcast. If someone wants to find out more about your curriculum or, or maybe even invite you to come to a school or come to life as what’s the best website for them to find out more about you.
Bob Lenz (13:17):
Well, if you want to go, if you want school information, go, the dignity pledge.com take the pledge as well. You take the pledge to stand up for the value of every person, right? So dignity pledge that com or if you want to come to a Christian music festival, life fest.com, right. Life fest.com. And so you go to either one of those in you’ll find out information, how to get my books. I’ve written six books. Anything that you need go to one of those for the public school, dignity pledge that com and for the Christian music festival life fest.com.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:52):
Well, thank you brother, Bob, for being on the evangelism podcast. I appreciate your passion for Jesus and your love for people.
Bob Lenz (13:59):
I’d love to come back some time. Let’s talk about how to encourage others in train them in bringing Jesus to people. Nine out of 10 people never lead somebody to Christ that has to change. How about nine out of 10 bringing some of the Jesus. Let’s talk about that next time.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:14):
Amen. It’s a date. We’ll do it. Thank you, God bless you. Thanks. Thanks so much for listening to the evangelism podcast today, our ministry is supported by people like you, who help us go to the nations to preach the gospel. Our goal is every soul. It only costs us an average of about $1 for every person. We’re able to tell about Jesus. And so could you do me a favor, go to my website, king ministries.com and become a partner with us for as little as $1 a month. You can start to partner with king ministries and help us lead at least one person to Jesus every single month. Imagine for $1, you can start a party in heaven every single month. So right now, go to king ministries.com and partner with us and help us to preach the gospel to those who need to hear the gospel. The most, the least reach people in the world. Also, I’d like to ask you to go to apple podcasts and give the evangelism podcast a five star review. Your positive review will help other people find this podcast who are excited about evangelism. Thank you so much. And God bless you
Evangelism Podcast Host (15:37):
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.
