Nick Hall leads Pulse Evangelism. His passion is leading people to Jesus and a few years ago his ministry launched the Pulse 100 to train young evangelists how to share the Gospel. Nick’s ministry has had a big impact here in America and around the world and on today’s episode of The Evangelism Podcast Nick Hall shares the story of how he was called to be an evangelist and some of his strategies for raising up a new generation of evangelists.
Nick Hall is the leader of Pulse evangelism, a ministry focused on training young evangelists to share the gospel. He received a call to evangelism as a teenager and has been pursuing this calling for over 25 years. Hall founded Pulse in 2006 with the goals of uniting the church, equipping people to share the gospel, and reaching the lost.
The key features of Pulse’s ministry are:
Pulse 100: A 9-10 month program that trains and commissions young evangelists aged 18-30, providing them with community, curriculum, and mentorship to develop their calling and character.
Evangelism training and resources: Pulse offers free online training courses and plans evangelism conferences to equip believers of all ages to share their faith.
Launching new evangelistic initiatives: Pulse provides an “incubator” to help young evangelists develop and launch new ministries and outreach efforts.
Hall sees a great need and opportunity for a new generation of evangelists to rise up and reach their peers and communities with the gospel. He believes God is pouring out an anointing and raising up a youth movement of evangelists in America and around the world.
Learn More About Nick Hall: https://www.nickhall.com/
Learn More About Pulse Evangelism: https://www.pulse.org/Transcript:
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Nick Hall leads Pulse evangelism. His passion is leading people to Jesus. And a few years ago, his ministry launched the Pulse 100 to train young evangelists how to share the gospel. Nick’s ministry has had a big impact here in America and around the world. And on today’s episode of the Evangelism Podcast, Nick Hall shares the story of how he was called to be an evangelist and some of his strategies for raising up a new generation of evangelists.
(00:41):
Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
Evangelism Podcast Host (00:46):
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
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:09):
Daniel King. 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, Nick Hall. Thank you so much for joining me on the Evangelism Podcast.
Nick Hall (01:22):
Hey Daniel, man, so glad to be here. Love the podcast and excited to be a part.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:28):
Well, thank you so much. You have been doing evangelism across America and around the world, and I’m really excited about how you’re training young evangelists through Pulse 100 and it’s really amazing what your ministry has been doing. I’ve had the privilege of attending several of your events that you’ve done in different parts of the United States, and it’s just so amazing to see the impact of your ministry. But I was thinking today we could start all the way back at the beginning and could you tell us a little bit about how you received your call from God to be an evangelist?
Nick Hall (02:08):
Yeah, man, it’s going down memory lane here. I love it. So my story as an evangelist goes way back to when I was a little kid. I prayed with my mom to receive Jesus and put my trust in him. And right away when I was a little kid, I just wanted everybody to know Jesus. So my joke is I had to go to church to learn not to share my faith. And the reason was I just always wanted people to know Jesus. I always wanted to share the gospel. And it wasn’t until I got around Christians that I realized that was kind of weird. So my story then was going to church, being involved in youth group, always wrestling with this passion and trying to fit in. And it was really when I was probably 14, 15 years old that I had a youth pastor that said to me, Nick, I think you’re called into evangelism.
(03:12):
And he just saw this boldness and this desire to share the gospel and he kind of called it out. So that’s the first time I can remember anybody affirming that in me. Fast forward a few years later, I’m 18, I’m a freshman in college and I was on a college basketball scholarship and God was just after my life in a way I hadn’t known before. And it really was for me, this crossroads moment of what am I going to live for? What am I going to be loud about? And really in a prayer chapel on this private university I was at, I really surrendered to this call that I’m on earth to tell people about Jesus. So I was 18 years old and that was really for me, the end of a lot of things that I was pursuing in the beginning of a new journey of just saying, God, wherever you want me to go, whatever you want me to do, I just want to be obedient. And so now I’m 43, so it’s been 25 years of running down this road, traveling the world. In the early days it was saying yes to any invitation and also going to learn from anyone who was doing it. So I would just travel my spring breaks, my summer breaks, any opportunity I had, if Billy Graham was somewhere, if Louis Pau was somewhere, if Josh McDowell was somewhere, I would just be there on their hip trying to learn. And so that’s kind of how I got into this.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:46):
And then talk me through what happened as you began to grow your ministry and developing the vision for what you’re doing today.
Nick Hall (04:59):
Yeah, so my context, again, all of us are coming from different places. Part of my call was I felt like I was supposed to transfer schools. So I transferred from this private school that had a more Christian foundation to a secular university back home. And when I did that, I was there trying to reach this campus, North Dakota State University. It was about 14,000 students. There was 25,000 college kids in our community. And of the 25,000, we counted somewhere around 700 that were involved in anything Christian. And so again, during this time, I’m traveling and learning under Billy Graham and learning under Luis Palau, and I’m traveling to preach in small towns, but this campus, these people that I’m around every day don’t know Jesus. And there’s this huge drop off. There’s a huge decline that happens in university where a lot of Christian kids who grow up in a home where they knew the Lord, a lot of them leave their faith in that 18 to 25-year-old window.
(06:05):
And so I ended up writing a paper in my English class in the fall of 2004, and the paper was really like this burning longing desire in my heart to reach my friends. And the paper was titled Pulse. And that paper really began a movement on our campus. We had 8,000 students come out to these different events, had 1200 students respond to the gospel and was really never trying to start an organization or a ministry. This was really about, man, how do we reach the people in our backyard? And so that paper though, and that initiative resulted in students all over America asking us for help. And so here I am, I just graduated with a business degree. I’m living in my parents’ basement, getting the pressure to go get a real job, normal things that you go in adulting, I guess. Yeah. And me and my friend were like, Hey, let’s go for it.
(07:07):
If God wants us to go, it’ll go. If he doesn’t, it won’t. And so in the fall of 2006, we incorporated Pulse, which is now known as Pulse Evangelism. And we just said, man, we’re going to try to reach our generation with the gospel. We really had three goals. One was to unite the church. Number two was to equip people to share the gospel, and number three was to reach the loss. And so we did this in small towns and in college campuses. And now the ministry has grown. We have about 50 full-time employees and do events around the world. And we really have boiled it down now into two pillars. One is to reach the loss, and that’s all things, evangelistic campaigns and outreach. How do we share the gospel? How do we raise up the church to be a voice for the good news? And then the second pillar is to unleash the evangelist. And so I’m super passionate about finding young men and women with the call of God on their life and helping them understand what it means to be an evangelist, that it’s possible to be an evangelist, and really raising them up and sending them out into varying spheres of influence where I believe we need evangelists active. And that’s partially in the marketplace, it’s partially in the church, and then it’s partially launching new evangelistic efforts and ministries.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:36):
Let’s talk about unleashing the evangelists. I really love that part of what you do. And I have some good reports because in my recent trip to Zimbabwe, there were several people on the trip that had gone through your Pulse 100 program, and I was asking some of them. I actually interviewed here on the Evangelism podcast, and then some of them I was just having conversations with and I was asking, what do you get out of being part of Pulse? And what did you learn being around Nick Hall? And their responses were just absolutely positive. They were talking about how it just revolutionized their life, changed their life. And then I saw that several of them had a chance to present the gospel and did a really beautiful job of sharing the gospel. And I could see that they had been trained well in how to share their faith with people. So kind of talk us through the equipping of the evangelists, identifying evangelists and then what your program looks like. And if someone’s listening and maybe they want to take part in one of the pulse 100 things that you’re doing, how would they be able to go about doing that?
Nick Hall (09:57):
Yeah, absolutely, Daniel. So all this started five years ago. So during the pandemic, everything shut down. And one of the things that happened during this time was a lot of the mentors and leaders I had from 2018 to 2020 passed away. So Billy Graham died, Luis Palau died. Robbie Zacharias was another mentor of mine died. And I think there was just this resounding question in my heart of where are the evangelists? And I’ve spent 20 years, 25 years traveling and doing this, and I would say largely for 25 years, I’ve kind of been known as the young guy, Nick, you’re the young evangelist. You’re doing the young things, what’s going on? And that makes sense when you’re in your twenties, but when you’re in your thirties, you’re not really the young guy anymore and certainly not in your forties. And so I think there’s just been this awareness in my heart and in my mind of where are these new expressions?
(11:00):
Where are the men and women called of God to reach their generation? How do we find them? How do we unleash ’em? Where are they? And I came across this quote from John Wesley and John Wesley had this prayer, and his prayer was that he said, God, would you give me a hundred? And he said, God, give me a hundred who hate nothing but sin and fear nothing but God, and I’ll shake the gates of hell. And so this was kind of Wesley’s prayer that started really the Methodist movement, the Wesleyan movement, and really what became known as the circuit writers. I mean, these were this group of young men that were going to go and change their generation with the gospel. And so I’d say for these five years that’s been like, my prayer is, God, would you give me a hundred? And it’s grown to the point, Daniel, that for me, there’s two parts of what I do.
(11:53):
One part is doing it, being an evangelist, but even that has shifted for me of I’m trying to be faithful as an evangelist, to be a role model, having a good marriage, having good relationship with my kids, loving the Lord more, keeping checks and balances on my health and the things that I’m not letting things become inappropriate or unhealthy in my private. Because we just see so many men and women of God, not just evangelists, but certainly evangelists, where there’s scandals that happen, marriages fall apart. There’s just this kind of track record of casualties, if you will. And every time an evangelist falls, it hurts everybody. Every time a Christian leader falls, it hurts everybody. And so when we started this pulse to a hundred, we said, we have two goals. One, we want to help men and women love Jesus with everything in such a way that what they speak of him is true.
(12:58):
So that’s just the first goal is really simple, that you would love Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And that how you’re representing him, whether it’s on a stage or off a stage, that it’s consistent with the truths of scripture, right? Like good theology, good doctrine, not teaching things that are just not biblical. But then the second goal, which to me is equally important, is that you would last so that in 5, 10, 20, 30 years, you’re still in the game. You’re still loving the Lord, you’re still being faithful. And I’ll be honest, for me, I learned a lot of how to do it, like preaching, giving the gospel, giving a response, organizational tips. I learned barely anything about how to be healthy, how to be well, how to take care of your emotions and your ego and all of these things. And so that’s really then turned into this initiative and it’s grown every year.
(13:59):
When we started, I didn’t know that we would find a hundred. The goal was what if we could train a hundred in a year? And I didn’t know that a hundred would apply Now every year it’s grown. Every year more are coming every year more are being trained. But again, our desire in this is we’re coming behind them. We’re giving ’em a community of like-minded people. So you’re 18 to 30, you burn for the loss, you want to share the gospel. You’re weird. In most settings, you are weird. People don’t get you. They don’t understand. You’re always burdened. And when you share your burden with others, evangelists know this, look, you share it with others and they look at you like you’re a little bit nuts. And it’s one of the first things we say when we get the group together is to say, Hey, you are nuts.
(14:48):
You’re weird. That’s part of why you’re in the room, but you’re not alone anymore. So now you have other like-minded burning ones wanting to reach their generation. And from there it’s like there’s a community, but then it’s understanding the calling. What does it mean to be an evangelist? What does that look like? We have a certain set of curriculum we’re trying to help equip and educate them with tools and tactics to do it. But again, equally important is how are they living? What does their life look like? I mean, evangelists often don’t have a good relationship with the local church. Evangelists often are lone rangers and can get bitter at the body of Christ. And these are really toxic things that can be to the detriment of this calling. We’re here to serve the church. We’re not here to use the church. So it’s community, it’s curriculum, it’s calling, it’s character.
(15:45):
We’re building into them. We’re giving them mentors and small groups. Again, we’re trying to help them develop the right disciplines to be able to last. And then at the end of the program, it’s a commissioning. We’re wanting them to feel the sense of what it is to be sent that God believes in you and we believe in you. You have a family. So that’s really Pulse 100. It’s a nine, 10 month program. We have a hundred every year. We’re about to start our fifth cohort this fall. But then as that’s grown now we’re producing more offerings. We’ve purchased a housing center and also a training center to have an incubator space for men and women who have this dream, who have this passion or wanting to launch something. Where do you go? We’re wanting to provide a place where, Hey, you can figure this out.
(16:40):
How do I form a board? What’s my strategy? What’s it look like? How do I do this? And we just call it like we’re building a home for the evangelists and a place. And honestly, we’re pulse. We’re not trying to get other people to be pulse. We want to launch them to be who God has made them to be. And in some ways, I joke with our team, say, we’re raising up our competition and we want an army of men and women from every background to be bold and unleashed to do the work of the evangelists.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:16):
That’s awesome. So if you are between the ages of 18 and 30 and you want to get trained in evangelism, Nick, what would be the best way for them to find out more information?
Nick Hall (17:29):
Yeah, I mean online pulse.org. And then when you go to the website, you’ll find Pulse 100. So you could, if you entered it, it’d pulse.org/pulse 100, and there would be an application process there, but there’s a lot of other things available. We have a training resource that we keep developing called Make know, and that’s anybody can do it, it’s free. Almost everything we do is free. We’re not trying to make money, we’re trying to create avenues and resources. And as this training center opens, we’re also going to be planning and holding evangelism conferences for all ages. So we’ll be doing events for pastors, we’ll be doing events for parents, for teenagers, for grandparents. What does it look like for us to live out this calling in varying spheres of life? I mentioned earlier I really see this calling and these men and women coming in, they’re from three different arenas.
(18:31):
A third of ’em are from the marketplace, and God is calling them for the marketplace to be an evangelist at Target or General Mills or in the medical field. We need evangelists everywhere. We just need men and women who are burning to share the gospel and reach their friend, neighbor, family, everybody. The second bucket is in the local church. I believe we need evangelists on staff at churches. We need the church to understand what the evangelist is, and we need the evangelists to be committed to the local church. And so this is raising up men and women who are going to be youth pastors. They’re going to be teaching pastors, they’re going to be evangelism pastors. And their purpose within the church context is twofold. One, it’s to equip the people in every church, every person who comes to this church, we have a burden that they would know how to share the gospel.
(19:27):
And I find that that either exists or doesn’t exist based on whether there is an evangelist there. Where there is an evangelist, you’ll find that equipping of the saints taking place, which Paul talks about in Ephesians. But then the second goal in the local church is to help the church get outside the walls. How do we reach our neighbors? How do we reach our community? How do we plan intentional? That could be international, it could be domestic, but again, it’s just that heartbeat of the evangelist needs to be present. And then the third bucket, which is probably where I gravitate towards the most, is I’m looking for the men and women that have a God idea in their heart, in their mind, that I believe the world desperately needs. And they don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to start it. And again, my story is 20 some years ago I felt this burden.
(20:17):
I felt this passion got to launch this, got to do it, but who knows how to do it, who has done it? Who is doing it? It’s not a long list. A lot of it is you have to figure it out on your own. And so we are trying to help those men and women not have to do the same mistakes and go through the same hardship. We’re trying to soften it for them and give them a launching pad to do what God has put on them to do, whether it’s online, whether it’s stadiums, it could be anything. I just believe that we need a new generation of evangelism and evangelistic innovation to reach the world.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:59):
Amen. I agree with you totally. And I think it’s amazing that you’re doing that. Let’s finish by talking about America. You have invested a lot of blood, sweat, and tears and money into reaching people for Jesus here in America. And in some ways it looks like America there is growing darker and darker, but at the same time, there are amazing rays of light where God is breaking through and doing amazing things. It seems like just in the last little bit there has come a new hunger for the things of God. What do you see that God wants to do here in this nation? You’re very much a visionary. And so what do you see in the year and years to come, what God wants to do here?
Nick Hall (21:52):
Yeah, I think all around the world, this is true, but certainly in America it’s true. The last five years have been a season of breaking again from the pandemic to the racial and political unrest, instability to the economic instability. It seems that there’s not a lot of people that are able to just keep going with the status quo. I think our best efforts, if we’re honest, we have to say, man, they’re not working how we would like them to work. And I think that is a real gift from God, because as Americans, we have this kind of determination and pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work hard. And anybody who works hard can get it done. And just like anything, I think your strengths are your weaknesses. So our strength is that we’ll do it and our weaknesses will do it sometimes before the Lord.
(22:59):
This isn’t about doing, it’s about humility and repentance and admitting you can’t do it. Admitting you don’t have the answer. And that’s hard. It’s hard for leaders, it’s hard for evangelists. But I think we’re in this season of breaking where God is wanting to pour out a new level of anointing and blessing to those that are willing to be broken before him. And there is a desperation. And again, in the desperation, people are going to turn to different things. They’re going to grab on harder to money or they’re going to grab on harder to politics. They’re going to grab on harder to things where we can find safety and security, but also people are going to grab harder onto the things of God. And I think that’s where the change can and will happen. And there is a youth movement happening right now again, and we’ve seen revivals and we’re seeing revivals and mass baptisms and mass conversions.
(23:53):
And it’s happening right now. I mean, the last five years, we’ve seen more people come to Jesus in America than we had in our 15 years prior combined. So the fields are ripe for harvest, but I think we have to be willing to change and to adapt. And I would say specifically, we have to be willing to get behind this next generation. So we do an event every summer in Arkansas, and this summer we had people from 42 states come and they’re coming to be trained and galvanized in the gospel. So we had 50,000 people there, and we had thousands of people respond to the gospel, which is great. But more exciting for me is we had a dozen young evangelists on stage preaching the gospel, and we had people from 40 states being equipped. So we had more than 20,000 people go through vandalism training during this activity.
(24:51):
And again, I think that’s what God is doing is he’s equipping the saints, he’s raising us up, and I think he’s unleashing the church to get loud about what matters. I think for a long time the church in America has been loud about everything, but Jesus we’re loud about social issues, we’re loud about politics. But when it comes to the gospel, 90 plus percent of people never share it. Now those people share about everything else. They share about their views of vote for him or vote for her. They share about their views on vaccination. They share. I mean, we’re just loud. Social media has made us loud about many things. And I think we’re living in an age where God is waking us up to where does our help come from? And either our help comes from the Lord or it’s all fools gold. And so I really believe we’re living in a revival moment.
(25:45):
I think this is the dawning of the day of the Evangelist. I believe that the evangelist exists. I will often do this in our office. I’ll have a drum or a cajon or a mbe, and I’ll hit it. I’ll just hit it and I’ll just hit it and I’ll always hit it. I’ll hit it. And I’ll say, the role of the evangelist is to keep the beat. Keep the beat. Keep the beat. People need Jesus. People need Jesus. People need Jesus. People need make Jesus known, make Jesus known. And what I’ll say is that if nobody’s keeping the beat, then nobody has the beat. And in the midst of many voices and many things that are loud, people find themselves getting loud about the wrong things. And I think we need the evangelists more than ever to be holding up the North star to the church and saying, Hey, we are a good news people.
(26:34):
And until God changes the heart, nothing’s going to change. And that doesn’t mean the evangelist doesn’t care about politics and doesn’t care about education. We realize we need to pray and ask God for godly leaders and good legislation and good laws, but more than any office in the church, we’re the ones that realize that until a soul is saved, it’s just behavior modification. And so we need to see this heart change in the bride of Christ and in the masses. And so I think that’s what God is doing. Again, there’s an army rising up and I’ve never been more excited. And the good thing, Daniel, I think you and I are similar in this. I’m less excited about what I’m doing than I ever have. I mean, if people ask me, what are you excited about? I’m not talking about an event or a big dream I have, or let’s fill a stadium or fill them all and those will come and go.
(27:33):
What I’m most excited about is God is birthing a generation, and I think it’s time for us to get behind this next generation. Every leader. If you’re a leader and you’re watching this, I would challenge you. If your passion is just in what you are doing, I think you’re missing it. I think God wants us to be opening doors and raising up and giving away what we have. And this isn’t something that can wait until we’re 60, 70, 80. That’s normal. Somebody gets to be in their seventies and all of a sudden they really care about young people. And it’s kind of convenient at that point. You need to because you’re going to die soon. But I think we need to have this open, open-handed heart of saying, man, we need everybody. I can do what I can, but I can’t do enough. It’s not on me. It’s not about me. This is about the glory of God. This is about the gospel of Jesus. And we need a generation. And you know what? If people go further and do better than me, praise God. Praise God because I can’t do it. But God’s doing it. He’s raising him up, and now is the time.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (28:42):
Amen. Well, if you’re a leader or an evangelist, you want to know more about Nick, you can go to nick hall.com. You can also check out pulse.org and find out about the Pulse 100 and everything that Pulse evangelism is doing. Nick Hall, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast. It’s great to have you here.
Nick Hall (29:05):
Super thankful for you, Daniel.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (29:07):
Thank you.
Evangelism Podcast Host (29:08):
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Evangelism Coach Daniel King (30:11):
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Evangelism Podcast Host (31:32):
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