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American evangelism

Shane Degen | Jesus Loves America

Shane Degen is a from Australia, but he has a heart for America. God gave him a vision to do fifty stadium events – one in each state in America. Today we talk about how God set him free from a life of addiction to heroin and gave him a passion for evangelism.

Learn more about Shane Degen: https://jesuslovesamerica.com/

Discover Shane Degen’s Two Hearts Gospel Presentation:

 

Transcript: 

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Shane Deagan is from Australia, but he has a heart for America. God gave him a vision to do 50 stadium events, one in each state in the United States. Today we talk about how God set him free from a life of addiction to heroin and gave him a passion for evangelism. You’ll be inspired as you hear his passion for living for eternity.

Evangelism Podcast Host (00:43):
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 (01:06):
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, Shane Deagan from Australia. Thank you for being on the Evangelism Podcast.

Shane Degen (01:20):
Good morning, Daniel. Thanks for having us.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:23):
Alright, so you are an evangelist.

Shane Degen (01:25):
Yes sir.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:25):
And you have come here to America as a missionary because God has given you a vision to reach the nation of the United States for Jesus.

Shane Degen (01:38):
Yes sir.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:38):
And your ministry is Jesus loves America. Yes,

Shane Degen (01:42):
He does.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:42):
So I love us.

Shane Degen (01:43):
Yes. It’s the gospel in three words.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:45):
Well, let’s start at the beginning. How did you become a believer and then how did you start stepping out in evangelism?

Shane Degen (01:56):
Okay, right. So we’ve only got half a day. No, I’m kidding. Give an evangelist to Mike, he’ll take over the show, but okay. So I met Jesus in the jail cell in the year 2002, January 16. So up until that point in my life, I’d gone to church as a boy. But in my latter teenage, some stuff happened to me as a kid and I got kind of tempted by the enemy as it were for that big wide world of sin and depravity. And so as a teenager started taking drugs, trying to probably numb the pain, but looking for hope. Never really as a boy, I went to Sunday school and church. I never really met the Lord. I just had lots of good teachings, but I did love God in my heart. Anyway, at any rate, I went off into the world, got tempted and started taking drugs as a teenager, starts with marijuana. But by the age of 19, I was a heroin addict. I had a $3,000 a day habit, but I was always very, that’s pretty expensive. Yes sir. It’s

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:10):
After a few days I’d run out of money.

Shane Degen (03:13):
Yeah, I guess. So thus eth the lifestyle of crime to support that. And so there’s a lot of people either deal or steal in that world. And I was selling a lot of drugs to support my habit and it just went from the lighter, lighter party drugs. It just got worse and worse. But I was studying science at university and my major was chemistry. So I kind of fell in with some meth cooks and I was using that to support my heroin habit and all that. Started around 18, 19 and continued up until about 24. I owned some businesses. I had an internet business, a nightclub, and a rave production business. So I was a bit entrepreneurial. Within a year I dropped out of university. I didn’t finish my undergrad at that point. And by the age of 24, the police caught me, sent me to jail.

(04:16):
Then six months later, I was laying on my bed of the Toowoomba Watch house, which is kind of like the holding cells in Australia. And I was just laying there and I was thinking about what am I going to say to the judge because the next day I had to stand before him and give an account and he was going to sentence me and I realized I am not going to be able to talk my way out of this one. They had me, had me on some, I had stabbed a guy. I was on production of methyl amphetamines. So very serious charges. I was going away to jail for a long, long time. And as I was laying on my bed trying to come up with an excuse, realizing going to, I can’t took my way out of this, God spoke to me in that moment.

(05:08):
I wouldn’t say I necessarily heard an audible voice or I didn’t see a light just deep within my heart. I knew I knew and it was like God said to me, how would I like to be standing before him on judgment day, trying to come up with an excuse for hell because that’s what I was doing, trying to come up with an excuse for the judge and I didn’t want to go to jail for a long time. The idea of hell and eternity, that’s not just a couple of years, that is forever. That struck me. The fear of the Lord struck my heart, eternity became real. And so I surrendered to God in that moment. In my heart, I just chose to do the Christian thing, whatever that meant, I’m going to do that. So read a Bible, get to church on Sunday, try and pray. But really what happened in that moment, even though it was a fear of the Lord moment, I had an amazing encounter with the love of God that just changed the trajectory of my life. I did do a couple of years in jail, but when I got out, I met my amazing wife, Amanda.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:24):
And now you have eight kids.

Shane Degen (06:26):
Yes sir. So our oldest

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:28):
Is 22. A big family.

Shane Degen (06:29):
Yes. Well, God has blessed us. Yeah, without a doubt. My joy.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:37):
So your oldest is 22,

Shane Degen (06:38):
That’s Locklan.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:39):
Yes. Going down to what’s your youngest?

Shane Degen (06:42):
So I’ll go through it. So Locke’s 22. Then we have Elijah, he’s 20, they’re kind of one’s in the army and one’s a mortgage broker. Then I have Noah, he’s 18, just finished school. Then Gabriela is 16. Then we have Moses is 13, Abe, Abraham. Oh, sorry, I missed, Evangeline is 11 and then Abe is nine and then Isaac is

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:10):
Seven. Okay, so then you got out of jail.

Shane Degen (07:14):
Yes.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:15):
You became an engineer.

Shane Degen (07:16):
That’s true.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:17):
And then God called you to be an evangelist. And so how did that happen?

Shane Degen (07:24):
Okay, so from jail. Yeah, I got out. I started studying engineering in aerospace, avionics and I did undergrad. I worked for Boeing for a season in Australia. And then my professor offered me a scholarship to do a PhD. So I was about six months into that scholarship, enter revival now. So from 2002 I went into jail. 2004 I got out and started college straightaway. And then up to 2008 was my undergrad years. And then my last few years I worked for Boeing and I was going to work for them full-time when the scholarship opened up. But in the mid of 2008, there was, that’s the year I started my PhD. There was a revival that was broadcast on God tv and that just changed my world. I saw lots of people getting healed. I saw wheelchairs getting empty.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:19):
Which revival was that?

Shane Degen (08:20):
That was in Lakeland, Florida.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:23):
Okay.

Shane Degen (08:23):
Yep.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:24):
And who was leading that?

Shane Degen (08:28):
I forget the name of the evangelist, but yeah, but that revived.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:33):
I remember hearing about that. Yeah, it was powerful. It was a big deal.

Shane Degen (08:36):
Yeah, they had like 35 people get raised from the dead over a series of 120 days.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:44):
Wow.

Shane Degen (08:45):
Now I’d been a Christian for six years and I’d never seen any miracles. We believed in miracles. I just never saw them in the west. You’d hear about happening in places like Africa and that kind of thing. But I was seeing them live on TV every night. I mean 55 people got up out of wheelchairs over the course of 14 days watching these people get up and walk. And then every couple of days there was a new dead raising testimony. There were 35 different testimonies. I tuned in about day 55 and tuned out about day 80. But that 30 days was enough to catalyze me into the things of God. So up until that point, if you had have asked me how long was I going to live, I would’ve said, oh, 70 years, 80 years would be good. But after that, I just knew that I was going to live forever and I had to reprioritize my life for the forever.

(09:45):
As an engineer, I won’t in this major international competition for UAV design, I was a workaholic. We would be up to 80 hours in the lab or field testing. And I realized in that revival that everything I was working really hard on meant nothing in eternity. I was going to get to heaven bankrupt as it were, that I couldn’t take any of that stuff to heaven with me. The only thing I could take to heaven with me was people. And I needed to reprioritize my life to help others get to heaven. So that mobilized me out onto the streets to start showing the gospel, the message of that evangelist, it was essentially, Hey, the stuff we are doing up here, God will use you to do it. Get out there, tell people about Jesus and you will see these miracles break out. Gone are the days where we just tell people about Jesus. Now we need to demonstrate the power of the kingdom. I’d been a Christian six years, never shared the gospel. Once I had seen one person come to the Lord just through living it, he’d seen the change in my life and he started coming to church with us. I was too scared to be honest with you. But since that revival, I see a handful typically get saved daily.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:08):
Wow. So in Australia you had the opportunity to do a stadium event.

Shane Degen (11:15):
Yes sir. Yes.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:16):
Jesus loves Australia. Tell me about that. It took a big step of faith to do it

Shane Degen (11:21):
Right. Wow. Let me just tell you the process to that. So I stepped out of my postgrad in 2010, took a masters just for an early exit just because I had this fire for souls in me. The word of the Lord is shut up in my bones, like a fire says Jeremiah and I grow weary of trying to hold it back and indeed cannot. And so I just had to go after God. So I stepped out, started going out on the streets. But then within a couple of weeks I went to a conference, had a visitation from the Lord and he said, stop, wait. I had stadiums and crusades and everything in my heart, but the Lord said to me, wait, I want you to pray for three years. And if we do that, then we would see the birth of a worldwide revival in 2018.

(12:15):
So this is the year 2010. I needed that word from God. It was a very clear conversation, two-way conversation. It was only a few sentences, but I had it with the creator of the universe. And up until that point, I had very little faith for hearing God’s voice, but I needed that word to sustain me through a three year prayer meeting. So from 2010 to 2013, I just prayed like about eight hours a day, up to 16 hours a day. Instead of going to work, I would go pray, but I would still go out on the streets once a week into 2013. That’s kind of when I stepped into the ministry just started. But even since then, I spend the first half of my morning with the Lord just in prayer and worship, really trying to hear direction from him. And then we mission in the afternoon, go do whatever it is God’s called us to do.

(13:11):
So just in our local area, we started off with a seven university campaign across southeast Queensland in Australia. All this kind of transition happened in Brisbane, Australia, which is the capital of Queensland. And so we did seven university colleges kind of doing revival and harvest. But I was very frustrated at the fruit I was seeing, wasn’t seeing much. But then we stepped out and we did cities. We started doing country towns. We did three major towns, but again, there was only some getting saved. We weren’t filling the arenas and the stadiums we were booking at that stage. And so I left Australia, I packed up, moved to North India, poured my life for a few months into North India as a missionary, trying to reach the largest, most unreached people group on the planet in the states of Uta, pian, Bihar. But that door closed after a few months.

(14:16):
We couldn’t work there any longer. So returned to Australia, just started seeking God, what do you have for us? What do you have for us? And it was stadiums, big stadiums in the capital city. So went in and had a lot of conversations with those guys. Went and booked this massive series of gospel events and then went back to my prayer closet and prayed for the 80 million to do it. And it didn’t come, but that caused me to go get alongside churches, start to rally churches, work with pastors. And then in 2017 I went to Sydney because I kept having dreams about Sydney. Sydney’s the largest city in Australia, has a population of about 5 million people. And I kept getting words about Sydney. So I said, okay, Lord, well which part of Sydney do you want to do? Like this area or this area or this area? And God just said, stop. He says, come up here, see what I see. I saw the whole city of Sydney. I went, all right, well if it’s going to be Sydney, then we need Stadium Australia, which is right in the middle of Sydney. It’s the largest stadium in Australia at that time. Its sponsored name was a NZ stadium. And so we booked it by faith, this multimillion dollar stadium. At the time I was still believing God for a bottle of milk for breakfast some days for our family. But whilst we booked the $2 million.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:55):
So you booked the stadium while you were praying for milk for your family,

Shane Degen (16:00):
Right? Yeah.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (16:00):
So that’s a big step of faith

Shane Degen (16:03):
That actually the word that caused that to happen actually started eight years earlier in 2010 after I first stepped out. So one day I was in my backyard really trying to figure out how I was going to get a bottle of milk to feed my children. The next day we had no milk and I just cried out to Lord. I said, Jesus, I need $2 for a bottle of milk. And I very clearly heard the audible voice of the Lord say to me, son, right now you’re learning to trust me for $2. One day it will be $2 million. I woke up, went to bed that night, a great peace came on me. I went to bed, I woke up the next day, milk was on our doorstep. And so God showed his faithfulness with the milk. And indeed it happened almost a dozen times over the next 12 months where we would go to bed, no milk, and it would just be on our doorstep the next morning. So that really sustained me through that eight years until we saw the fulfillment of that word December 1st, 2018, where we booked the $2 million stadium.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:15):
And so God enabled you to raise the budget, and what were the results of that outreach?

Shane Degen (17:24):
So we had a couple of thousand people turn out growing in the grace of fundraising. So yeah, we didn’t have any money two weeks out, but we got enough money for the deposit six weeks out and then two weeks out we made the final payment on the stadium. But over the course of watching it unfold, churches when we came to town, they knew we had no money. And so it was hard to get them to come on board. But as we just kept going back to the churches, letting them know what’s happening, helping them with their evangelism programs, we had a point where we had a couple of major breakthroughs, either financially or with connections, and it was those breakthroughs that the churches saw, oh wow, God is in this. So they started signing up and in the end we had 2002 people come in the door according to the counter.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:34):
Wow, okay. So then God gave you a vision for America.

Shane Degen (18:40):
And

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:40):
So you’re from Australia, but you’ve come here to America as a Australian missionary and you’ve started, Jesus loves America. What do you see God doing here in America?

Shane Degen (18:54):
Well, first of all, the harvest is so ripe. It’s just amazing the number of people who know about Jesus but don’t know him. So we see a lot of people come to the Lord here.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:08):
Do you feel like the United States is more open right now than Australia?

Shane Degen (19:15):
Yes.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:16):
Just in conversations that you have with people.

Shane Degen (19:19):
Without a doubt, I would say that America is probably four to five times more Christian than Australia, particularly in the southern states, which is where I mostly am. But even in the northern ones, the ones that a lot of people would consider heathenistic states, they’re twice as Christian as Australia. So yeah, there is definitely an openness for the gospel.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:43):
I think that’s an encouragement for people in the United States to hear, Hey, we have a great place where we can really make a big impact for God.

Shane Degen (19:52):
That’s right. Yeah.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:53):
I mean, you talk to pastors everywhere you go, it doesn’t matter where you go in the world. They say, oh, in this place it’s really hard. It’s hard. But I’ve found that wherever you go, there’s people that are open to receive Jesus.

Shane Degen (20:05):
That’s right, absolutely. The harvest is ripe. It’s the laborers that if we need people to know their God, that lion of the tribe of Judy, he wants the raw and he wants to save souls. So yeah, it’s definitely very ripe here. What’s kind of mobilized me for stadiums and those kind of events is personal evangelism. Everything that I’ve just learned on the streets, we just take into churches and we take that from churches to the cities. So our typical campaign philosophy, what a typical campaign would look like is we’ll go into a city and tried to connect with the gatekeepers in the city, the senior leaders, senior ministries, just share with them. We’re evangelizing pastors. Go in there, share what we do, asking them if they need help with their evangelism programs. Could be bible colleges, seminaries or just ministries in general. And then typically they’re a little bit standoffish until they get to know you. But once they see some of the fruit, then they’ll open their doors and then we go and train, mobilize their people. But it’s right from the beginning, it’s with this vision of we are going to bring the city together. So at the same time we’ll start talking to the stadium, start negotiating with them the price, because that takes a lot of money plus faith and yeah, whilst rallying a team that’s going to help us pull this event together.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:42):
So what does that look like when you go into a church

Shane Degen (21:47):
And

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:47):
You’re training them in evangelism, what are some of the principles that you share? How do you motivate normal church members to get involved in sharing their faith?

Shane Degen (21:59):
Okay, well, so the key is the Holy Spirit. We always start with without the Holy Spirit, he is the master evangelist. We are wasting our time because the number one reason you probably know these statistics that people don’t share their faith is fear. 22% don’t share their faith because of fear. 17% don’t share their faith because they dunno what to say. Another 17% don’t share their faith because they don’t have opportunity and 9% don’t share their faith because they are too busy. So the fear thing, the Holy Spirit is the key. The spirit of power and boldness dunno what to say. Well, we’ve got simple little tools that we train people and what to say. But also what we’ve found is that once people know what to say, many Christians actually dunno how salvation works. So when we train people in tools, they just got saved, they made a decision, they prayed. Now they come to church on a Sunday, maybe go to a midweek group meeting, but they don’t know the process of salvation. So by training them in how to evangelize their friends, we’re actually giving them the confidence in how to be able to share the gospel. So that lowers the fear factor as well.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (23:24):
So what do you want to see God do here in the United States?

Shane Degen (23:30):
Well, we were just at Lasagne and I just came back from, well, okay, a few weeks ago now, about a month ago I think, or six weeks. Yeah. I came back from Anne with such a fire. God shifted something in me that it is possible if the church collaborates for us to evangelize nations. Two years ago we had a prophetic word given to our ministry. We came to America to Dallas based on two words and a dream a friend had. So that sent me to America and really it was just to do a citywide event. But while we were there raising the money and bringing churches together, training churches, getting a team and everything, we received this prophetic word around 50 states, 50 stadia simultaneously. One day, 20, 25. Now at this point in time, I was struggling trying to pull together a multimillion dollar campaign, one team, one budget, one city, the whole,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:39):
It’s interesting how God works, like our biggest vision, we’re like, we’re going to dream so big, we’re going to take the whole city. And then God says, no, my vision is 50

Shane Degen (24:50):
Because you start once you’ve

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:52):
Done, because God thinks way bigger than we do.

Shane Degen (24:55):
And sometimes when you’ve done something once, he wants to stretch you.

(25:00):
My background’s engineering. We have project management plans with roadmaps and milestones and yeah, that’s not how the Lord works. He wants you to get out of the boat, walk on the water. It defies all science. So yeah, that’s often what we find, which is why I don’t always have a management plan anymore. Our project management plan is the Lord. We seek him daily. He kind of shows you, I’ve found the big picture, but the mistake that we can make is trying to get to the big picture in our strength, leaning on our own gifts and talents and that kind of things. If we want to see God type fruit, God type results, we need to become 100% dependent on him letting him do the work, letting him bring it together. And we are just following him that way because he does the work. It’s a lot more effortless, it’s a lot more fun, and he gets the glory.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (26:04):
Now you also have a passion for entrepreneurship.

Shane Degen (26:09):
Yes.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (26:09):
And God’s given you a mandate to raise up believers who will be so entrepreneurial successful that they can give 90% and keep 10%.

Shane Degen (26:27):
What

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (26:27):
Would you say to the entrepreneur who wants to be used by God to put resources into evangelism?

Shane Degen (26:36):
So this whole concept comes from a man, I’m pretty certain his name is Rg Lano, about a hundred years ago. And what he did, his testimony is he was just a business guy who went to his local church, but they were always telling these stories of missions overseas and how God was moving. And so he went to his pastor from memory, he went to his pastor and said, what can I do? I really want to help more. He felt called to go be a missionary overseas. And his pastor said to him, no, how you can help the most, you’re an entrepreneur, how you can help the most is get more money to give to missions and let the missionaries do it. This was kind of the mentality, the philosophy at the time and just with that church. And so he was like, alright, God, well bless me more so I could give more because the missionaries, they need the money and the more money they can get, the more souls they can reach.

(27:41):
And on both levels, number one for eternity. But number two, helping them just here on earth. And so what he did was he signed 90% of the equity of the shares of his company over to the church. That way he could give 90% tax free. Now, yes, in America people can give tax free, but the limitation not many people know is that it’s at 60%. You can only give up to 60% of profits tax free. Above that you have to pay taxes because he wanted to give above the 60% threshold. He gave ownership to the ministry and then lived off the 10%. Well after he did that, God exploded his business. I forget the exact figures, but like a thousand fold type thing because God could trust him with the little God gave him much. So he did retire very, very wealthy. There’s a university at Tyler now called Larna University, but his entrepreneurial activities were in earth moving equipment. I think he built one of the first or had a patent for one of the first one ton moving Earth equipment a hundred years ago. But he had many patents in that area.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (29:03):
A lot of evangelists. Listen to this podcast. What advice would you give to evangelists?

Shane Degen (29:13):
I love Jesus. Everything. The number one thing that just has made the biggest difference in my life as it’s that first watch recently, this is what I’ve realized it is I spend the first three hours of the day just with the Lord and in the Bible from Hare culture, it’s called the first watch. But I think giving that first part of your day and your morning to Jesus, number one, you fall more in love with him. People want to not just know about God, they want to meet people who know God. We want to bring them into a relationship with God. We’ve got to know him. So kind of, I think I meet evangelists all over the world and I’m very blessed to be able to do that. But that’s the key to everything for me has just been that first few hours with the Lord in the morning.

(30:16):
From there, I get the ideas from there, I get the direction. He’s my CEO. When you work in a business, a lot of businesses, not every business starts with a staff meeting. People get delegated their tasks for the day. But so I get my instructions for what to do next or where to go for the ministry from that place. But David says this, he says this one thing I have desired that I will seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life to behold his beauty, number one, to inquire in his temple. Number two. So I think when we come before the Lord, there’s got to be this place of letting go of your to-do list, and I need help with this, this. And it’s really just a place to worship, to praise, to behold his beauty and his goodness and to fall more and more in love with him.

(31:10):
And this ever number one pursuit to mine is this deeper intimacy with the Lord. And then from that place, half the questions actually get answered, that God just sorts ’em out for you. But we typically still have our questions. So he just starts to speak and then you can go about and do what he says. And I’ve found that’s the way to be the most fruitful. The days where I get busy, and I don’t do that because you’re pressured, because of some deadline. I get up and I start phone calling, emailing, you’re kind of hitting the target with 10% of the phone calls, 20% of the emails. But if I would be disciplined in setting that first part of my day apart, when I come out of that place, people are contacting me. I don’t have to ring them. The phone calls I’m making, it’s hit, hit, hit, hit. So I can actually be more fruitful, even though I’m working less, but I’m spending more time with him because he’s ordering my footsteps.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (32:18):
Let’s finish with a word of prayer for America. Would you pray that God would send revival to this nation?

Shane Degen (32:29):
Amen. Yes, Lord. Oh Lord God, there is 50 states, Lord here, 50 states, 50 states, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. We thank you Lord for what you did last Tuesday. God, there was a mighty breakthrough for this nation and just, I really believe the word of the Lord now is run. The doors are open, wider, wider than before. There was already so many people getting saved before, but for the evangelists, for the missionaries, for those in ministry, there is such a port says one Corinthians 15, A great effective door for the gospel has been opened for me. And so God, we just, I pray, Lord for the revivalists, the evangelists watching here, Lord, that you would mobilize, mobilize, run now with the vision, run, run, run, run, run. Now is the time to run. Go up your loins and run. Because we have this window, we have this window where things are going to rapidly accelerate.

(33:49):
There is going to be just I, just a massive advancing. I see just this rapid acceleration. The interesting thing about the harvest fields is once a seed goes into the ground, it grows for months. The Bible says a man sows seed to the ground, goes to sleep all by itself. The ground produces first the blade, then the head, then the seed in the head, then he puts the sickle in. It’s like there’s all this time of preparation, but in one moment the harvest comes. I really feel like this is that moment for America. Everything we’ve gone through for the last four years has just been ripening the harvest. But now is the time. Now put your sickle in, says the Lord. Hallelujah.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (34:54):
Amen. Shane, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast.

Shane Degen (34:59):
Thank you for having us. Daniel,

Evangelism Podcast Host (35:01):
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 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 an altar 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 (36:03):
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. For

Evangelism Podcast Host (37:23):
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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Sean Dunn | Reaching Millennials and Gen Z With Innovative Digital Strategies

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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Tom Miyashiro | From Faith 2 Faith

Tom Miyashiro is the founder of From Faith 2 Faith, which ministers on the mission field of New England on the East Coast of the United States. His ministry focuses on youth centered, community-based outreach, and partnership with the local church. Today, you will be inspired as you listen to the story of everything God has done through his ministry.

Learn More: https://www.f2fmi.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, TTom Miyashiro.

Tom Miyashiro (00:11):
You got it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:39):
Love

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

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

Tom Miyashiro (20:45):
Butcher,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Miyashiro (26:23):
It’s awesome.

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Stephen Strang | Spirit Led Living in an Upside Down World

Stephen Strang leads Charisma Media. They publish Charisma Magazine which had reported on the Spirit-Empowered movement for decades. Today we talk about three books on evangelism being published by Charisma House: It’s Our Turn Now by Mario Murillo; Ignite Your Life by Barry Meguiar; & Spirit-Led Living in an Upside-Down World by Steve Strang.

Buy the Books: 

   

Learn More:

https://stevestrangbooks.com/ 

https://www.charismanews.com/ 

 

Transcript: 

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King, and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. Today. I have a very special guest, Steve Strang from Charisma Media. Thank you so much for joining me today,

Stephen Strang (00:11):
And I’m excited to be with you. You’ve, as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been excited.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:15):
Well, I love telling people about Jesus. Now, a charisma is a legend. When I was a teenager, I remember my mom and dad were subscribed to the Charisma Magazine and we would read all the stories of what God was doing around the world. And you have really been instrumental in helping ministries tell the world about Jesus for so many years. How did you get started in the whole publishing business and, and with the vision that God gave

Stephen Strang (00:47):
You? Well, I had an interest in writing and journalism going back to high school trained to be a journalist. And you know, there’s a lot of media that don’t even touch anything Christian or spiritual. And if they do, it has to have a, a hint of scandal or controversy or something. So when the heyday of the charismatic movement there was a need for what we did, and I’ve been doing it. And, and by God’s grace, we’ve grown into lots of other kinds of media, especially as a digital age came. I like to tell people that when I started charisma, we were still using manual typewriters, literally. And of course, all that has totally changed. Now, now a lot of what we do are books and we’ve sold millions of copies of books and and a lot of them have to do with evangelism. And really evangelism needs to be a part of everything in the spiritual life. It isn’t like some people are like Christians over here, and then we’ve got these few evangelists, and it’s entirely up to them. No, it’s entirely up to all of us.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:54):
And so you have several books here that you are publishing right now. Let’s start by talking about your brand new book. It’s called Spirit Led Living in an Upside Down World. That’s right. What is this book all about?

Stephen Strang (02:08):
Well, it’s about the power of the Holy Spirit, but in a way that’s almost like a cliche in, in especially in Pentecostal circles. Why does that exactly mean? A lot of things have been written about the Holy Spirit, everything from theological books to whatever. I try to take the look that we need that power more than ever. And I see a lot of people, even that claim to be spirit filled Christians, they don’t walk in it, they don’t experience, they’re discouraged. They feel like what I call the other side is winning again and again. And I’m saying that we have to have the power of the Holy Spirit to wa to experience the gifts of the spirit, the fruit of the spirit, just to survive. And I used the example that I heard from a preacher one time. He said that when you scuba dive the scuba gear will not keep you from getting wet, but it allows you to live in a hostile environment that would, that would kill a human being to be underwater for more than a minute or two.

(03:07):
But as long as you’ve got the scuba equipment and oxygen, you can stay down there indefinitely until the oxygen runs out. Well, to be in this upside down world. If we have the power of the Holy Spirit, we can have joy, we can have peace, we can have all these things, and we can live in this world regardless of if things are going right or not. And I think that that’s important. And then of course, if we’re gonna win the world at all or have any kind of impact on culture, it’s got to be through the power of the Holy Spirit. In fact, I tell the story that you know, as several decades ago, we got reports as far back as the 1950s that that missionaries, Christian missionaries who went from America from denominations that denied the power of the Holy Spirit when they got into countries where they had to really battled demonic forces, that they found that they couldn’t get along without the power of the Holy Spirit.

(04:05):
And they, they began receiving the baptism of Holy Spirit, you know, often from maybe meeting other missionaries or whatever. Well, they had the power to confront demonic demonic forces that we weren’t accustomed to the United States. Now granted, we have demonic forces. There’s always been sin, but guess what we are now having, we’re seeing spiritual warfare at a level we’ve never seen before. And I talk in here about evangelizing not as a specific topic, but when I talk about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, one of them is the spirit a word of knowledge. And I tell a story about Reinhart Bonky, the great evangelist who got a word of knowledge that his brother, who instead of becoming a gungho Christian, evangels had entirely gone the other way, almost in an agnostic or atheist. And his brother was going through a very difficult time.

(05:10):
His brother lived in Germany, Reinhardt was in Africa at the time, and his brother had just lost his marriage. He was considering taking his own life. He had a dream about being on a bridge. Well, at the same time, the Holy Spirit revealed to Reinhardt, he had a very similar dream, and he felt he should write his brother a letter. His brother was looking for some kind of sign that God was real. He ended up getting powerfully saved. Now, this was before the days of email, and I tell the story much, much better in the book, but it’s an example of where a word of knowledge caused someone to come to Christ. And that’s only one of many ways that the power of the Holy Spirit can help us. To me personally, it’s the boldness, it’s the confidence. It’s the reassurance that God is with you causes you to be bold instead of timid. So I think that for any, any Christian, I, in fact, I believe that the spirit filled life, or as I call it, the Spirit-led life should be normative. It should be the normal Christian life. It was in the early church. Of course, all kinds of things happen and different denominations and doctrines and so on and so forth. But it ought to be the normative Christian life in the same way the sharing Jesus should be normative.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:39):
You have documented many different moves of the Holy Spirit over the years. What sense do you get of what the Holy Spirit is doing right now?

Stephen Strang (06:51):
Well, that’s a good question, and it leads me to my next book. I believe that something, you know, things have been pretty bad, but we’re starting to see a shift. The revival at Asbury University is one example, but Mario Marillo, who people might know from the Victory Channel, and of course he’s been around since the Jesus movement.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:11):
And Mario is a great evangelist. He is full on evangelistic. He gives the greatest altar calls. In fact, I was just at a meeting he did in Tulsa, Oklahoma recently, where they packed out the maybe center and he gave the altar call. And so many people were getting saved. They, they couldn’t even fit them all into the altar.

Stephen Strang (07:33):
Well, I happened to be at the same meeting, and I went specifically because of Mario. I was tremendously touched myself. And you’re right, he is a powerful evangelist. But he started having, during the Covid shutdown in California, where they were almost dracony in the restrictions they put on, he’s, people would flock to his tents. And now of course he’s going other. But his book, his new book, which just came out, I right after New Year’s says, it’s our turn now with the idea that God’s plan to restore America is within our reach. That’s what the subtitle is. And I, I believe, in fact, he and I talked about it, I did a podcast with him that he, he believes what’s happening at Asbury and a lot of other places is an indication that people are spiritually hungry and they’re coming to Jesus you know, even during really difficult times like Covid was and everything else that’s going on. So I think that this would encourage people, it would give them insight. No book is gonna be the answer to everything except the book, which is the Bible. But our books try to encourage people, give them hope, tell stories that they wouldn’t know otherwise. And Mario is a great example.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:53):
I would love to see God raise up a whole new generation that has the same boldness as Mario Marillo to share the gospel. Now we have another book here. It’s by Barry McGuire and it’s called Ignite Your Life. And it, it’s not specifically about evangelism, but he’s very evangelistic in it,

Stephen Strang (09:13):
Right? It really is on evangelism.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:15):
Tell, tell me about it.

Stephen Strang (09:16):
Well, Barry McGuire is from McGuire’s Car Wax. It’s a company that his grandfather founded in 1901. He really took it to great heights to where it is the number one car wax brand in the world. And he was raised a Christian, he’s been a spirit led Christian for many, many years. He tells the story of how he has shared his faith every single day for 40 years. And this is the only book he’s ever written. And it tells his story. And we talked about the fact, and I don’t, maybe I shouldn’t say this, but within the publishing world, books written on evangelism, evangelism generally don’t sell very well. Well,

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:03):
I’ve got a, a bunch of books I’ve written on evangelism, and that’s probably true. <Laugh> You, you wish they would because we wanna get people fired up, right? But then a book that has the secret to success does much better.

Stephen Strang (10:17):
Well, you know, there, I could talk since I’m a publisher for a long time about that, but people don’t very often read books they ought to read. People aren’t gonna buy a book that says you need to lose weight, you know, but they’ll read a book on how to get healthy, which may include losing weight. So we, this book kind of masquerades, maybe that’s not the best verb to use, but is his story. But his whole life is about leading people to Jesus and sharing his faith and being happy. He says, you’re so happy when you do this. And, and he talks about how, how he has energy, and he’s gone through some terrible ups and downs in businesses where he almost lost his business. At one point, his, his daughter tragically died as an fairly young adult. But the Lord brought him through because he had this passion to share Jesus and passion.

(11:17):
He, he gives a new definition to Romans 8 28, which is a very common scripture. All things work together for good, and Christians like to quote that. But the rest of the verse says, all things work together for good to those who are called according to his purpose. And why does the purpose of God that none should perish so that when you’re doing God’s purpose, which is sharing your faith, getting people to come to Jesus, that that’s when all things work together. And he elaborates on it much more than I am, tells this story in a very winsome way. And he has been enormously successful in lots of different venues. He had a television program on the Discovery Channel for like 18 years now. It was car crazy. It was about all these guys that love cars and they loved to sh and if they got a car, it’s gonna get the best shine with McGuire’s wax.

(12:15):
And, you know, they talk about all these things, but I’ll give you a personal example as I got to know him. As you know, as a professional, as a friend, before we did the book several times we would go out to eat without qu without exception. Some stranger would come up during the meal and say that, you know, he used to watch his car show with his dad, and they used to polish the car together. And, you know, this is the kind of feedback you would get. But, and often Barry would witness to these people right in front of us. And he also told stories that and he would also witness the waitress or the waiter. In fact, he told a story. He was in a restaurant in Springfield, Missouri, of all places. And he, and he asked the waitress, he said, when the food comes, we’re gonna pray.

(13:11):
We’re Christians, is there something we can pray for you about? And she said, yes. She said that a family member was almost in depression, that his daughter had been raped and brutally murdered, and he was just having a horrible problem and was very discouraged, obviously. And so Barry gave her his business card and wrote his cell phone number on it. Well, she called and told him, turns out he’s a car. Crazy guy. Watched him on tv. Couldn’t believe that the Mary McGuire reached out to him. Wow. And so he called Barry, Barry was able to share with him that he lost his daughter. Now she died of a disease, not a brutal murder, and was really able to minister to the guy. And again, he tells the story much better than I am. But that’s an example. And actually, I learned from his example that when I go into a restaurant, I did it twice this week, I will ask the server their name and say, is there anything we can pray for you about?

(14:18):
And it’s very interesting to see the expression on their face just instantly. Usually they have to think a little bit about it. I’ve had waitresses break down in tears. One lady said she was having a really bad day, and we said, well, we’ll pray for you. You’re better. She came back later and said, this morning I was with a friend, as the friend died. Wow. Now they knew the friend was dying. And she went there to comfort the lady, and she said she really appreciated us praying. One time I was with a friend and we prayed or asked the waitresses, we prayed for her. About 10 minutes later, another waitress came back and said my friend was back in the kitchen telling everyone that you’re praying for her. Would you pray for me? Now, we, we don’t always get that response. Sometimes people wanna pray for world peace or the war in the Ukraine or something like that, and we’re fine.

(15:14):
We’re sometimes we just pray a blessing on people. But that is a way to move people a little bit closer to Jesus. And it opens a door instead of just being strangers, you’re someone who care. And very, very often people say, even the ones who say world, pray for world peace, will just say, I really appreciate you reaching out like that. And it’s sort of a non-threatening, socially acceptable way to do it. And you know, there are some people that are just so hostile to God that they’ll practically curse at you. And I’ve, I’ve wondered if I would experience that. And I’ve done this dozens of times and have ne have never had anybody be rude. And, but it’s also touched me that I could tell that a lot of these people has have nobody to pray for them. And there’s been several that I felt led to to pray for on an ongoing basis.

(16:08):
I mean, as the Lord would bring the them to my mind. And you know, this is evangelism at a very low level, but it’s a door opener. And Barry is a good example. And, and when I first got to know him, I said to myself, how in the world do you share the four spiritual laws with somebody every single day? <Laugh>, I found that a lot of times he would speak to someone about the Lord and it would be simple. Something as simple as praying for a waitress. But I believe that that’s valid. And the fact is he does it day in and day out. He has led many, many people to the Lord from this very simple thing. And anyone, well, first of all, is a good story. I mean, it’s an American success story. And you get to know something about his life.

(16:54):
Like you read about the life of a great man or woman of the past. He of course is still with us. But beyond that, I think that people just can catch something of his spirit. That this isn’t something you just sit in a class and you take an exam and on do, do evangelism the right way. You memorize the script, so to speak. And maybe that works for some people, but it, it doesn’t work for most people. And people just think it’s hard. I’m gonna do it wrong. I’m gonna embarrass myself. No, it needs to be an outflow of everything in your life as we’re led by the spirit of God.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:31):
Even if you’re passionate about cars, God can use you to bring people to Jesus. And especially in the car world, you have people that would be interested in this book who are into cars that would never go to a church. Absolutely. And so God will give him a voice to reach people.

Stephen Strang (17:47):
And he knows all the statistics when you’re with He He’ll wax eloquent about car guys, which they say include women, women can be car guys too. It’s almost like a huge fraternity or something. And, and he, we talked about this, that a lot of people that know him for television or certainly McGuire’s Car Wax, will read the book outta curiosity and they’ll get the Christian message.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:15):
Let’s talk for a moment about Charisma Media. There are a variety of ways that you help a lot of ministries. You, you have articles that go up every day about what God is doing around the world. You also have a podcast network, and I have several friends that are on your podcast network and, and you’ve helped a lot of people start to have a voice in different areas that that wouldn’t have been able to do it without you. And you have this, this, this publishing. How can people find out more about what you do?

Stephen Strang (18:49):
Well, we have many websites. They could go to charismamedia.com, they could go to my own website, which is stevestrangbooks.com. Find out the books I’ve written. I’ve only written a handful of books. I’ve published a lot more. And but, you know, this is not about us. Yes, we’d like for them to subscribe to our charisma news.com website or our website for Charisma Magazine, so on and so forth. But we’re just trying to do what we can to get out the message. And we’re blessed to live in a great country where people can afford to buy books or they can afford to buy magazines. Although a lot of the things like podcasts and other things, and the websites of course, are absolutely free supported by advertising. But but I’d like to, I could tell people that with my book, it can be pre-ordered on amazon.com.

(19:41):
It, it won’t be released until May 15th, which is just a few days before Pentecost Sunday. Actually, the pre-orders help us Amazon holds onto the pre-orders and then they bill your credit card when they ship you the book, the day it comes out. And it helps get a momentum going. The New York Times looks at all those numbers, so it would help me if you wanna help me by ordering it. These other books are available in stores. You know, we like to say wherever Christian Books are sold, that’s not literally true because you always miss some places going, buying it from some of the online book sellers, including our own. It’s called My Charisma shop.com, where you’re buying directly from the publisher, but it’s usually easier for people cuz they have an Amazon account setup, Duane, Amazon, and these, these are great books. I just got the numbers this week.

(20:34):
They’re both doing very well as new books and, and I’m just you know, we do many books and yes, they’re all important, but I, but I believe so strongly in both of these books, these books that I’m wanting to push them. And I will just say that when I was 20 years old, if you can imagine me being 20 years old, I was in impacted by Mario, who’s a few years older than I am. He was already a dynamic fiery evangelist. And I went to a conference, actually, I went, actually after I was so impacted the first time I made it a point to go to some other conferences he was at, and actually went to Resurrection City in Berkeley, which was what they called their ministry back in the day. I was powerfully impacted by him, had no idea that our lives would intertwine like this. And I’m just really honored to be able to publish his book.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:30):
Well, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism podcast. I I’m very thankful for your life. I remember a few years ago charisma did a little article about our ministry and, and since I’d grown up reading Charisma, I was like, wow, now I’ve really made it in ministry. So thank you so much for your,

Stephen Strang (21:46):
It’s not just a one and done. You know, as, as stories happen, as new initiatives are taking place we like reporting that people are tired of just bad news. People are tired thinking that Christians are always losing. No, there’s a lot of good things going on and part of our place in the media ecosphere is to report these kinds of things. So you need to help us by letting us know what God is doing in your ministry.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (22:18):
Thank you Mr. Strang. Appreciate you being on The Evangelism Podcast.

Stephen Strang (22:21):
Thank you for the honor.

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James Biddle | Joy to the World

James Biddle is the Community Outreach Pastor at Joy Church in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee. The church is led by Pastor Jim Frease who has a vision to take Joy to the World. On today’s episode, James shares several innovative ideas for taking Christ to your community.

Joy Church Website: https://joychurch.net/

Notes:

Outreach starts with the senior pastor. The pastor sets the culture.
In Acts 1:8, Jesus told us to start in our community (Jerusalem) then go to the world.
Take a 5 mile radius and draw a circle around your church. make it your goal that every person in that 5 mile radius will be aware that your church is there and that you care about them.
Outreach values driven by Pastor Jim Frease:
*Invest Invite Include
*Connection before correction
*Perception determines reception
*Generosity that breeds curiosity
* Always make a video of the outreach to show your congregation.
* Postcard Flyers quarterly and we train to invest invite include with matching invitation cards. Pray over flyers as evangelism. Make that next weekend really sharp.
* Outreaches are different than events. Don’t charge for any outreaches. Make it all free.
* Keep scattering seed. It takes time for the community to trust us.
Outreach Ideas:
1. Under $1500 (not heavy evangelism just focus on connections). We’ll see one or two salvations.  If one family comes to your church and starts tithing the outreach paid for itself.
Snow-cone outreach at park (pump it in advance)
Teacher breakfast $800 CFA
College breakfast Chickfila and coffee
Feed a group of 100 police or firemen
2. $2,500
Free community yard sale
Buy everyone’s Chick Fila for an hour. Have a team inside connecting.
Christmas toy for every new first time guests. 50 kids at $50 each gift. Have some candy and hot chocolate. Let your members use as an invite include opportunity to be saved.
3. $10,000
Gas card giveaway with free meals and car wash.
Welcome Basket outreach. Nice stuff, not cheap church stuff. Target new neighborhoods. $35 per basket. Gift card, coffee, mug, tea, snacks, church invite. Excellence doesn’t have to be expensive. It’s doing the best you can with what you have.
*Advertise with excellence but over deliver
*Good deeds but always be accompanied by the good news. We won’t do an outreach if we can’t at least invite people to church with an invite card.

 

Transcript: 

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
James Biddle is the community outreach pastor at joy church in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. The church is led by pastor Jim fries, who has a vision to take joy to the world. On today’s episode, James shares several innovative ideas for taking Christ into your community.

Evangelism Podcast Host (00:32):
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 Danielle King.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:56):
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. James Biddle is the community outreach pastor at joy church in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. And so the church is led by pastor Jim fries, and he has a vision for taking joy to the world. And so it’s so nice to meet you.

Pastor James Biddle (01:24):
It’s good to meet you Daniel, and I’ve enjoyed connecting with you this week and I really appreciate your heart for the great commission, your heart for souls. And I’m just honored to be here and share a little bit about what God’s doing in middle Tennessee.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:37):
So tell me, how did you become the community outreach director there at joy church?

Pastor James Biddle (01:42):
Yeah. Thank you. So I’ve known pastor Jim for 20 years. He’s been a mentor spiritual father, and we were at Knoxville, Tennessee, and he called us in 2019 to come and serve. And it’s been an honor ever since. And so we’ve got a long term relationship with pastor Jim and we moved there to serve full time in 2019.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:01):
All right. You’ve given me some tremendous notes that we’re gonna talk about here. The first thing that you mentioned is the outreach starts with the senior pastor. The pastor sets the culture. Talk to me about how that works in your church. How does pastor Jim free set the culture for outreach?

Pastor James Biddle (02:20):
Yeah, absolutely. It, it has to begin with the senior leader. They have to carry the vision. They have to fund the vision. They have to be fully committed to being a soul winner and people do what they see, people model that. And so our church is a tremendous outreach church because our pastor is an outreaching pastor. He is witnessing to people, sharing his faith at restaurants, not only in a mass alter calls, but he’s actually doing it one on one. And so the pastor has to be fully sold out to leading this, to modeling it. And it has to be a focus of your church and you have to fund it. You have to allocate finances for it.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:57):
Talk to me about acts one eight and how that influences how you reach out.

Pastor James Biddle (03:01):
Yeah, we, we believe acts one eight where the Bible says you shall receive power. After the holy spirit comes upon. You you’ll be my witness in Jerusalem, Judea Samaria, and then all the parts of the earth. And we believe that Jerusalem is our community. And so pastor Jim has such a heart for the community. We, we do a lot of world missions. You are a world evangelist. We do a lot of missions different countries, but we start in the community. We’ve drawn a five mile radius around our church and we’ve said, we’re gonna own that five mile radius. And so what we found out Daniel is the more we impact our local community, the more resources we have to reach the world. And so it starts in the community.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:46):
Let me give you some phrases here. And then you tell me what they mean. The first one is invest. Invite include,

Pastor James Biddle (03:53):
Invest, invite, include something. You’ll hear all the time in our church. We say it, every service we say it all the time. That’s for our people to invest in those that we don’t know. You have friends and family. We don’t know you work with people. We don’t know, invite them to come be a part of joy church. And when they show up, include them in the process, make ’em feel like family.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:15):
Another phrase is connection before correction. What does that mean?

Pastor James Biddle (04:20):
Yeah. We always want to connect first. And if you look at Jesus in John chapter four, the woman at the well, he connected with her, they connected over the water. Jesus was thirsty. She had water, there was a connection. And then he was able to help her be corrected to the gospel.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:37):
Why do you think that’s important in the, the modern day church? Cause sometimes people, it seems they, they have finger wagon, religion. They’re, they’re yelling at people and correcting the whole world saying here, all doing it wrong. But why is connection so important?

Pastor James Biddle (04:53):
Well, there was a survey done a while back about what people thought about churches. And they said they were judgemental and irrelevant. And so our pastor has led us and taught us that we’re to tell people how good God is. God is not mad at them. We say in our church, if you feel a stomach, it opens a heart. And so we want some kind of a connection. We wanna earn a voice. We wanna earn their trust. Before we just try to give ’em the gospel. We want that genuine connection because we love them and care about them. And it opens tremendous doors for the correction of the gospel.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:24):
I heard your pastor say another phrase yesterday. When he, he preached here at the, the I CFM conference perception, determines reception.

Pastor James Biddle (05:33):
Yeah. So we do a lot of outreaches that change how people perceive the church. Again, if you ask people, what do you think about church? Well, Christians are hypocrites. They’re judgemental, they’re relevant. So we do a lot of things in the community to change how people view God to change how people view the church. Because if we change how they perceive us, then they’ll receive our message that we have.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:57):
And here’s another phrase, generosity that breeds curiosity.

Pastor James Biddle (06:01):
We wanna be so generous that people ask, why, why are you doing this? We, we are always giving away things. One thing that’s important to us is at outreach events. We never charge. We will sometimes charge for events, but when it’s an outreach, we never charge. We give away everything. We wanna be so generous. We wanna be known for that. And it really breeds. Curiosity, why are you doing this? Why would you give this away? Why would you do this? It’s because God loves you. And we love you. And it really does breed. Curiosity.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:34):
What are some ways that your church gets people in the church ex excited about the outreach and, and wanting to participate?

Pastor James Biddle (06:42):
Yeah. Well, number one, you talked about this always video. We video everything and that’s because video tells a story, we’ll say, Hey, we did an outreach. You all, weren’t all there. So we’re gonna show you about it. Every week, during time and offerings, we share about the outreaches that we’ve done. We do a quarterly postcard mailer. We actually do old fashioned postcard paper stamp. We mail it. You may not be able to do this right now, but you can start on some level. We mail a postcard to everybody in our county. We do it four times a year. And, and so

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:15):
What would be on one of those postcards? What, what are you advertising?

Pastor James Biddle (07:18):
Yeah. And it, it, it, the catch phrase is, are you tired of enduring life? Do you wanna enjoy life? It gives our service times. It tells us what we do. And we just keep that in front of people. And we try to pick a fun creative cover. So people look at it, you’ve got about three seconds. When somebody gets a postcard, are they gonna trash it or keep it? So we brainstorm as a staff, we pick a really good loving, encouraging image. And then we do some other media that ties into that. And that’s one way that we, we drive traffic into the door.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:49):
Now your church has several different types of outreaches that you do. Okay. And in your notes, you’ve given me some $1,500 ideas for outreaches, some $2,500 outreaches, and then some, some $10,000 outreach. And not everyone who’s listening has a church that’s as big as joy church, but in a small church, you can do a small outreach that, that doesn’t necessarily have to cost a huge amount of money. So let’s just go through the list. Yeah. Starting with the, the $1,500 outreaches. What, what’s one of the, the outreaches that you do that may not cost that much, but still has a big impact.

Pastor James Biddle (08:30):
Yeah. And think excellence that doesn’t have to be expensive. Excellence is doing the best you can with what you have. And so you may not have a lot of resources, but you can do some of these things. So one thing that we do is we’ll find a local park and we’ll call in advance and rent a ice cream truck, or a snow cone truck, or an icy truck. And we’ll have them come out to the park. We’ll set up tables and chairs and canopies give a two hour window and we’ll buy everybody’s snow cones. And you can do that for a thousand dollars. You can serve 250 to 300 people, free snow cones, thousand bucks, couple of canopies, couple of tables, couple of chairs. And it’s a tremendous way to invite people to your church.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:13):
Now, yesterday, you were explaining to me why you put out canopies and chairs.

Pastor James Biddle (09:18):
Yeah. We’re trying to be thoughtful to the guest. You know, if you’re doing snow cones in a park, it’s probably summer, it’s probably hot. So you wanna create some shade for the people standing in line. You want to create that environment. And then we put out canopies and tables and chairs, cuz we want to create a place for people to stay. If they sit down, we can have our team connect with ’em and love on ’em. Now, Daniel, these are not heavy evangelistic outreaches. We’re not gonna get 30 people saved at these outreaches. We might have one or two salvations. These are more connection. These are more perception, outreaches. And over time they fold into what your church does in the community. And every single time we have families come back. And if you have one family come to your church, get plugged in, start tithing. That outreach paid for itself. Now we don’t do that to get them to come and tithe. But in a practical sense, one family gets plugged into your church. That outreach essentially costs you no money and you reach a family. And so we try to provide those connection opportunities with our team.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:22):
And so you view this more as an investment. You’re not spending money, you’re investing money, getting people saved, and then they’re coming back and bringing resources to the

Pastor James Biddle (10:32):
Church. Yeah. And we are unashamed that our ult we don’t have an ulterior motive, but we have an ultimate motive. That’s what pastor Jim says. We don’t have an ulterior motive. We have an ultimate motive. And that is to get people back into the church. And we’re not ashamed about that. That is God’s model for discipleship. And so we’re always inviting people to come and be a part of what God is doing.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:53):
All right. Gimme some more ideas for that first price tier.

Pastor James Biddle (10:58):
So find a local school, connect with a principal and say, Hey, on the first day of school, when the teachers are coming back, we wanna bring Chick-fil-A breakfast to your teachers. You’re talking a hundred teachers, maybe 110, 115 at the most. That’s a pretty good sized school. So for 700 bucks, you can get, Chick-fil-A go to a wholesale club and get granola yogurt, orange juice, and just show up and bless the teachers with breakfast. On the first day of score, you will be their hero and it’s 700 bucks.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:29):
What else?

Pastor James Biddle (11:31):
Well, something else that you can do is you can go to a local college. We’ve got a university in our area and we connected with some folks there and we’ll go down on a Thursday morning. It cost about a thousand bucks. We’ll buy Chick-fil-A. And we’ll say for two hours, come by and get free. Chick-Fil-A you need some students there. Let ’em get on Facebook, Instagram, Hey, come get some Chick-fil-A a thousand bucks. You can feed students on a college campus. Chick-Fil-A give ’em some coffee and you can make some amazing, amazing connections because you love them. You’re serving them, you’re connecting. And then you invite them to come to church.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:03):
Who else could you feed?

Pastor James Biddle (12:05):
Yeah. So don’t stop there. What about police? Firemen? You could literally have every fireman in your community. Maybe not your city if you’re in a big city, but if you’re in a small town, like we are, we have a hundred people in our police department. I can feed a hundred people for a thousand bucks. If I’ve got a really good team that will cook it and prepare and get volunteers engaged, you could host the firemen and say, Hey, we don’t have a fireman, appreciation lunch, have them on your campus, serve them a really nice meal, no junky meal. Make it really, really nice. Get your best cooks your best volunteers, put your best foot forward. And these people will notice that you care and you do this over time. Over time, over time, people start to realize, wow, this church cares about the community.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:49):
Now bump it up a notch. One of the significant outreaches that your church does is a garage sale. Te tell me about that and how that works.

Pastor James Biddle (12:59):
Yeah, so we do a free yard sale every year. And our church people start months in advance, saving stuff, collecting stuff. And we, we have everything donated to the church two weeks before cuz we don’t have a lot of storage. And then on a Saturday we’ll set up all these items, televisions, refrigerators, clothing, toys, all donated by our church, family and people. Our church family knows and we give it all away. Every family gets one big ticket item, you know, 30, 40, $50 or higher it’s TVs, computers, printers. Every family gets one big item. And then depending on our stock everybody else who comes in, every person gets 10 items and then they might get five items of clothing. Just depends on how many things are donated and we’ll have hundreds and hundreds of people come to this and we feed ’em and this does cost more.

Pastor James Biddle (13:55):
You’re gonna spend two to $3,000 on food and things like that. And we, we clean every item. We check every item, we check, every zipper. We check. Every button takes a lot of volunteers. This is not a really expensive outreach, but it takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of manpower and I’d be happy to share more. If they contact me online, I’ll give you all the details, everything that we do, but we give it all away for free. And it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. People start calling the office in July, Hey, y’all having a free yard sale because people will wait in line sometimes overnight to get washer’s dryers, things like that. And Daniel that’s the best part at the end when they go through the checkout line where recount, how many items they have, we have a prayer tent. They have to exit through the prayer tent, cuz it’s not just about good deeds. It’s about the good news. And we pray with ’em. And the biggest one we did last time before COVID we had 53 decisions for the Lord through that prayer tent. And it was amazing

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:50):
What a tremendous harvest, what a great blessing that is. And I know every angel in heaven, rejoices when one person gets saved. And so to have 53 come to Jesus in one weekend, what a tremendous blessing. All right, let’s bump it up to the $10,000 level. You had an idea at $10,000. What was

Pastor James Biddle (15:09):
It? Yeah, so we just did this because gas prices are very high. If you’re watching this in the future, I hope gas prices have come down right now. They’re very high. So literally last week for two hours, we advertised it like crazy. And this was not for our church. People we advertised. This is not for you. You have to train your folks. Outreach is not about us. So tell your neighbors, tell your friends, this is invest invite and include. We bought $250 gas cards. And we said the first 200 families that come on campus, you get a free gas card. So they circled around our parking lot. And then we had a free car wash. We washed close to 200 vehicles. We had all of our teenagers out serving. We were washing cars. We have all this food. We were cooking. We have a mobile kitchen.

Pastor James Biddle (15:56):
It’s like a food truck, but you can do it with a grill or anything like that. We fed everybody. We had our outreach center open and it was absolutely amazing. I believe 21 people gave their heart to the Lord in line before they even got into the gate. Five people accepted Jesus as they were waiting in line to even pull into the parking lot. And we just trained our team to connect, connect, to share. And it was amazing, but that that’s a more expensive thing, but, but you can plan to do that even in the future and, and save and budget for those

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (16:26):
Things. I was thinking that if gas prices go up too much more, it might double your cost to do that outreach.

Pastor James Biddle (16:33):
Yeah. And, and you know, we’ve done that before, but the reason we did $50 is cuz we wanted it to be noticeable. We wanted our community to notice, wow, we wanted the wow factor, not in a prideful way, but in a way that says this church is actually really trying to meet a tangible need. And we were honored to do that. We understand not everybody can do that. We’re honored to be able to do that, but that’s a $10,000 outreach.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (16:57):
You also have welcome baskets that you give to people. Are, are those for people who visit the church?

Pastor James Biddle (17:03):
Yeah, that’s a great question. So we actually go in and blanket neighborhoods, we’ll find a newer neighborhood that has two to 300 homes in it. And we’ll put together a really, really nice basket. Now they, this is a, an expensive, this is a $10,000 outreach, but you can do this on a much smaller scale. So we’ll go into a neighborhood and we’ll make a really nice 30 to $35 basket. We put a $10 Panera or Chick-fil-A card in there. We put really premium coffee. We put a nice Tumblr. We put some Yankee candle. We put some really premium tea, some Linor chocolates. I mean, we put a lot of nice stuff in these baskets and we’ll take a team of 40 people and we ding and dash, we just set ’em on their door and leave. We don’t knock. We don’t walk around. So this is not an outreach where people get saved, unless you just bump into somebody walking around. But this is a connection outreach. What happens is we’ve had this over and over again, Daniel people will come to our church and they, they were saying, we were just talking about, we need to find a church. We were just praying about a church and we came out and boom, there’s your basket. Every single time we do this, people come to church and it’s a blessing.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:10):
I like what you said earlier. You said that good deeds must Al always be accompanied by good news. Yeah. And, and so how do you communicate good news with people? If they come to one of these, one of these things, how do you train your people to share the good news? Yeah.

Pastor James Biddle (18:28):
Pastor Jim’s heart is that we’re moving people forward in the gospel. We’re not, it’s not a social gospel. We’re not just trying to meet needs. So it might be as easy as giving an invite card. That’s okay. Some events we do some outreaches. We do. We’re only allowed to give them an invite card. We turn down opportunities because we can’t invite people to church. We’re not interested in just sponsoring the high school down the road so they can have a better sports field. We want to get people into the kingdom of God. So we train our team thoroughly on to connect to love and, and we teach ’em the Romans road. We teach ’em how to offer, to pray for people. Hey, is there anything I can pray with you about? And that opens so many doors and just be friendly, just be nice and be excited about what God’s doing in your church and at a minimum, give them an invite card at a minimum. Ask if you can pray with them.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:19):
That’s awesome. Well, James, it’s so exciting to hear what joy church is doing to, to reach out to the world. And I really love the, the joy to the world that you’re taking joy to the world and, and, and going outside the walls of the church in order to, to minister, to people. And so if you’re listening and you wanna know more about joy church and, and what they’re doing to reach out to people, you can find them at joy, church.net pastor Jim freeze. And I’m sitting here with James Biddle. Thank you so much for being a guest on the evangelism podcast.

Pastor James Biddle (19:56):
Daniel, I’m honored to know you and I love what you’re doing. Keep it up. Keep helping churches keep equipping and empowering, and you’re doing a big thing and you make a difference and we’re honored to be able to share today.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:08):
Thank you. 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 (21:28):
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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United States

Percentage wise, we see just as many miracles and salvations here in America as we do overseas. Almost every Sunday that I am not out of the country, I am preaching at a church in America. I believe that God wants America to experience a new Great Awakening. Here are videos from outreaches we have done with local churches in America.

Spring Break Mission Trip to Orlando, Florida with Victory Christian School

Local Church Outreach in Glenpool, OK 

Door to Door Witnessing in San Fransisco, California. 

Mobile Evangelism Truck in Tulsa, OK 

Witnessing at a Tattoo Festival in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 

CAN YOU HELP US REACH PEOPLE FOR JESUS?

Evangelist Daniel King is on a mission to lead people to Jesus. But he cannot do it without your help. Can you give a financial gift today to help us “plunder hell to populate heaven?” To support King Ministries in our quest for souls, click here!

 

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