1 877-431-4276The Pentecostal Movement in Sweden | Josef Maxson
Josef Maxson, a representative of the Pentecostal movement in Sweden, discusses the history and growth of the movement in the country. He explains that the Pentecostal movement began in Sweden in 1907 and spread through Baptist churches. The movement grew rapidly under the leadership of Lewi Pethrus, with over 55,000 members after 20 years. Currently, there are around 440 Pentecostal churches in Sweden with 18,700 members. Maxson also highlights the missionary legacy of the Pentecostal movement, with Sweden having sent out more missionaries per capita than any other country. He mentions the impact of Swedish missionaries in countries like Liberia and Bangladesh. Maxson emphasizes that missions are still a key focus for the Pentecostal movement in Sweden, especially among young people. He shares his personal experiences of witnessing the power of the Holy Spirit in missions and the inspiration it brings to his work. The interview concludes with a prayer in Swedish for a new move of the Holy Spirit in the Pentecostal churches of Sweden.
Learn more about the Pentecostal Movement in Sweden: https://www.pingst.se/english/
Transcript:
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King. I’m excited about telling people about Jesus today. I have a very special guest with me, Josef Maxson from Sweden. Thank you for joining me today.
Josef Maxson (00:12):
Thank you. So nice to be in your podcast.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:15):
Well, we are here in Guinea, and we have been having a wonderful gospel campaign, and you came with one of the evangelists who’s here, and it’s been absolutely wonderful to get to know you. And you are actually working right now with the Pentecostal movement of Sweden. And so over the years, God has done really amazing things through the Pentecostal movement in Sweden. Let’s just start at the beginning. How did Pentecost come to Sweden?
Josef Maxson (00:54):
Yes, so I mean, the Pentecostal movement have been in Sweden since around 1907. So I mean, it started on Ausa Street and some years later it went first to Norway with a man called Barat. And in Norway it was a man called Ros. And he went there for a Bible school and to hear this Norwegian preacher preach about what’s happening over on Asa Street, and I mean the movement started to spread in the Scandinavian and mostly in the Baptist churches. So Lewi Pethrus, I mean, he gets to this teaching and he starts to preach it, and more and more people are listening to him and he starts ministering in a church in Stockholm, I think around this time also in the Baptist Church. And in this new Pentecostal movement, you don’t, meaning at that time you needed to be a member in the church. You took the holy communion.
(02:20):
And this was, I mean, they didn’t like this fault anymore. They wanted to, I mean, everybody could take the holy communion if you are a believer. So then this congregation that Levi Pets was pastoring, they decided to break up from the Baptist movement in Sweden, and they started their own church, so to say. And in that time, you can say the Pentecostal movement started in Sweden when they broke laws and they choose to be on their own. And then it continue in many different Baptist churches, but also people started new churches. So I think the first 10 years, it was around 50 churches that started that connected to the Pentecostal movements, so to say. And the founder in Sweden is Lewi Pethrus. So he was pastoring this church for nearly 50 years, and he was, the Pentecostal movement in Sweden shouldn’t exist without him. He was a real apostle and entrepreneur.
(03:40):
And his church grown a lot the coming year during the twenties and the thirties. And I mean, he was a road model for a lot of pastors. And what he said, they listened to him, so to say. And I think after 20 years there was over 55,000 members. And then they decided around between the wars like 1,930 to build a new church. And they built a church for, I think it was four, 4,000 attendance. And this was the biggest, not stadium, but city hall or church building, church building, or the biggest building to gather people in at that time in the northern part of Europe. So it was really big
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:49):
Building. They had big faith
Josef Maxson (04:53):
And I think it was the biggest for nearly 30 years or something.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:58):
So the Pentecostal movement has continued to grow and is now very mature. And you serve on the staff with the Pentecostal movement. What’s your position?
Josef Maxson (05:09):
So my position is head of communication. So I work with the marketing with the social media, our webpage, but also a lot connected to our events, leader events, pastors network, summer conference and youth conference, and different kind of campaigns during the year. We do a lot of advertisement around Christmas and during the Easter in the secular media to tell about Jesus and so on. So it’s a lot of different parts. We have a magazine coming out fourth time every year.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:54):
And so approximately how many churches and how many members would be considered Pentecostal now
Josef Maxson (06:03):
In the Pentecostal movement in Sweden, it’s around 440 churches right now, and the member is 18,700.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:14):
Wow. And so for a country the size of Sweden, that’s quite good.
Josef Maxson (06:20):
Yeah, it’s the biggest. In Sweden, we have had a church for over a thousand years, the state church, but the other churches called Free Church Free Churches. So this is the biggest dominations among the free churches, of course. I mean when it was as big as it was over 100,000 members, but it’s still the biggest dominations.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:47):
And so what is the spiritual atmosphere like in Sweden? As you mentioned, Christianity goes back a thousand years, but in that type of atmosphere, sometimes people’s love for Christ grow cold. And so what are the opportunities that the Pentecostal church sees and what are some of the challenges that you feel you’re facing right now?
Josef Maxson (07:12):
I mean, the Pentecostal movement was growing on until 1980s or something, and then this slowly started to getting down in numbers. But the last 10 years we have seen that the Baptist number have been going up, and we’ve seen a lot of new churches planting, I mean, to Sweden. We have a lot of refugee have been coming in the last 50 years, but especially the last 20 years. And they start new Pentecostal churches only in Stockholm, the capital. It had been started over a hundred new Pentecostal churches the last 10 years.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:57):
Wow. And do they come under the umbrella of the Pentecostal movement?
Josef Maxson (08:00):
Some
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:01):
Of them or some of them stay independent.
Josef Maxson (08:02):
Some of them stay independent, and some of them come into the umbrella. And we are working quite hard to get them in. I mean, some of them don’t know for many years that it exists a Pentecostal movement or domination to be part of. So we work to them to get them in, and we see a lot of growth during that process.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:28):
Let’s talk about the missionary legacy of the Pentecostal movement, because I’ve been all over the world and I have seen the impact that missionaries from Sweden have had in different parts of the world. And so this last week I was in Foya, Liberia, right across the border from where we are. And there is a hospital, a school, a beautiful church building and a radio station and some other buildings that were built by Swedish Pentecostal missionaries that came back in the late 1940s, early 1950s and stayed there all the way up until the war. The big war happened in Liberia. And it is just amazing. The Pentecostal legacy continues today we’re working with my friend Billy Bimba, and his father was led to Jesus by one of the Swedish Pentecostal missionaries and pastored there for many years. And now his children and his grandchildren continued to minister in Liberia. And I’ve seen that in different places. I was just not too long ago in Bangladesh. And there’s a church there that has been supported by the Pentecostal movement, and it’s growing by leaps and bounds in a very unreached area. What are some of the other stories of impact that the Pentecostal Church of Sweden has had through the missionaries you’ve sent out?
Josef Maxson (10:01):
I mean before or when many of the churches started in the early 19 hundreds, before you built a church building, you send out missionaries or before you had your own pastor, you send out missionaries. So it’s really in the Pentecostal congregation in Sweden’s DNA to send out missionaries. And I mean, the impact is enormous. It’s hundreds of millions of Christians who have been coming through Swedish missionaries. And I
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:39):
Heard that at one time per capita, Sweden sent out more missionaries than any other country on earth.
Josef Maxson (10:45):
Yeah, that’s true. So I mean, I think we had started churches, the Pentecostal movement in Sweden has started churches in over a hundred countries all over the world. And I mean, most of them we have good relationships with today. And even if the work has been changed a bit, we still do a lot of work through our humanitarian organization. And we have a mission organization works with the media like radio and tv, and also a lot of congregation, they have their own relationships with different congregations and dominations and countries. And so to say, so I mean, a lot is in the history, but we still works a lot around the globe
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:37):
Today. And would you say that missions is still part of something that the churches want to support and want to be a part of?
Josef Maxson (11:44):
Yeah, I should say that’s one of the keytones in the Pentecostal movement. It have been, and it’s in the future also, but of course I should say it have been the last 30 years. They have been going down a little bit. But the last 10 years, it’s growing quite a lot. And especially among the young people, they got new burning heart for missions in all different ways and to build relationships, and you want to reach out with the gospel. I mean,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:17):
Let’s talk about your burning heart for missions because you’re from the Pentecostal movement of Sweden, but this week you are here in Giga, do Guinea. And this morning, of course, we were at the fire conference with all the leaders from the city, and we were preaching on the Holy Spirit, laid hands on them. Many of them spoke in tongues for the first time. Many of them were filled with the Holy Spirit. Several even had demon manifestations that demons came out and the bad spirits came out, and then the Holy Spirit came in. And so it is really beautiful to see, but what is it that drives you as a young Swedish Pentecostal to go out on the mission field?
Josef Maxson (13:01):
I mean, the experience for myself is one important part of it to learn, to get a sense of the history of mission send out from Sweden, but also to see, I mean, unreached people getting to know Christ today. I mean, I’m growing up in a old church where you tell a lot of stories how it was back as many years ago. Sure, yeah. But it’s so interesting to go out now
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:37):
You have a fresh story just from this morning a few hours ago.
Josef Maxson (13:40):
Exactly. Exactly.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:42):
And even last night, we saw miracles. You were taking pictures of the people that were healed. There was one deaf woman and her ear was opened. One woman who was blind in one eye, her eye was open and you were taking pictures of them. And so now you have fresh stories that Jesus is still working today.
Josef Maxson (13:58):
And my normal work is a lot about how do we do missions in Sweden and to sometimes every year go out and to learn and to see how other do and what’s happened around the world. It’s getting me very inspiring. And to see that unreached people get to know Christ, even today, it gives a lot of hope when you work with Swedish teenager. And also to see how we can learn from different cultures and so on. And also to go out to meet people who have been infected about them. The earlier missionaries from Sweden, I mean, I went to Bible school in China, and we was out on the countryside, and then a man come in front of us, me and my friend who was there, and he thanked us, and he was crying like, thank you that you bring the gospel to me and my family over a hundred years ago.
(15:01):
And I mean the missionary who sent to China, I mean, this was in the late 18 hundreds. This was one way ticket to go to China from Sweden. You packed everything. You leave everything behind because you had some burning heart to tell the gospel. And I mean, to hear that and to understand that and to see that with my eyes, it’s getting me a lot of inspiring to continue my work. And then how can I both be helping in the mission doing around the world, but also how can we do a better work in Sweden? And I mean, it’s the next generation growing up. They have a hunger for something. In many years, it was hard to preach the gospel in Sweden because a lot of the youth said, I don’t want to hear. I don’t believe in God. I’m an ageist. But today you belong or belong for something and you want to hear and you want to experience spiritually chi and so on. That’s quite interesting to see what’s happening in the coming years. Yeah.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (16:13):
Amen. Well, I believe that every Pentecostal church is always praying for revival. And so let’s finish the interview today by praying together that God would pour out his spirit upon the Pentecostal churches of Sweden. That new fire would come, that new growth would come, and a new heart and passion for missions would come. And so can you finish? But instead of praying in English, can you pray in Swedish, pray for the Swedish Pentecostal Church to experience a new move of the Holy Spirit in this modern time?
Josef Maxson (16:47):
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes…
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:24):
Amen. Well, thank you Joseph for being on the Evangelism Podcast.
Josef Maxson (17:29):
Thank you. Thanks Having me.
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Bishop Albert | Free Christian Churches
On today’s Evangelism Podcast I interview Bishop Albert from the Free Christian Churches of Bangladesh. Bishop Albert shares about the growth of Christianity in Bangladesh, which is a predominantly Muslim nation. In a nation with a population of almost two hundred million people, the church has grown from 175,000 to almost 600,000 Christians since the country gained independence from Pakistan. However, Christians still make up only 0.3% of the population. We ask people to pray for the church in Bangladesh.
Learn more about the Free Churches of Bangladesh: https://fccbchurch.org/
Transcription:
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. Today I have a very special guest with me, Bishop Albert Mirdha from Bangladesh. Thank you for being on the Evangelism Podcast.
Bishop Albert (00:15):
Thank you brother Daniel to meet you this morning.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:19):
Yeah, so we are here in the nation of Bangladesh and God is moving. It is so beautiful to see what God is doing here. Tell me some about what God is doing in this nation.
Bishop Albert (00:33):
Yeah, actually you see that Bangladesh is a new nation, about 52 years old, independent from Pakistan and it was third largest Muslim nation in the world and church was very tiny in Bangladesh after the liberation. But anyhow, the God has started to pour his spirit in the country of Bangladesh and from 175,000 when we are free from Pakistan and until now it is almost 600,000 Christians. So it is couple of times, hundred times increased means that is from the newborn babies in the country and the church is growing by his fire. So churches establishing in the country,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:21):
What would you say is the total population of Bangladesh?
Bishop Albert (01:25):
200 million people in the country and only 0.2% say you can say that Christianity in the country.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:34):
Wow. So I was reading some statistics and something like 91% of the population is Muslim, 92 7%, 8% is Hindu and then 0.2%
Bishop Albert (01:53):
Percent Christian
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:54):
Is Christian
Bishop Albert (01:55):
And this very
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:57):
Small
Bishop Albert (01:58):
Percentage.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:59):
But in the midst of this, it seems like there is a great harvest that God loves Bangladesh very much and Jesus is doing many wonderful things. Can you tell us some about what you see Jesus doing here?
Bishop Albert (02:13):
Actually, look, gospel came in this part of the country 500 years back, but mostly it was in Indian side and very few people has moved to the east part of India. I mean it’s a former India,
(02:30):
But the thing is it’s just a communication problem as well as it was not preached by our own people because we didn’t have any local Christians. The Jisu came and also some Catholic missionaries came and Orthodox people came but it didn’t need to work properly because they work in a very few areas. But actually in 1947 to 1971, mostly the church started to begin on the feet and 1971 when was independent and then there so many missionaries came from the west as well from US Canada and a part of Asia also. And then evangelism started and I think 72 to 80 it was, I mean, is a blooming of our churches because so many churches, new churches established in the country, like our church also, I mean started in 1984, but the missionary from Swedish free mission came or Swedish. Pentecostal churches came in 1970. So this is the way actually the after liberation in Bangladesh, 1971, the church has started to establish the kingdom of the country.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:39):
Now you’re leading the free Christian churches of Bangladesh. And in back in 1972, how many churches were there?
Bishop Albert (03:48):
Actually, 1970, the missionary came from Sweden
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:52):
To support
Bishop Albert (03:53):
To humanitarian areas because we had a tidal board in 1970, 15th of May, 15th of November. And then the missionary came here with social help. And then after a couple of months, just four months later, we had a liberation. We were started or begin in March, 1971. So then all missionaries leap again to their own country and then they came back after liberation in 1972. So this 72 to 1984, there is no mission work started by our missionaries, which Pentecostal missionaries jointly and individually scattered. They work. But lately they decide that they will start a mission organization called Free Christian Churches of Bangladesh. And this is a Pentecostal church from Swedes Pentecost Church. So we started in 84 and then 84 until, I mean now we have so many churches, we have 474 churches with 54,000 people all are from newborn babies. So I mean from 1970 to 1984, we are not existing. That time we didn’t start our mission work. So mission work started in 1984. Wow.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:11):
Let’s talk some about your testimony. How did you become a believer and how did you know that you were called to be a pastor and to lead churches?
Bishop Albert (05:23):
Actually, see, I born in a Christian family. My father was a pastor as seldom he was the mission school teacher of churches of God, US and 1972, actually I came into the ministry when I was fresh young around 15 or 14 plus almost close to 15 years old. I started to evangelize people of our country and I started to give the trust and sharing word of God. This is the way actually 72, I engaged into the evangelism Since then until now I’m voluntarily serving to my Lord.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:00):
Wow, what a blessing. And I had the opportunity this week to see the beautiful school that you have up north and I was so impressed with the children. They were so well-behaved and it was so beautiful to see the vision that God has given you
Bishop Albert (06:22):
Actually, I mean education is the key of development in anywhere else, socially or spiritually. Without education you’re going to do anything. Our church people are very illiterate and they do not have an opportunity to send their kids to the schools because school is very, very expensive. In Bangladesh, you have to pay everything. It’s not free. So I thinking I was praying to God in seventies that I will help to the kids with education if it is an opportunity God given to me. But finally I got this opportunity, 1998, to establish this home of peace that you have seen anywhere there. Actually these children are from orphanage back down. They’re single parents, they are very poor. Marginalist background of the new believers, our main motto to give them education and they can discover the truth of life and truth of heaven and then they will work that independently in the church will be self-supported in the future because the leadership will come from there.
(07:29):
That’s the reason actually 570 children you have seen from different areas and different ethnic group they’re studying over there. So our main goal to make them understand and also give them education and they can stand on their own feet. Otherwise they can be the physical laborer in the field or they can be the domestic worker or they can be the trafficking somewhere else. That’s the reason I know we have started and they’re, well actually they are taught like that. They knows how to behave with the field and usually the 570 kids in the children, I mean in the home of peace and it didn’t found that the noise is there, but they’re playing with joy and they’re very happy to be there. And I mean over 500 children already graduated from this place and they’re now in different areas of life.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:21):
Wow. Let’s talk about the future. I met your son John, and he has the same calling on his life that rests upon your life. And I was so impressed with your son. He went and studied in Canada, he went
Bishop Albert (08:38):
To the
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:38):
United States and studied and he’s very smart and he could have a job anywhere in the world, but he feels like God has called
Bishop Albert (08:48):
Him
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:49):
To be here in Bangladesh. And you and John and the pastors in this movement have come together and put together a vision for the next 10 years. What do you hope to see God do
Bishop Albert (09:04):
Here? Yeah, actually we are so thankful to our loving Lord and also John, I mean because we thought that he will be staying in USA because he studied in US in Florida.
(09:15):
But after completion, his study and after graduation same day, he returned home and he said that we tried to push him to stay in us, but he denied. And he said, no, that’s my calling to go back home and also I will serve over there. So finally we found that it’s a Gore’s will that he’ll be coming back and he helping to the ministry. And we are planning because I already 51 years I am in the ministry and I’m planning to hand over to him. And since he’s very matured and very capable to run this whole ministry because these 477 churches with lots of people and I think he can manage well and he’s learning our decade of revival and all, we have a vision 2032 that the F C C B, the Serve Pentecostal Church will plant new a hundred churches in Bangladesh within this 10 years of time and 1000 people will be baptized and 10,000 new people will join into our congregation and a whole and 200 leaders will be prepared or raised that they will work for the future generation in the churches. That’s our goal right now.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:34):
I think that is a goal that comes from God. And God is going to do amazing things in the years to come because Bangladesh really is a harvest field and there are so many people that need Jesus in fact, right by where the home of peace is. There are some fields there. And we went and I was watching the farmers in the field, they were cutting the rice plants down and I was thinking, wow, this is a vision from God that Bangladesh is a great harvest field. And I pray that God raises up many laborers here
Bishop Albert (11:13):
Actually. You see that Bangladesh really is right now the harvest field and this is an abundant mission fill of the west. So one day missionary leap from this country and because of no result, but now God is God’s time. He’s giving result to the churches. So this is the harvest time. And if we have few laborer truly speaking that God, Jesus has told that plenty of harvest, but few are laborers. So we actually, this is thing Bangladesh is right now the place of mission and also the mission field and harvest is plenty. So we need to harvest because he’s coming. I believe personally that he’s coming. We are living in the end time. So this is the time for harvest. This is the time for preparing people on earth and we are responsible for Bangladesh. We want to reach to every corner of Bangladesh with the gospel.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:05):
Amen. So many believers listen to this podcast. How can they best pray for the nation of Bangladesh? And then how can people help with what God is doing here?
Bishop Albert (12:21):
You see the prayer bind us together and this is actually the spiritual bindings is most important and the time has come to come closer and the believers will come closer and pray for extending the kingdom of God. So Bangladesh is one of the unreached country in the world, number one. So the people, those are actually our brother and sister in many countries, we going to say that
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:51):
Please
Bishop Albert (12:52):
Prefer Bangladesh, that we can win the souls of the country because this is very hard soil. Bangladesh is really hard soil once upon a time, but now God is opening the doors for missions and the local church want to reach to the corner and to every people. So we need your prayer support at the same time, you are most welcome to have the campaign or work together with our church and also supporting with your generous prayer or answer finance if it is possible. This is where we can work together for his glory.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:26):
Amen. Well, there is great opportunity here. There are many
Bishop Albert (13:30):
Villages
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:31):
That need a campaign, that have never had a campaign, no one has ever come to talk about Jesus. And so it has been a great privilege to be here as your guest. Thank you so much for inviting me here and for being here. It has really been wonderful to see what God is doing here. Let’s finish by praying for Bangladesh
Bishop Albert (13:54):
Together. Yeah, Daniel, you are not
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:56):
Guest.
Bishop Albert (13:57):
We are family. The family of God. We are working together for his kingdom because that’s our purpose, that God
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:04):
Has
Bishop Albert (14:05):
Called us,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:06):
God have
Bishop Albert (14:06):
Raised
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:07):
Us
Bishop Albert (14:07):
For supporting and we didn’t know each other, but now we are brother
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:12):
In
Bishop Albert (14:12):
Christ, so let’s work together, pray together, and sub together for his kingdom.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:18):
Amen. So
Bishop Albert (14:18):
You are most welcome anytime in the country of Bangladesh and that we can work jointly for this. And also please pray for
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:25):
This
Bishop Albert (14:26):
Children home where 570 children are there because they’re the future of the country, the future of the churches, because you have seen that they have a morning devotion and evening devotion and they’re learning who is God, how to support him and how to solve him.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:43):
Yeah, they were singing songs, quoting verses, and even being led by other students. I was very, and they did a beautiful cultural program.
Bishop Albert (14:54):
They
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:54):
Danced and they had different groups from different parts of the country, different ethnic groups, and they dressed up in the traditional costumes of their people and did the traditional dances and it was so beautiful. Yeah.
Bishop Albert (15:10):
They’re actually from 17 different tribe groups or ethnic group, including also Bengali, our main motto
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:19):
To raise leaders from
Bishop Albert (15:22):
All different tribe groups and ethnic groups that they can work for their own community in the future. That’s our main, main plan or vision. That’s wonderful.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:33):
Well, let’s pray. Dear heavenly Father, we pray together for the nation of Bangladesh. We ask that you would pour out your spirit upon this nation. Lord, we pray for many salvations, many miracles. Lord, I pray for the churches to be strengthened. Lord, I pray that new leaders would be raised up. I pray for more churches to be planted. Lord, I pray that all of Bangladesh would hear about Jesus
(16:07):
The great work that Jesus did on the cross to provide for our salvation. And Lord, I thank you for Bishop Albert, for his son, John Lord. We ask for your blessing to be upon them and give them great wisdom as they lead these churches. This movement of believers in reaching one of the great unreached areas of the world. Lord, we ask you for a mighty harvest of souls here in Bangladesh. In Jesus’ name,
Bishop Albert (16:43):
Amen.
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Niclas Wiktorell | What is God Doing in Sweden?
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell from the Pentecostal Church in Lidköping, Sweden, joins the Evangelism Podcast to discuss the spiritual climate in Sweden. Pastor Niclas shares his testimony of how he became a believer and felt called to be a pastor. He also talks about a unique outreach his church did last Easter, where they filled a local arena for three days. Pastor Niclas also discusses how his church reaches out to immigrants from countries like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iran, teaching them about Swedish society and culture, and offering a Swedish school for them to learn the language. Pastor Niclas emphasizes the importance of Christians opening their eyes to the harvest fields around them and sharing God’s love with people.
Learn more about Pastor Niclas Wiktorell: pingstlidkoping.se
Transcription:
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King, and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. Today I have a very special guest, pastor Niclas Wiktorell from the Nation of Sweden. Thank you for joining me
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (00:12):
Today. Thank you, Daniel. So glad to be here.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:15):
We are in Asia together,
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (00:18):
And
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:18):
We have had a wonderful time this week. God has been moving here, and so
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (00:23):
It’s been
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:23):
So wonderful to get to know you and you pastor a church in the nation of Sweden. Can you tell me first, what is the name of your church and then what part of Sweden are you in?
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (00:35):
Yeah, of course. The name of church is the Pentecostal Church in Lead Tripping. And Lead. Tripping is in the southern part, southwest part of Sweden, close to Goberg.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:46):
Okay. And let’s start with your testimony. How did you become a believer and how did you know that you were called to be a pastor?
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (00:55):
Okay. I think it started all, when my uncle came back from Africa, he was a missionary in Liberia in Africa, and he came back and he told about Jesus and what he did, and that really moved me as a little kid. I was maybe six or seven years old or something like that. And then I believe I saw that, okay, this is what I want to do with my life. But then
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:20):
It took a
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (01:20):
Little while, maybe during the teenager, as a teenager, I forgot about it, but I had my faith and I went to a Bible school. And on that Bible school I decided I wanted to do this, and God spoke to me about it. Yeah.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:35):
Wow. And how long have you been pastoring?
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (01:38):
I’ve been pastoring for about 20 years. Wow.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:42):
And what is the spiritual climate in Sweden? I know historically there’s a strong church there, but now it seems like Sweden is more of a secular society. What would you say people’s understanding
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (01:59):
Of God is? Yeah, it’s very secular, and I think the minority has the idea that there is no God no at all. Maybe 10% has some sort of notion about God, but very few Christians, maybe two, 3% maybe.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:23):
And so in a secular society where people have a historical understanding sometimes of Christianity, but now believe that there is no God, how do you reach those who are lost?
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (02:37):
Wow. That is a tough question for us to do that. But I still believe that, well, it’s the same thing, even though it’s a secular country, I actually believe that now it’s so secular that when we come with the message of Jesus, it’s like, wow, people haven’t heard it before. So when I grew up, everyone about Jesus, but they rejected it. But now the kids and the young people, it’s like they’re hearing it for the first time. So I think you just have to be bold and you just have to try to reach out and tell the good news.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:16):
And so this year at Easter time, you had a very unique outreach. Tell me what that looked like and what God did.
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (03:24):
Yeah, we did it in a local arena. So we had 1500 to 2000 people in that arena for free days. And it was from the region, our city, it’s a small town. I mean, it’s like 40,000, but we could reach people in that area, in our region. And every night we saw people coming to Christ.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:50):
How did you promote it? How did you invite people to come?
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (03:54):
Mostly through social media, actually. Only through social media. Yeah.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:58):
Okay. So
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (03:59):
Facebook. And Facebook and mostly Facebook.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:03):
And so you asked your church members to share it and to invite people, and then were you also doing advertising on
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (04:10):
Facebook? Yeah, a little bit of advertising too, but that was what we did.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:17):
And so Easter’s a great time
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (04:19):
To
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:19):
Reach
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (04:19):
Out to people.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:20):
That seems very amazing that for three days you were able to fill the place with
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (04:27):
1500,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:28):
2000. I
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (04:29):
Mean, it was such a huge step of faith for us. It was because we maybe do like this in Sweden two or three times a year, and now we thought we would do it in our little town, and it was a big step of faith, but we did it and with God.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:47):
And what type of program did you do? Was it like a typical church service? Were you doing an Easter drama? What
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (04:53):
We did a number of different things. It was music programs and then also of course preaching. A lot of testimonies, a lot of testimonies about people that have been in different kinds of addicts and so on, and also some drama. Yeah.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:15):
I’ve read in the news that there are lots of immigrants that have come to Sweden, and it’s a little bit controversial because some people want to be very welcoming. Other people say that is difficult to integrate them into the society, but your church is actually reaching out to immigrants that have come from many different parts of the world, and you’re reaching them with the love of Christ. What does that look like?
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (05:43):
Yeah, we reach people from Syria and from Afghanistan and from Iran. And every week we have this program Thursday nights when we invite them and we teach them about Swedish society, our culture and so forth. And also, we have a Swedish school for them, so they learn to speak Swedish.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:09):
And many of them coming from these nations are probably Muslim. The majority, the majority are Muslim. And so I think that’s really wonderful that you’re reaching out to the Muslims. In many times, Christians go on a mission to another nation in order to reach people, but really God is bringing the mission field to you. They’re right on your doorstep now, and I think it’s so wonderful that your church is reaching out to them, loving them, and showing them the love of Christ.
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (06:41):
Yeah, we always say that, but God has brought us the mission feel to us, so it’s much more easier now in that way.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:49):
And how has your church responded to that? Have they been enthusiastic about being a part? I think
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (06:54):
It’s been really, really amazing. A lot of people put in their hearts to this and work with this every week, and you see friendships with the immigrants and so forth. So it’s really, really nice to see what God does in people’s lives.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:11):
I think that’s so wonderful. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, we’ve had many Afghan families that have come there, and my father worked in Afghanistan for 12 years, and so we have been working with a group of the Afghans that have come to our city, and some of them actually had a stopover in Sweden, and so
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (07:31):
They
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:31):
Had some very nice things to say about their time in Sweden, and then they left Sweden and came to America. So we’re happy to have them now,
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (07:39):
But
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:40):
I think this is so important for Christians to open up their eyes. Jesus told the disciples, and John Pour is open your eyes and see the harvest fields. Really, the harvest field is all around us.
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (07:52):
And
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:52):
If we’ll look for opportunities to talk to people about Jesus, to share God’s love with people, then we can see God begin to do miracles in their lives.
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (08:02):
Yeah, that’s amazing.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:03):
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism podcast.
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (08:08):
Thank you, brother.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:09):
Daniel, let me ask you, what is your life message? What is the message that you like sharing with people the most that God has given you?
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (08:21):
Well, I think that God is a good father and he wants to invite you into his family. That is the thing that he’s a good father and he cares for everyone. He loves everyone, and he wants to take care of every person, and he sees everyone individually. Yeah,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:39):
That’s beautiful. Thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast.
Pastor Niclas Wiktorell (08:43):
Thank you, Daniel.
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Samuel Jonsson | Building the Local Church in Sweden
Pastor Samuel Jonsson pastors a local church in the south of Sweden. On today’s episode of the Evangelism Podcast we talk about what God is doing in Sweden, the spiritual atmosphere in Sweden, and how the Pentecostal church of Sweden is reaching out to their communities with the love of Christ.
Learn more about Pastor Samuel Jonsson: www.hovslattpingst.se
Summary:
In this podcast episode, Evangelism Coach Daniel King interviews Pastor Samuel Jonsson from Sweden. Pastor Jonsson discusses the challenges of spreading the gospel in Sweden, a secular and individualistic country. However, he remains hopeful, noting that God is raising up young leaders and churches are starting to reach out and grow. Pastor Jonsson shares his church’s efforts to reach a specific area with a high concentration of broken homes and single parents. They have started a Sunday school and a children’s choir, which has attracted children from non-Christian homes. He also emphasizes the importance of pastors going on mission trips to expand their worldview and gain new perspectives. The episode concludes with a testimony of an 80-year-old man from Pastor Jonsson’s church who returned to a country he had previously worked in and witnessed the growth of the church.
Transcript:
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. Today I have a very special guest with me, pastor Samuel Jonsson from the nation of Sweden. Thank you for joining me today.
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (00:14):
Thank you so much for joining this podcast. It’s wonderful.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:17):
And so you are pastoring in the nation of Sweden. You have a Pentecostal church. Tell me what is God doing in Sweden right now?
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (00:32):
I think God is doing a lot of things in Sweden. It’s quite, Sweden is quite a tough country in some ways, very individualistic, very secular in some ways. So it’s a quite hard time getting through everything else with the gospel, the message. But I think God is racing up young leaders and I think God is racing up leaders who wants to search the gifts of the Holy Spirit, get more into what God is doing, what God is saying, what God wants to do for the nation of Sweden. So I have hope for the nation of Sweden. I think God will do great things, but maybe we have to go through some tough things also during the way, but we can see some churches starting to reach out more, growing a little bit more. And then some churches of course struggling, especially in the north of Sweden, maybe small churches struggling a lot. And also in the south of Sweden, church is struggling because they’re quite small, some of them. But still I think God is moving in many ways. I can see small, I don’t know how to say it, but small signals of great things to come. I don’t know how to explain it better than that, but a longing for the things of God and a longing for the spirit of God to start to move and talk and speak and direct and heal and so on.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:05):
Now in what part of Sweden is your church located?
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (02:09):
We are located in the south of Sweden, not the furthest down, I dunno how to say
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:15):
It,
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (02:16):
But in the south of Sweden. Yes.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:18):
And I’ve heard that that area is maybe known as the Bible belt of Sweden. You have many believers in that area, but of
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (02:26):
Course there’s, compared to the rest of Sweden, there’s
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:28):
Still many people that need Jesus.
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (02:31):
Yeah,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:31):
Definitely. In the context of your area, what are you doing to reach out to the lost and bring people to Jesus?
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (02:42):
Yeah, if I go to my church, the church where I’m a pastor, we are trying to specifically actually reach out to a specific area where we live. Of course we tried to reach out to all people where we live, but God gave us a heart for a specific, is like a small, I don’t know how to say it in English, but apartment, house area, something like that. Many families live there who have a quite tough situation, single parents and broken homes and so on. And we just received the heart for that area to try to reach out. So the woman who is a child and family pastor in our church, she got the vision together with a couple of other guys to start to have a Sunday school in this area. So on a regular basis they go up there on Sundays first we meet together, all of us in church and we pray together, together with this team and together with the rest of the church, we’ll celebrate.
(03:49):
We have worship in church and then they go up and they have a Sunday school for kids. But the focus is also to reach out to the whole family. So primarily through the kids, but then through the kids to the parents as well. And in this area we also had small, you say small events, gone there, done fun things for the kids, just blessing them, talk to people, get to know people. So we are trying in different ways to reach out to this specific area because we realized that almost none of the churches where we have people coming from this area to their churches. So it’s almost like a small subculture almost in the outskirts of the area. So we are trying to get in there and trying to reach people with the gospel. But then we also actually, I want to tell you about a kid’s choir. That’s also,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:58):
I think this idea is a very unique outreach idea. You were telling me about your children’s pastor and she has started this choir for the children and what is that?
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (05:10):
Yeah, she got the vision for that. Also, I think our kids pastor has some kind of an evangelistic heart and she just got a vision to start kids choir in the area. So first we just had kids from our church maybe in the beginning starting to come and they wanted to sing and learn to sing and so on. But then the kids started to take their friends from school into this choir. So a lot of friends came who came from non-Christian homes into this choir. So I think now they can gather on Tuesday evenings and on Tuesday evenings there can be 70 kids, sometimes 60 to 70 kids and maybe half of it are from non-Christian homes. So then we have added special services Sunday services on a regular basis during the semesters where we try to, we invite everyone, all of these families to come because the kids’ choir will sing and we try to give different kids and the choir specific roles.
(06:24):
So the families really will come because they want to see their kids and then they come and listen to their kids singing. And we just try to incorporate dramas into those services and incorporate a simple gospel message just to present the gospel in Jesus Christ to these families. And we have not yet seen the fruit we are praying for, but we are just trying to continue in that direction because just recently actually we had this kind of a service for, I think it was two weeks ago or three weeks ago. And then a grandma who had followed the family to the church, she told one of our leaders afterwards, I don’t think she was a Christian or had any Christian heritage in that way, but she said that these services means so much to me. It was like something touched her heart, but maybe she could not spell it out what it was. I believe it was the spirit of God of course, but maybe she could not spell it out. So we are trying to reach out also through this choir. And then the church where I’m a pastor is really, I told you in the car, I think it’s a really entrepreneurial church, many entrepreneurial people. So there are more ideas than we can almost do so many ideas, so many visions. But it’s really fun.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:57):
I think that’s really wonderful. I think in the years to come, some of those entrepreneurial ideas will result in grapefruit for the kingdom of
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (08:05):
God. Yeah, I hope. I
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:07):
Sure hope. Let’s talk about your history. How did you become a believer? How did you know that you were called to be a pastor?
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (08:16):
Yeah, I grew up in a Christian home. So I grew up in a Pentecostal church and both of my parents were a part of the church. My father was an elder in the church, but when I was quite young, I think I was nine years old, I remember quite vividly that my sister came home. I don’t know where she had been or maybe she had been to a camp or something. But she came home one day and we sat and we ate dinner. And I remember my sister started to talking about God and saying things about God that touched me in a special way. I had never experienced that because I remember looking into my sister, I was only nine years old, but remember it still, I was looking at my sister and I realized she has something that I don’t have. I had some kind of faith in God.
(09:13):
I remember, I mean we prayed together as a family. We prayed in the evening and so on. We could read the Bible together. And I had a children’s kind of faith maybe, but I saw something in her eyes and I realized she has something. And later on I realized that she had in some way accepted Jesus entire life. And that made me think at an early age think like what is this? And I started to pray. I remember in my own room like Jesus, I also want what she has. But then the specific moment came when I was at a big conference and I remember I had decided in my heart that tonight I want to really spell out a prayer that Jesus, I want you here in my heart. So I said to my mother, we were sitting in the front row seat that the conference, and I remember still that I turned to my mother at the end of the service and I said to her, I want to become a Christian. And then she followed me to what you call it when the
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:20):
Altar, the altar,
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (10:21):
Exactly to the altar. They had an altar called people were coming in front of the preacher or what? It
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:32):
Was for the altar time. Yeah,
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (10:35):
For the altar time, exactly. So I was just following my mother, and then an old man came up to us and he asked, what do you want? And I said, I want to become a Christian. And I remember praying that prayer, not feeling very much. I did not have a specific feeling in my body or anything, but from that moment, I have never looked back. It’s like Jesus has been the biggest part of my life since that moment. And then I got baptized a couple of years later when I was 11 or 12 or something, 11 years old. I think I had to wait a little bit. And then I got baptized. And then when I was in seventh grade, I experienced the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues for the first time at the church service, like a prayer service or something like that in my home church. I was sitting alone and just feeling the spirit, starting to draw me to him and then giving me words, speaking of tongue.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:35):
And then how did you know that you were called to be a pastor? To be in the ministry?
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (11:41):
It’s a quite long process actually. But when I was in seventh, eight, nine grade somewhere, I started to think a lot about what am I going to do with my life? And remember quite early that sometimes when I thought about that, I started to think maybe I should be a preacher or maybe I should do missionary work or maybe I should. I started to have those thoughts in my mind, but I was pushing it away because I thought that pastor is always not for me. It’s like old men in strange clothing and I don’t want to be that. So I pushed it away. But then when I came to, I think in the states, you call it senior high school. In Sweden we call it gymnasium. So when I came to gymnasium when I was like 16, 17, 18 years old, then I started to become really passionate about serving God.
(12:45):
So we started a group in school, me and some friends, we had a group in the school, we were going to a Christian group and we did outreach and gave away books and gave away Bibles and did different events. And the passion to serve God just grew in me during that season. I could not say that I have a calling to become a pastor, but I just knew I want to serve Jesus. Jesus is the best thing I want to serve him. So that grew in my heart really during that period. And then when I came out of high school, I was still quite confused, what am I going to do with my life? But then I had some different events happening that pointed me in this direction. First it was actually, I worked at an industry where my father worked just for a short period of time.
(13:37):
And one day when I was standing there and working, I actually heard a voice. I think this was almost the first time where I can say I heard almost a clear voice. I almost jumped because I heard a voice saying that when you come home from work, your pastor are going to call you and he will offer you a yoga church to be a youth youth leader. And I was like, what is this? I remember going to the toilet and being like, God, was that you? It was so whoop. But then when I came home, I went up to the tv, put on the tv, and then 30 minutes later the phone rang and I just immediately knew my pastor is calling now, my mom picked up the phone and she called me Samuel Michael, our pastor is calling you. And I was like, yep.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
It’s like God calling Samuel in the Bible, Samuel.
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (14:34):
Yeah, it was so specific, I just knew it. Okay, yes, I will take this. I took the phone, hello, Hey, we have been thinking do you want to work as a youth leader here in the church? And I was like, yeah, I’m going to think about it. You had a word from God, you knew he was calling. Let me pray about it a little bit. Yes, let me just pray. But I knew the answer of course. So then I worked at my home church for a short period of time. And then one year later or half year later, I went to Peru actually with a friend. We were on a short mission trip together, me and my friend. And in Peru, I once again heard that clear voice. And that was also very specific. I remember one night when I was laying in my bed, I just suddenly heard a voice say, when you come home, you are going to go to Bible college.
(15:29):
And he also told me what bible college it was. You will know when you get home why you are going to that specific Bible college. And in that bible college you will get what you call it. You will get direction for where and how you will serve me. So then I came to the Bible college. I met my then soon to be wife early on in the Bible college. And we started to date and see that we experienced, we felt that we should be together. And then at that bible college, in the beginning of it, I once again a third time heard the voice talk. And I remember the voice said that in the spring you will get an offer to start to work at the church and I want you to say yes, and then you will continue in that direction. So when the spring came, once again, that situation occurred.
(16:29):
So we got an offer, me and my then soon to be wife. We had an offer from a church in the north part of Sweden, far up north to come and work together with them quite broadly. We worked as some kind of youth workers, youth and kids workers, maybe you could call it, but also very evangelistic and also quite pioneering, but also preaching, teaching and everything. We had to do everything. So it was a great school actually to be there. So we was there for three years and then I felt, okay, this is what God has laid on my heart to work, to be in church, to be in ministry, continue as a pastor in different capacities. So then I went to study theology. So then we went to Stockholm in Sweden, the capital, I studied theology and leadership, and my wife studied to be an OB optician.
(17:25):
I think you can say. She had had that on her heart for a very long time to become that. So we was in Stockholm studying. And then I actually once again heard that voice. I’ve been hearing, of course God speaks all the time, but sometimes you can hear it more specifically, I believe. So I heard the voice when I was studying, say that the church where you are practicing now, they will ask you to become their senior pastor. And also once again, I want you to say yes. And I was like, I can’t be a senior pastor. Of course I can be on staff, I can be in a team, but can I lead the church? I had, it felt too big almost for me. I was only like 27 years old at that time or something. So I was like, oh no, that’s too big.
(18:16):
But then it came later on, a year later from that time because their pastor sadly became quite sick. The one I worked together with him in a small, I had a small percentage. I was paid a small percentage. So I worked at the church together with him, and then it became sick. And then they asked me, and then we just felt, yeah, God has prepared this, so let’s stay. So when I had studied, I continued in that church outside of Stockholm, a suburb of Stockholm. That’s like a long trajectory, but small steps where God has led. It
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:53):
Is beautiful to see how God has spoken to you at several key moments in your life and given you direction. Now, right now you and I are together in Asia, and I don’t want to mention exactly the particular country that we’re in, but we are here telling people about Jesus. Now I have a question for you. Do you think that pastors should regularly go on mission trips to different parts of the world? And what benefit would that be to a pastor?
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (19:31):
First, I just want to say definitely I think you should go if you have the possibility. And the church may have the economy to send you away sometimes once in a while, I think you should do it definitely. Because especially when you come from the West, and maybe if you come from Europe who is quite once again quite individualistic, quite secular, it’s a quite tough place sometimes to be spiritually, I think. But then to also come to other places and see other kinds of soils almost,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:08):
They have a different set of problems. Yeah,
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (20:10):
Yeah. Every part of the world have their problems, but sometimes it can be good to change the
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:16):
Problems
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (20:17):
To see something else and see how other kinds of churches are thinking to see how they are working, to see how they are reaching out to the neighborhood. And when you come to places like this, we are now in Asia or I have traveled to Africa several times and you see, you can see, especially maybe when I was in Africa, you can see their hunger for God and their hunger to pray, their hunger to seek things of the kingdom, their hunger to lay hands on the Sikh and pray for them and believe that something actually can happen that stirs something in your heart that you have to take home. I mean, you can’t leave it there. You have to take it home
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:04):
At the very least. It gives you some good stories to tell next time.
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (21:08):
Yeah, exactly. Definitely good stories to tell in your service. But I think, yeah, I always recommend, I had actually, when I was in Stockholm, I was the pastor of a satellite church and I had senior pastor working, leading me of course, and leading all the satellite church pastors. And he once said that you have to travel as a pastor from your country to other countries because you have to expand your world, otherwise you will become very narrow-minded and just thinking that you have all the answers and you know everything. So you have to, on a regular basis, expand your world. And I have carried that thought with me. If I have the chance to go away for a week or some days and you see something else and experience another culture, another church. And then I take it. And then I also love to travel, so it’s nice to travel, but I like that idea to expand the mind and expand the world and not become too narrow.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (22:20):
Now, there is a really wonderful testimony that has happened this week in this part of Asia. The Swedish Pentecostal church has actually been working for many years, and you brought with you one older gentleman from your church. He’s 80 years old, and he actually was here in this country working back in 1985.
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (22:46):
Yeah, somewhere
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (22:47):
Early eighties,
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (22:48):
84, 85 until I think 87 or something like that.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (22:52):
Yeah. And so at that time, the church in this nation was very small, and now it is growing. They have gone from only a handful of locations to now over 450 different congregations with over 50,000 believers just in this one network of churches. And it was so beautiful to see this 80 year old, great man of God, come back and see some of the fruit of what the seeds that were planted so many years ago.
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (23:32):
It was so beautiful. And he both were a part of the leadership seminar we had. And I mean, his English is not so well right now, but still sitting there and listening to him teach. And you think about how he planted that seed for like 35 years ago or something like that, more than 35 years ago, and he now gets to sit in front of young leaders in the north part of this country and teach them the word of God. I think it was so, it touched my heart, but then also to see him lead in the prayer of salvation yesterday at the campaign, it also touched me so much because you can see the faithfulness of God and you can see how he has walked with Jesus all his life, and he still has a passion for the kingdom of God. I mean, he’s seen a lot. He both have seen the good things and the ugly things in church and in the Christian life, and he’s seen everything of that. But still, he has a passion, a soft heart. A soft heart for God, and a soft heart for
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:43):
People. Now tell me his name. How do you pronounce it?
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (24:49):
Sorry, not the common name in the States.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:52):
Yeah. Well, it was so beautiful to see, and it really encourages me because it means that the seeds that we plant today, imagine what God will do 30, 40 years from now. Can you imagine being 80 years old and coming back to some of the places where you have sowing seed
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (25:11):
And
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (25:11):
Seeing a great harvest?
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (25:12):
Yeah. That’s a dream. That would be a dream.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (25:16):
Amen.
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (25:17):
Could be in that place.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (25:18):
Amen. Well, brother Samuel, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast. I appreciate it.
Pastor Samuel Jonsson (25:23):
Thank you. Thank you, Daniel. Good to meet you.
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Giles Stevens | Church Multiplication in Brazil
Giles Stevens is the evangelism pastor for a huge network of churches in Brazil. His goal as an evangelist is to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry. You will be amazed as you listen to his story about how the church grew from 70 people to tens of thousands.
Learn more about Giles Stevens: https://gilesstevens.com/
Learn more about the church GIles Stevens is part of: https://www.igrejavideira.com.br/
Buy the book about “The Eleventh Question”
Transcript:
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. Today I have a very special guest with me, Giles Stevens from Great Britain now in the great nation of Brazil. Thank you for joining me today,
Giles Stevens (00:15):
Daniel, a joy to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:18):
Alright, you are passionate about evangelism. Tell me a little bit about your testimony and how God has brought you to where you are now.
Giles Stevens (00:27):
Well, I’m the first believer in my family. I like to say I got saved by mistake. I was looking in all the wrong places for life and for adventure. I’d rather thrown out the idea of Christianity as a young teenager because of my rather negative sort of traditional church experiences. And so I went to look for life and adventure outside of the church and that took me down all sorts of wild and paths and so forth. But thank God in his rich mercy, he sent along a couple of nice friends of friends who preached Christ to me and it kind of tricked me up, woke me up, brought me out of my lost state and showed me what life was all about, where told me the truth. And it just radically changed my life. And I think the fact that I’d come from a family where we didn’t know Christ personally and didn’t have that relationship and the fact that I suddenly realized there was an eternal realm and the decisions we make here during our lives affect where we spend our eternity.
(01:29):
I kept thinking to myself, well, how come nobody’s ever told me this before I could have died and if I’d have died, where would I be today? And so in a sense, I became a natural evangelist. I just thought there would be thousands, millions of people out there just like me who had no idea about these eternal consequences and destinations who’ve never heard. And so I just began. Once I was saved and knew the Lord, I just thought, boy, I’ve got to tell everybody else. So I preached at everything that moved. That’s how it started.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:56):
So you definitely have the call to be an evangelist on your life. And now you’re living in the nation of Brazil. How did you end up going to Brazil?
Giles Stevens (02:06):
Well, I married the girl.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:09):
Where’d you meet?
Giles Stevens (02:10):
Well, my wife, who is Brazilian as I’m indicating, she had won a scholarship to go and study in a Bible school in London, a place called the International Bible Institute of London, run by the quite well-known church, Kensington Temple. And so she was there and I was a full-time evangelist traveling around London at the time and other places with a big gospel tent and putting it up in downtown parks and using music and test me and other things to bring people in. And then preaching, there was no tomorrow to the crowds. And her church brought in the whole tent and all the equipment. I noted her in the kind of gang of young people. But being a classic Englishman, we have this slight reserve on us. So you shouldn’t really in decent society introduce yourself. So I saw this girl wanted the local pastor to introduce me and he didn’t. And so in the end, at the end of this mission, I went away having seen her thought, well she looks lovely and she’s full of the spirit and there’s something different about her. But I didn’t get introduced. But interestingly, a year later I was in a Reinhard Bonky fire conference in Birmingham and I saw her again. And thankfully by then I had more kingdom culture than British culture and I thought, I’m not going to miss my chance. Second time round,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:34):
God is the God of a second chance he brought her back.
Giles Stevens (03:37):
So I made a beeline for her.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:39):
Oh well that is a good place to meet your wife at a Reinhardt Bonky fire conference. I know you know that here is someone who loves Jesus.
Giles Stevens (03:47):
Well that’s right. People who go to those fire conferences, they have to have a certain are type of believer. They love the fire, they love evangelism. And so I like to say it’s a good place to find a partner better than the pub.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:01):
Alright, so you met her, you got married, how many years have you been married now? 23. Wow, congratulations. And she’s from Brazil, so you ended up going to Brazil with her?
Giles Stevens (04:14):
Yeah, we married in England. And so it was only really after our marriage that we went down to Brazil to meet the extended family. And we have completely different upbringings. And this is one of the challenges, but also one of the exciting things about our relationship is I was brought up, my father was a general in the British Army. I went to private schools, studied at Oxford, been traveling around the world ever since. My youth,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:43):
A classic British gentleman. Well,
Giles Stevens (04:47):
I trying to be, be gentle. Anyhow, Sylvia, in contrast, she was brought up out on a ranch in the back end of nowhere. I think you Americans, if you can picture in your mind the little house on the prairie, then you’ve pretty much got how Sylvia was raised. She’s the oldest of four girls. Her father and mother had this ranch literally miles and miles away from the big city. And they were brought up without electricity, without a car, without telephones. They would go to town once a week in a horse and cart to go to church and buy a few supplies. And she tells these incredible stories about how sometimes in rainy season to get to town you’d have to cross rivers and if if it had risen through the rain, they would have to sort of camp by the river until it had gone down so that they could cross over in their cart.
(05:39):
And so it was completely different upbringing. But as I’ve often said to young single people who are looking and praying about their married marriage partner, I’ve said, look, it’s not the past that counts. It’s the destination, your future that counts. Scripture says how can two walk unless they are agreed. And so when you’ve got a similar vision, a similar heart, a similar passion, then I believe that partnership can be a success. And thankfully, like we were talking about Sylvia being in a fire conference for evangelists, I knew that’s somebody with a similar vision. So it’s been a great, great marriage.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:16):
And what city are you living in? Brazil?
Giles Stevens (06:20):
Well, it’s a place that nobody knows and nobody can pronounce even if they know it well, certainly us foreigners. It’s called Goya. And it’s actually a large city, 1.5 million. So it’s big, but it’s kind of, it’s cowboy country. So people think when they think of Brazil, they either think Amazon or they think of Rio de Janeiro and the beaches kind of carnival football on the beaches. So we are more than a thousand kilometers inland, if you know where brazilia is, a couple of hours drive from there, right in the heart of Brazil below the Amazon and to the east of the Panol, which is the equivalent of our Everglades or your Everglades. And it’s a lovely region, beautiful countryside, jolly hot, but great place to be. Goana itself has no tourist attractions apart from an old zoo where there’s zebra that’s lost its stripes, there’s a lion who’s forgotten how to roar. And an old bear who strolls around. That’s our only tourist attraction. But Ang is not known for a tourist center. It’s known for something much more superior. And that is the move of God that’s happening there. It’s an extraordinary, it’s a city of revival.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:29):
Wow. Tell me about the revival.
Giles Stevens (07:32):
Well, I mean my experience mean in general. I can tell you about Brazil. I mean, it’s just extraordinary really what’s happened over the last 20, 30 years. I mean, Pentecostal, the Pentecostal missionaries came in and we’re here at an evangelist conference. So these sorts of conversations we’ve been having. But Swedish Pentecostals came in 112 years ago to the Amazon and started that sort of whole Holy Ghost move. But it didn’t really take off numerically until the last 20, 30 years. And so we’ve seen multitudes coming to the Lord in a general sense. I mean literally millions and millions, remembering that Brazil is a country of 230 million people. So that’s a big, big country. But I’ll give you more of the context with the network of churches with whom I’m based and principally work for, even though being an evangelist, I’m a kingdom man. So we started that church, which has now grown into a large network. About 24 years ago, I joined up with one of Sylvia’s youth pastors, my wife’s youth pastors, who had started this new church with a group of people, 70 people in a garage or on a veranda. And now that church is over 30,000 people.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:51):
And what’s the name of the church in port in
Giles Stevens (08:53):
Portuguese? It’s called Reja Viera, which translates directly as the Vine Church. The Vine Church. So we’ve now got over a thousand churches. And
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:01):
So there’s many branches all over Brazil.
Giles Stevens (09:03):
Yeah, I mean originally we just, the growth is so organic, the thing just kept growing and growing. And then before we knew it,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:15):
Well, if you name your church the vine, you figure it kind of spreads. We used to have a vine on our house and it would cover the entire thing. And so I think that’s a good name for a growing church. Yeah,
Giles Stevens (09:25):
I agree. I agree. I agree. It’s very biblical John 15. Of course. Yeah. But we did mean we were intentional as well. I mean some of the growth came just because people would get saved, become a member. And we have quite a strong church culture. So the people who sort of like what we teach and the way we do church, we’re a cell church. We have a lot of encounter weekends, and it’s a very busy active church full of young people. And so people who have been in that environment, if they get moved to another city for, I dunno, work or something else, they tend to, because of the culture they carry, they love having church at home as well as in a big building. So they’ll automatically start a group at home, a cell group. And so we just found these new groups growing up in other cities as well. And then we thought, well, we better send a trained pastor or a leader down there to help them. And suddenly we found that we had a network and then we did become a bit more intentional saying, well, let’s get a church into every one of the capitals of each state that 26 states. And then we thought, well, let’s get a church into every city with over 200,000 and so on and so on. And now we’ve become actually a growing international movement as well.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:31):
Wow, that’s amazing. And so tell me your position and what you do.
Giles Stevens (10:37):
Well, I kind of wear two hats really. I’m on the one hand an evangelist, and that’s really my principal.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:46):
The reason I’m asking this question is because a lot of evangelists who listen to the podcast are wondering how do they fit into the local church? Not every church makes a place for the evangelist, but I think an evangelist really needs to be part of a church and plugged in doing evangelism as part of a local church using their gifts. So how has that worked in your life? Well, I
Giles Stevens (11:11):
Think I really agree with you, and it’s not only good for the evangelist, it’s good for the church. It’s a two-way thing and it’s good for the family of the evangelists. You can’t just be out there on your own all the time. You should be in a community of believers. And in a sense, I mean I’ve always operated like this. My call as an evangelist is principally to my local church or to the group of local churches with whom I’m based. But obviously evangelists are kingdom people as we referred to earlier because we’re preaching the gospel to get people saved and to join a church. So we work with other churches as well. But for me, I think every evangelist needs to champion the local church. Christ is coming back for the church, it’s the church that will be raptured, the church is his bride.
(11:57):
And so the idea of having, even if you have a parachurch organization, you’re not building up that organization. You’re actually using your parachurch organization, your charity, your not-for-profit to build the local church. And I think pastors, they’ve had an uneasy relationship with evangelists over the years. They perhaps felt threatened by them or they feel that they might be pulling their flock away. But I think if evangelists express that and show that pastor I’m here to do a campaign so that your church grows so that new families come in, then obviously pastors are going to open up their hearts and their doors to them as well. So yeah, it’s always been a passion of mine. And I think also that coming back to the way we do church is that as Ephesians four says, the primary purpose of a five-fold ministry gift is to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry. So yes, I do campaigns, big campaigns, but actually I spend just as much time, if not more time training all the believers to be evangelists as well, all the believers to share their faith.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:05):
Yeah, that’s so much an important part of what the evangelist is called to do. So you said you wear two hats. One is the evangelist and are you saying the other one is the equipper or you have another hat? Yeah,
Giles Stevens (13:18):
Well yes, we might have a few hats here. We start breaking this down. But what I wanted to say was I do run an evangelistic association. It’s called the Great Mission, and that is to serve the body of Christ and the local churches at large. So I am an evangelist doing that within the Vine Church itself, I’m part of a presbytery or an apostolic team. I kind of serve as the director of evangelism. And so I train all the members of those churches. I prioritize that multiplying my own gifting and giving them tools and strategies so that they can be fruitful as well.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:58):
And so what does that training look like? Often in church, people want to do something for God and they have a heart to share their faith with others, but they don’t really know what to say or what to do. So in the Brazilian context of where you are, how do you equip believers to share their faith?
Giles Stevens (14:19):
Well, it’s great question. I really like that it’s right at the heart of what I feel like I’m called to do. I think firstly, local churches need to have a structure which allows them members to be sharing their faith and encourages them. It’s one of the reasons I really believe in cell groups where it’s not just now the pastor who’s doing the preaching because in cell groups, all the members of the church and that cell group can get involved in preaching and starting their own groups and so forth. So you are sharing what you’ve received, you are teaching what you’ve learned. And I think that produces healthy growth in the individual believer as well. If the believer is just receiving, then in a sense he grows lazy. If he’s just giving, then he’ll dry out. But you’ve got to be having both sides receiving and giving learning and teaching.
(15:08):
So we need to have church structures where that can happen. But as you rightly say, often people have a heart to win. Others, they just dunno how to start the conversation. They dunno what to say, they dunno how to do it. And so I think one of the things that the Lord has anointed me or gifted me to do is to create tools and strategies that help ’em to do that. And Daniel, you know how it is the evangelist as a character, one of the characteristics, the traits of an evangelist normally is that he’s quite extroverted. He preaches with ease. He burns all the time to share the gospel. And that’s great, but not all believers are like that. Like I say, a genuine believer, somebody who’s born again has a new nature, they’re going to have a heart to see others saved. Of course we are, but they perhaps just dunno how to take that step.
(16:02):
And so one of the things I’ve done is produce tools or materials that help people to share. Back in 2008 now I launched, or 2007 I launched a strategy called the 11th Question, a little booklet I’d spent some time with Reinhard, actually this is an interesting story. And he’d been down to us, he’d come and visited and preached in our conference and he was talking about in those days, I think his vision was to win 50 million people for Christ. Now we were really, really growing. We were really growing. I mean our churches were exploding, but when he started talking about the millions, it kind of makes you feel like you’re doing nothing in comparison. And I remember just lying on my bed after he’d been there and I’m just wrestling it out with the Lord. I’m thinking, Lord, I’m excited about winning 5,000 and he’s winning 50 million.
(16:53):
I said, I’ve got the same Bible as him, the same spirit as him. There’s something wrong here. And I felt like the Lord said to me, Giles, it’s one thing to have a vision, it’s another thing to have a strategy. I think we all tend to have a vision of winning our generation for Christ or something like that. But you’ve got to go beyond the vision and actually have a strategy in place that then fulfills the vision. And it was clear that Reinhard had his strategy of big crusades and all this kind of stuff. So I prayed that through and I felt like the Lord said to me to do two things, write a book for believers to equip them to share their faith, but also write a little booklet for unbelievers so that they can hear about Christ in a dynamic way. And I mean, if you think about it as well, you go to a Christian book shop, there’s pretty much nothing written for the unbeliever.
(17:44):
It’s all for the believer. And that’s got to be wrong because we are the salt and the light of this earth. So anyhow, I wrote this booklet called The 11th Question, A Spiritual Self-Evaluation Test. There are 11 questions, you have to answer those questions. The 11th is the most important, and the way you answer the 11th will determine your future. And what I did, it’s a little booklet with these 11th questions in, and we equip believers to share those 11 questions with friends. Now what happened was, this is back in 2007, I equipped 10,000 believers to do this test with seven people over the course of one month. So we evangelized 70,000 people in one month and we baptized at the end of it, 3000 on a day. So that was the beginning of this.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:29):
That’s like the day of Pentecost, 3000 people getting saved in one day.
Giles Stevens (18:33):
Well, we’ve gone beyond that. I then launched more recently another little booklet called Seven Good Things that maybe you Don’t know, same kind of idea. Because remember what I’m doing is I’m helping believers witness to their friends, to their neighbors, to their colleagues. So it’s not me doing the big preach. I mean, I do do the crusades and things, but this is getting the body to do it.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:55):
So let’s talk about the 11th question. What are some of those questions that people are trained to ask?
Giles Stevens (19:00):
You have to buy the
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:00):
Book to find out now is it on Amazon? Yeah, it’s on Amazon. We’ll put a link on the podcast so people can find the book The 11th question. But tell me some of the questions. No, I won’t.
Giles Stevens (19:12):
I
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:13):
Really won’t. The thing is,
Giles Stevens (19:15):
Like I say,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:15):
Because otherwise it
Giles Stevens (19:16):
Takes the kind of thunder out of it.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:18):
I mean, I’ve got a book, but I only got three questions in my book. You’re much more complex money. I just get them there much quicker. I’ll tell you some
Giles Stevens (19:25):
About my last one called The Seven Good Things. And that’s been really effective, which we launched just before the pandemic. And interestingly, when the quarantine came for us evangelists, most of us turned like tigers in a cage. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We love being out there doing crusades. You can’t have big gatherings. And I just was praying about, I just thought, Lord, what do we do? I just refuse to let not just kind of regulations shut me down, but also that kind of spirit of fear that was in the air, that everybody
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:56):
Was afraid
Giles Stevens (19:57):
That they were going to die and so forth. And I felt that classic story of David and Goliath. Saul ran from the Giant, but David ran at The Giant and I just thought, I’ve got to run at this thing. I’ve got to do something sort of bold and courageous at a time like this. And so I created a network on WhatsApp and for a hundred days I challenged this big network, thousands of young people to share their faith with one person every day for a hundred days. And I gave them different things to do. But one of the things was this booklet called Seven Good Things that Maybe You don’t know. And they would share these messages. And so some of those things, I’ll tell you those no matter who you are, you are much loved another one. No matter what you’ve done, there’s forgiveness available. I’m a real good news preach. I believe that Jesus Christ came as a friend of sinners to tell them the good news that their sins had been forgiven through his blood and by the
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:56):
Cross. And so over the course of those a hundred days, what were some of the miracles that you saw? Well,
Giles Stevens (21:01):
I mean the biggest miracle as we evangelists will say, is the miracle of salvation. And so actually at the end, it was in October, beginning of October during the pandemic, we baptized 10,000 people in a day.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:12):
Wow, that’s amazing.
Giles Stevens (21:14):
And that was in swimming pools and lakes and rivers and seas. Anywhere there was water because we couldn’t gather them together. We had this online meeting through YouTube and so forth, and all the different churches and places, the cities that were holding these events were baptizing. So we ran at the Giant.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:32):
Wow, what a miracle. Let’s talk about the spiritual atmosphere in Brazil. What do you see God doing in the nation of Brazil?
Giles Stevens (21:41):
Yeah, I mean we really have to talk about that because again, the tendency when we think about church growth and winning souls is to immediately go to strategy. But I think it was moody or one of these guys said, it’s not so much how you present the gospel, just make sure you present it hot. It’s got to be anointed, it’s got to be full of fire and life. And really, if you’re full of fire and life, it doesn’t really matter what sort of strategy you use. I mean, I teach young people these days. I say, look, be filled with the Holy Spirit and then do whatever you like because if you’re filled with the Holy Spirit, life is going to flow through you. So we work, how can I say? We’re very conscious, I suppose, as church leaders of creating spiritual atmosphere, culture, a revival culture.
(22:30):
And so I almost want to talk in tongues. So difficult to put into words this, but you’ve got to have that atmosphere where people are just going after God, where the presence of God is liberated and manifesting the whole time, and a fire will naturally go out unless it’s fed. And so we see that as well. It’s very easy for a move of God to stop very easy unless you make a personal decision. I think this is one of the roles of a church leader. You make a decision that your meetings, your church, whatever you do is you don’t accept anything but a manifestation of the presence of God. Whether it’s in a prayer meeting, a Sunday church, a crusade, an encounter weekend. We are going to pray to have that presence. We’re going to preach. Until we get that presence, it just becomes our life source. We need the living water. Because of that, there’s life manifesting. And of course growth comes because of life. Most people go after growth. I always say, no, no, go after the spiritual atmosphere and growth will be the result.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (23:37):
Wow. I know you’re a very proud father. Your son is at Oral Roberts University right now. My friend Rubens Konya took him over to Ethiopia for a crusade. And so God doesn’t just call individuals, he calls families. Talk to me about balancing family life and ministry life.
Giles Stevens (24:00):
Well, yeah, I mean that’s really interesting. Again, I’m really enjoying your questions, Daniel. We are a missionary family. I’ve got four children. Titus is the oldest, so 21, 19, 18, and 15 little girl at 15. And so let me say it like this. Sometimes you hear Christians say, God, first, family second, ministry third or those kinds of things. But I’ve never seen it like that. For me, it’s all one thing. So it’s not just about Daddy Giles being the minister and everybody else following me. No, we’re a ministry family, we’re a family of priests. We are all in this together. And so also for us, church isn’t a building, church is a body of Christ. And so we’re just as much in church at home as a family as we are if we’re in a pulpit somewhere. And I think that atmosphere and that way of life has just meant that what the gift and the call of God on my life has just been naturally spontaneously shared with the children.
(25:03):
And so they are all involved in the ministry with me. I mean, I was listening to a message that Titus preached the other day, and I had to post it on a pastor’s group. I just had to, on a WhatsApp group that I’m part of, I said, just listen to this coming from a 20 year old boy. Because what he preaches in this message, I think is wiser and more anointed than most ministers I’m hearing who’ve been in the ministry for years. And I don’t say that as a proud father. I’m just trying to say that when you’re brought up in revival and it’s just in you from the get-go, then it just sort of gushes out, doesn’t it? And so it’s just been a joy. Obviously, they’ve all got slightly different and giftings and so forth, but all of them are just full of the Holy Ghost. That’s great.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (25:52):
That’s awesome. What advice would you give to a young evangelist who really wants to be used by God?
Giles Stevens (26:00):
Well, yeah, really good question. Again, boy, you’ve done this before, haven’t you?
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (26:06):
You’re my 290th interview on evangelism. Fine. Yeah. Have I got anything new to say? No, it’s good. I mean, it’s so neat seeing how God uses different people, different personalities. There’s so many different methods of evangelism, but God is so wonderful. He uses all of us. Yeah, yeah. I mean
Giles Stevens (26:25):
Advice to a young evangelist is if it burns in your heart, preach it. I started out pretty shortly after I got saved. I remember reading the scripture that Saul, who became the Apostle Paul, he preached Christ immediately. The scripture says in the synagogues immediately after his conversion. So he didn’t hang around to start sharing about Christ. And I think when you’re faithful with the little, God will give you much. And so you can see how Paul’s revelation just grows and grows and grows. He was constantly giving out what he’d received. So I think there’s a principle there. If you’ve been anointed, to be honest, if you’ve got saved, start talking about it, start testifying. At least that’s what we’re empowered to do by the Holy Spirit. But I think really, if you’ve got a call to the full-time ministry and you dream of the multitude, so to speak, I think probably the best thing you can do is something rather like Elijah did with Elijah, serve a man of God, a more experienced evangelist.
(27:25):
Because there’s a certain amount you’re going to learn in the classroom, and obviously you’re going to learn through your own relationship with the Lord principally and the study of the scripture. But so much is transferred in that discipleship process when you’re actually under the authority and you’re serving a man of God who’s already doing it. There’s just lessons there that you wouldn’t get anywhere else. And I again like to teach on that particular story in the Old Testament that scripture gives detail and it says that Elisha, he poured water on the hands of Elijah. And I read that and I thought, that’s really strange that it would say that, but it’s clear that the detail is in the scripture, I think, to show us that if he was doing the menial tasks of just even helping Elijah Elijah wash his hands before dinner, that really meant that he was disposed to serve his master in any possible way that he could be helpful.
(28:21):
Remembering that, of course, Elisha was a rich young farmer, and so he was the rich young ruler, let’s say, who gave up everything unlike the rich young ruler who Christ called and went away. So he served this rather strange prophet. He saw the anointing of God upon him. So if you’re a young guy, then you kind of need to let go of sometimes of your natural world and your natural relationships and get around somebody who’s really anointed, but serve them in practical and menial ways. And you see, this is the glory of this revelation is that as Elijah poured water on the hands of Elijah, what he didn’t realize perhaps at the time was that Elijah was pouring spiritual water upon the head of
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (29:08):
Elijah. I love that story. And then one of the most tragic stories in the Bible is the next one of Gaze who was called by God, I think, to be the next prophet of Israel, but failed his test, and he was serving Elisha, but then for a little bit of money in a few sets of clothes, he gave up his anointing in his bad trade dollars because he didn’t know that being a servant is just a stepping to the destiny that God has for you.
Giles Stevens (29:43):
Yeah. Sold himself out. Oh, dear.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (29:46):
Tragic. I’m going to put a link to your book on the podcast, but do you have a website, a way that people can connect with you?
Giles Stevens (29:59):
Yeah. The ministry that I run, the evangelistic ministry I run is called The Great Mission. Put a.org on the end of that, and you’ll find us or Giles Stevens, old English name, G i l e s, Giles Stevens with a v.com. You can find me there and you’ll find materials. Like I said, my heart is very much to equip and empower others. I’ve often said, what’s best? One guy speaking to a thousand or a thousand preachers speaking to their multitude. So I’m very much about helping not just teach, but giving other young evangelists and teachers and preachers and pastors sermons to preach and strategies to use so that you can be fruitful in your own life.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (30:42):
My passion. Well, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast. I appreciate
Giles Stevens (30:46):
It. Daniel, it’s a joy. Thank you for receiving Titus when he’s been to help you as well and your crusades, and I
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (30:52):
Hope we can, he’s a blessing. Hope
Giles Stevens (30:53):
We can do more together.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (30:54):
Thank
Giles Stevens (30:54):
You. Bless you.
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Buddy Bell | How to Build the Helps Ministry in Your Church
Buddy Bell loves being the “Pastor’s Friend.” He is the world’s foremost expert on helping churches to build their ministry of helps. His passion is to activate the body of Christ to serve. If you need help training your ushers, greeters, or your nursery workers, Buddy Bell is the minister to call.
Learn more about Buddy Bell’s Ministry: https://mohi.org/
Buy Buddy Bell’s Book on the Ministry of Helps:
Transcript:
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Dr. Buddy Bell loves being the pastor’s friend. He is the world’s foremost expert on helping churches to build their ministry, of helps. His passion is to activate the body of Christ to serve. If you need help training your ushers, your greeters, or your nursery workers, Buddy Bell is the minister to call.
Evangelism Podcast Host (00:39):
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 (01:04):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King, and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. And today I have a great friend with me, Dr. Buddy Bell. Thank you so much for joining me on the Evangelism Podcast.
Buddy Bell (01:19):
Good to be here, Daniel.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:20):
Well, you and I have been friends for quite a while now. And the thing that I love about your ministry is that you love helping churches help people. Amen. And building the helps ministry. So tell me, how did you get started in helping churches build their helps ministry?
Buddy Bell (01:42):
Well, I think the big thing was realizing that I was in the ministry of helps. You know, my wife and I were involved in church and, and back then, no one had ever heard of the Ministry of Helps. And we were you know, people would say we were strange, we were weird, we were different. They told us, you know, God broke the mold when he made us. And I remember one day in church on Sunday morning, my pastor at that time opened up the first Corinthians chapter 12 verse 28. And he began to read it. It says, in God has set some in the church. And I thought, well, you know, that’s where I want to be. I want to be in church. I just don’t want to go to church. And it goes on. It says, first apostles, secondary prophets.
(02:31):
Thirdly, teachers after that miracles, then gifts of healings. And then he said, helps. And he stopped. And for 60 seconds, he expounded on the ministry of helps. And I sat there in church with tears in my eyes, and I said to myself, you know, buddy, you’re not weird. You’re not strange. You’re not different. And God didn’t break the mold when he made you, but the mold is still in the Bible. And I found my place that day in church. I was in the ministry of helps. And and so that began to, you know, develop on the inside of me. I be begin to s you know, seek more information on the ministry of helps. And because, you know, like one Mr said to me, you know, people want to see their place in the Bible. You know, am I on the team or am I just sitting in the grandstand watching the game?
(03:33):
People want to be in the game. You know, am I really important? You know, my, my greatest reward, I guess traveling and teaching on the ministry of helps is, and I’ll never forget her, this nursery worker walked up to me and she had tears running down her cheeks. And she, she said, you know, brother Bell, I really didn’t thank God, knew I was back there in their nursery. And I’ll never forget her. And, you know, and, and people think that, well, you know, I, I just work in the nursery, or I’m just an usher, or I’m just a, a greeter, or I, I just do what Pastor once done. And they don’t realize how valuable and how important they are. I mean, if it wasn’t important, then why did God, that created the heavens in the Earth set into the church helps. You know, there, there’s a rumor going around the world today that, that Buddy Bell made up this ministry of helps.
(04:32):
I didn’t make it up. I read my Bible, you know, and I, and I see I have a part in the body of Christ. I’m valuable. I’m important, you know the definition. Now, if I get preaching, we’re gonna take an offering <laugh>. Okay? But the definition for the ministry of helps is the Greek definition. It’s as one of the administrations in the local church by way of rendering assistance, or especially of help minister to the weak and the needy. So if you’re rendering assistance in any way in the church, if you’re giving help to the weak and the needy, you’re operating in this supernatural ministry. The ministry of helps. Now, listen to me, it’s a ministry as just as valid, just as anointed as if God had asked you to be a prophet. I think I heard an amen out there. Amen. Maybe a couple amens out there.
(05:25):
Amen. Why? Because God is not a respecter. We’re in this thing together. You know, I thank God for prophets, but also thank God for nursing workers and ushers and greeters. You know, I’ve <laugh>. I’ve had people, when I get done ministering on helps will take me off to the side. I don’t know how many times this happened. And they say, now, brother, buddy, I want to ask you a question, but I want you to be honest with me. Like I’ve been lying to ’em the whole time. You know? And they, but I want you to be honest. Nobody’s around, you know, but you’re really not that excited about nursery workers, are you? I say, excuse me, I’m gonna back up. The wrath of God is coming in here. You know? And, and I see it on people’s faces when I’m teaching on the ministry of helps. You know, do, do, do you really believe that brother buddy? Well, let, let me help you out. When I look at a nursery worker, I don’t see a nursery worker. I see Jesus. When I look at an usher, I don’t see an usher. I see Jesus. When I look at a prophet, I don’t see a prophet. I see Jesus. And that’s why I can be excited about every member and every part of the body. Cause I’m excited about Jesus. Amen. All right.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:41):
Amen. Amen. Let you do something. Well, I think your perspective is so valuable, cuz sometimes when people think about being in ministry, the picture that comes to mind is the fivefold ministry gifts. You got the apostle, the prophet, the evangelist, the pastor, the teacher, and they envision a platform ministry where someone’s up on the platform. And, and a lot of people are actually scared to do public speaking or get on a platform. They, so they say to themselves, oh, I could never be in ministry. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But what you’re saying is that you can totally be in ministry by finding a place to serve in the house of God. Amen. And by helping out with what needs to be done, because the pastor is not the only one called to serve the Lord. Every single believer can find a place to help in the body of Christ. Amen. Would you say that’s
Buddy Bell (07:35):
True? Daniel? You used the word just a moment ago that I don’t use. Okay. And because it’s a word that causes division within the body, and that word is fivefold. I don’t believe in the fivefold. Okay. You can’t find it in the Bible, that word. You know? And so I tell people, I’m in the sevenfold now I’ve got you on that one. Cause seven is God’s number and what’s the other two helps in governments. But then that don’t leave anybody out. Okay. And so, I, I I don’t use that word fivefold. Okay. And because when you said it, you know, there was a division there, you had a group that was up on the platform, and then the rest of of us over here, you know, we all want, we’re all, we’re all in this together, you know? And so you know, I, I just don’t use that word, <laugh>.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:29):
All right. Well, I will amend my vocabulary. Yeah. And, and I actually agree with you. I, I think helps is a, an extremely valuable ministry in the church. All right? So let’s say you, you go into a church, right? And you’re, you’re helping their, helps ministry, challenging people to serve the Lord with excellence. I’ve heard you talk some about King Solomon and the excellence that his helpers serve the Lord with. Talk. Talk to us a little bit about that.
Buddy Bell (09:00):
Yeah. When the Queen of Sheba and from Ethiopia visited her, him, you know I point out the things that she noticed, okay? And you know, a lot of, a lot of times we don’t realize when people walk into the church that they see things and they’re moved by what they see. Okay? She was moved by what she saw. She saw the food the, the, the meat on the table. She saw her, the building. She saw the ministers and their apparel, the cup bears and their apparel, the way he carried himself in, up into the house with the Lord. You know, 85% of communication is done through body expression. You know, you ever had anybody ask you, Hey, what’s wrong? And they go, well nothing. Well, you need to tell your face cuz your face is telling everybody that there’s something wrong. You know? And so, you know, I, I talk about ushers, that they affect people’s giving by the way. They, they come down the aisle with the buckets. You know some of ’em look like they’re in a funeral. You know,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:08):
If an usher is me, no one wants to put anything in that offering bucket right here. Throw, put your, put your offering in there.
Buddy Bell (10:15):
Right? And, and, and some do that, some think, well, maybe we shouldn’t be taking an offering right now. They don’t have to say nothing. You can see it, you know, when a pastor has to coax them to come down for the offering, okay, we’re, we’re gonna have an offering here. Okay. You know, God loves a cheerful giver, a hilarious giver. Gonna need some ushers ushers Fred come on down, Fred. Come on, Fred. You, you can help out. You know? And, and, and like, we’re trying to coax them in, into giving, okay? When they ought to come down for smile on their face. Well, Daniel, how come they don’t smile when they come down? I’ll tell you why. They’re not givers themselves. I wouldn’t have a non-GI person as an usher in the church. A actually, I wouldn’t have a non tither as an usher.
(11:04):
What, what, what an honor to stand up and say, now we’re getting ready to take your offering. And these people that are serving as ushers, they’re all tithers in the church. Wow. You know, had, have one usher said to me, well, you better not look at the, at the giving records, you know, if I’m a Tyler or not. I said, listen, sheep are not dumb. I said, we don’t need to look at the records to see if you’re a ti or not. We have our ways of finding out, you know, when we’re down at, I help afterwards, you know, we’ll bring up tithing and notice how quick you change the subject.
(11:40):
So we, we, we don’t need to look at the books. We’re all in this together. We all have a part. We’re all, we’re all valuable. We’re all important. The ushers, the greeters. I’ve seen people get at the door when they walked in. I saw this one gentleman when the greeter reached out to grab him, and he fell on his knees. He said, my God, I need Jesus. Well, doesn’t he know he is gotta wait till the end of the service? That’s when we give the altar calls at the end. You know, first church I was involved in our attitude in the ministry of helps us. We’re going to get everybody saved. Everybody healed. Everybody set free before church. And if we miss any em, pastor can pick, pick him up at the end. But in a lot of churches is well, they see how many pastor can pick up at the end.
(12:29):
You know, where we, you know, were, we were, we were evangelizing at the door and the nursery, you know I tell a story, you’re gonna get me going on the stories here. A mother came to the nursery and worker and said I just wanna know something. What did you do to my baby last Sunday? I, I, I, when I picked up my, my baby and I took her home and I put her in the, in her bed, she immediately went to sleep. She never goes immediately to sleep. What did you do to my baby? And so the, the nursery worker had an opportunity to share Jesus with her. She went out front at, in the service, and at the end, she raised her hand and got saved. Now, was it the sermon or was it the, the nursery worker that realized, this is not a babysitting service back here, but this is a ministry. And she ministered to that mother that morning, and that’s why she got saved.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:31):
Yeah. When you think about a new visitor who comes to a church, Uhhuh, <affirmative>, he drives into the parking lot. He sees the parking lot attendant. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> helps him park his car. Then he walks in the front door, there’s a greeter there. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then an usher helps the person to find a seat. Maybe if they have kids, they go drop their kids off at the nursery or mm-hmm. <Affirmative> in the children’s ministry. So they’re looking around trying to figure out where they’re supposed to take their kids. Yeah. Finally, they, they get in, they’re the, the usher helps them find a seat. And people are there and, and say, Hey, that’s my seat. I sat in that pew every Sunday. What are you doing sitting in my seat? Right? But, and then somebody greets the crowd, and then you have the praise and worship team get up, and then maybe someone receives the offering. And you can be 30, 40 minutes into the church service before they ever see the pastor, hear the pastor. And probably by that time, they’ve already decided whether they like the church or not, whether that would be the type of church that they would want to be a member at.
Buddy Bell (14:35):
Right. The experts say that first time visitors will determine within the first six to seven minutes if they’re going to return or not to that church. And who do they meet in the first six or seven minutes?
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:49):
Usually not the pastor. He’s back there in the, the green room on his face before God praying, probably. Yeah.
Buddy Bell (14:56):
They meet, they meet the parking lot attendant who park it over here. Stay between the lines. Grab your kids’ hands. We need speed bumps out here, nursery, I don’t know where the nursery’s at. Find somebody’s got a baby and follow them. And then they walk in and they see the greeter, you know shake hands with the people in front of ’em there and hug them. But when they walk to the door, the, the greeter just happened to turn and not shake their hand or greet them, you know? And then they go on down the hall and they go to the nursery after they find it, you know? And the nursery worker looks at him and said, oh, no. And not another one. Man, I need some help back here. I hope you brought some clean diapers. I mean, you know, some people bring their babies in here and they don’t bring extra diapers, and they expect us to supply them extra diapers.
(15:48):
And then they, they leave there and they, they go down to the, the youth room. And the youth leader comes out and said, oh, you’re new. Well let me explain some things that go on down here in the youth ministry. We cast out devils down here, and if your little boy’s got a devil, we will cast it outta him. And then they come on down the hall and, and they walk into the sanctuary. Now I’m talking about typical churches. Okay? And they walk in the sanctuary, and the ushers and the elders are holding up the back wall, you know, for six days. And six nights. The back wall stands by itself, but it becomes a seventh day. It takes all the ushers and all the elders to hold up the back wall, you know? And, and they just say, well, just, just find a chair somewhere, you know? And so they go, they, they sit down, you know? And and then they watch the, the worship team and the, and the musicians. They’re up there arguing which song they’re gonna sing. Now, would you go back to that church? Would you go back to that church?
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (16:52):
Not that church. No. Actually, I probably preached to that church one time.
Buddy Bell (16:56):
<Laugh> <laugh>. I’ve been in a lot of those churches. You know, I, I have, I’ve been in a lot of those churches. But what if, what if they walk in or drive into the parking lot and, and the parking lot attendance out there. He’s got a smile on his face. He welcomes them to the church, you know, and it says, Hey, you know, the door is right over here. You know, the greeters are at there. They’ll help you if you got questions. They’ll show you where all, where your children need to go. And the greeters there got a smile on their face, you know, they find out they’re new. See, greeters should be walking information booths, you know. So they take that family and they take them down to the nursery. They introduce ’em to the nursery worker and let ’em know that they’re new here.
(17:41):
You know? Then they take ’em down to Children’s Church and they let ’em know that they’re new. And then they take ’em up to the sanctuary and tell the usher, these, these people are new. Well, knowing that the usher’s gonna make sure that they have a real good seed up front so they can see everything, hear everything that God wants for them to hear, you know, tells ’em more about the church, tells ’em to get excited. You know, our pastor’s been into Word, he is been teaching this series. I mean, it’s really, the people are really excited. Now, you tell me you’re gonna come back to that church.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:14):
That sounds like a great church to go to.
Buddy Bell (18:16):
And there are churches like that. Yeah. There are churches that like that. And and so
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:21):
And so when you go into a church and they’ve asked you to, to help their ushers, help their greeters, what are some of the things that you say to them to, to help them to be the very best ushers and greeters and ministers that they can be?
Buddy Bell (18:40):
Well, the most important thing, again, is to show them and teach them about the Ministry of Alps. Once, you know, it’s hard to teach someone something if they don’t realize how important it is. And they are okay. And so, you know, the, the f the very first thing is to teach them, you know, the importance of the ministry of helps. But also, you know, I’m not just there for people that are serving, but the leaders need to understand it. Okay? People never go beyond their leadership. However, the leadership is in the church. That’s the way the people will be. You know, a a lot of times it, it’s not the people’s fault, you know? Pastor said, well, I can’t get anybody involved. Well, my first question is let me talk to your leaders. Do they believe in the ministry of Hels?
(19:42):
You know, do they realize how valuable the people are? You know, that their ministry is a, is a supernatural ministry. Do they understand that? You know, and so, I, I always say, let me talk to your leaders. You know, let me, let me minister to your leaders and show to them how valuable the ministry of helps is, and that it’s an important ministry. You know? And they need to get that across, you know, <laugh>, you I had a a minister years ago when I was young. And he asked me, he said, brother Bell, you ever listen to yourself preach? I said, oh, no, no, no, no. He says, you need to listen to yourself. Preach. There’s two attitudes in preaching. There’s a want to attitude and a half, two attitude. He says, we all know we have to. He said, but Brother Bell, what’s missing in people is the want to, you know, we tell ’em, you have to be saved.
(20:44):
You have to, you know receive Holy Spirit. You, you have to, you have to. You have to. When we ought be saying to, no, you want to get saved, you want Jesus in your life. You want to serve God, not you have to serve God. You know? No. You want to serve God. You want to be every, everything that God wants you to be. You wanna do all that God wants you to do. You know? And, and that’s what’s missing before a lot of people. And so, you know, that’s one of my main goals when I go into a church, you know, is put the want to back into people because they, all they’ve been hearing is the have to, you know, when I go to a church, I guarantee a pastor. I guarantee him that 10% of the people that are in front of me will step out and want to serve God that have never served God before.
(21:39):
I guarantee it. It happens everywhere I go. If there’s a thousand people in front of me, over a hundred will come forward. That’ll want to serve God. People want to serve God. And you’ll never talk me out of this. Every Christian, every Christian, deep in their heart desires to serve God, but they’ve never been told, you know, that cleaning the church being a greer, being an usher, going on an evangelism trip with Daniel King Ministries, you know, and carrying your bags, you know, helping to set up the, the music the sound, you know, at, at your meetings. It’s a ministry. It’s a ministry. It’s just as important as you standing up there and ministering the gospel of those people. Because if you had to go and do everything that you just did, that happened in your trip in Ethiopia, y you wouldn’t have done it.
(22:37):
You, you, you couldn’t have done it. Okay? But you had a lot of people around you, a lot of people doing other things, you know, and they weren’t in front of the people. Okay? But they’re valuable, and they’re important, you know, every member, every part of the body, you know, no matter where it is, okay? You know <laugh>, if I was to reach inside of you right now and pull out a part of you and showed it to you, you know how you would react? You would react. Like some people, some people react when they see people that walk in the church. Oh, no, what’s that? You know, where did that come from? But if I told you it came from you, what would be your first response?
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (23:22):
I need that.
Buddy Bell (23:23):
Right. Put it back. Put that
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (23:25):
Liver back. I need that
Buddy Bell (23:26):
Liver. Yeah. You didn’t ask. Yeah, but you didn’t ask me what it was. You didn’t ask me how important it was. You didn’t ask me how it helped other parts of my body. But when you found out that it was part of you, all you knew was it must be there for a reason. It must be there for a purpose. And that’s the way everybody is in church. You’re there for a reason. You’re there for a purpose. Maybe I don’t understand you. Okay? I don’t realize right now how important you are, but you’re part of the body, and I need every part of the body.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:03):
Yeah. When we were just in Ethiopia, one of the most important team members we had was, was someone who was just taking pictures. Yeah. Because without those pictures, you can’t tell the story back home of everything that, that God did. And so I had a, a wonderful man of God who came and, and he was just servant taking pictures and mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you’d never taken pictures before. But I put a camera in his hands, I think God can use you. And he, he captured some good ones. And then thinking about Ethiopia, they traced their spiritual heritage back to the Queen of Sheba. Yeah. And so, the, the fact that to this day in Ethiopia, there are people that credit their spiritual heritage all the way back to the impression that the Queen of Sheba had with the, the people that attended to King Solomon. It shows the importance of the ministry of helps.
Buddy Bell (24:55):
Yeah. When I was my teaching that I do called winning first time visitors, and I talk about the Queen of Sheba and everything that she noticed, you know, and while she was there, there was a, a young lady that was sitting on the front row. I was in San Francisco, and she was really into this teaching. I, she was saying, Hey man, she was rocking back and forth in her chair, you know? And so when I got done, she walks up to me and she says, brother, buddy I don’t know if you noticed this, but I was really into your teaching day. I said, well, yeah, it was pretty noticeable. She says, you know why I said, no, why I am from Ethiopia. And the Queen Shiba was responsible for bringing the teachings of God to our country. And that’s why I got all excited about that. Amen. But I, I, I teach that. I’ll go into a church to show everybody just how valuable and how important they are. Let me let’s see if we can find it here somewhere in my Bible.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (26:01):
I like your Bible. It’s full of marks all over the place. You know what they say? Dirty Bible, clean living, clean bible, dirty living. Yeah.
Buddy Bell (26:09):
But I, I wanna, it’s falling apart. And I, I’m wanting to go get a new Bible and but it’s all marked up, you know? And you know, so I don’t know what I’m gonna do. But you know, one of the things that you know, I tell people this now. I, I say this, curiosity is the number one evangelism tool in a local church. People think that they’ve got, you know, people say, well, you know, I, I, I can’t get people to come to church. Well, you just told me something. You don’t talk about your church outside of the four walls. I said, you know, you don’t have to preach the people to get ’em to come to church. You don’t have to quote scripture. You don’t have to act spiritual around. Just talk about your church. Talk about what’s going on, what’s God is doing in your church.
(27:05):
Cause sooner or later, their curiosity is going to peak. Okay? And, and what’s go, what happens to ’em is the same thing that happened to the Queen of Sheba. She says, how be it, I believe not their words, until I came and my eyes had seen it. And behold, the one half of the greatness of thou wisdom was not told me for the exceeded the fame that I had heard. So somebody was talking outside of the four walls, you know, and she’ll, she, she said, well, I just got to go see it with my own eyes. But there was something else that she experienced, okay, while she was there that she would not have experienced if she hadn’t went. She says, happy are thy. Amen. And happy are these I servants with stand continually before the they hear thy wisdom. The spirit of the place touched her, even though she saw all these different things.
(28:04):
Okay? It was the spirit that was, everybody was happy. And then she said, blessed be the Lord I God. Now I tell people she got saved. Now I know nobody can get saved in the Old Testament, but it’s a type in the shadow of the new. She said, there is a God. Now, I don’t believe an unsafe person should have to go to church five or six times to realize that there is a God. They can realize it in their very first visit, just like the Queen of Sheah. And then she makes his statement, this confession. She says, blessed be the Lord thy God, which delight indeed set the only throne to be king for the Lord thy God, because I God, love Israel to establish them forever. Therefore, many king over them do judgment and justice. What a statement. From a first time visitor, there is a God, you’re a man of God. This is the house of God. God’s hand is upon you in her first visit. And I’ve seen that happen with other people that, that it just, when they walked in and just realized there is a God. But what would happen if they had to go through that parking lot, attendant that was grumpy, the greeter that didn’t greet them, the nursery worker that told ’em off the, the usher looked like, looked at him like, what are you doing here?
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (29:31):
You think the usher that didn’t us.
Buddy Bell (29:33):
Yeah. Right. You’d think they, that, that there is a God in Israel. And then she writes a check for 130 million and dropped it in the bucket. I tell churches, you need money. There’s no telling how many Queen of Shebas have walked into your church, could have wrote you one check and paid for everything. But they thought, you know, it’s kinda like this. I asked people that, that invest in stock. Do you just ran randomly pick a stock and invest in it? No. You, you, you find out about that company and if you’re gonna invest a lot of money, you go and you visit that, that company, you want to meet the employees. You want to meet the, the, the up in the office area, you know, the executives. Cause you’re getting ready to put a bunch of money into that. Well, it’s the same way in church. Some people wonder why people aren’t giving well. Cause they, this don’t look like a good company to invest in.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (30:38):
Yeah.
Buddy Bell (30:39):
Now you got me preaching
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (30:40):
<Laugh>. Well, you’ve written some great books on the ministry of helps on ushering, on greeting, just different ways to, to help churches with the, the helps ministry. And on your website you also have some online courses that can help train churches in these different areas. They could sit all their ushers and greeters down and they could go through some of your material. And you’ve also traveled and spoken at over 3000 churches, which is an amazing statistic. Yeah. Helping a lot of different churches from every different type of denomination. So if someone wants to find out more about you, they want to buy one of your books, go through one of your courses, or maybe even invite you to come to their church. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, what is your website that they can find out more information about you? Well,
Buddy Bell (31:34):
They can number one, they could type in Buddy Bell in any search engine. Okay. It’ll come up.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (31:41):
You know, I did that earlier. Some baseball player came
Buddy Bell (31:44):
Up. Yeah. Me and the baseball player. Yeah. People always ask me, are you Buddy Bell, the baseball player? I said, no, gimme a dollar. You know, I tell everybody, you gotta gimme a dollar. If you think I’m Buddy Bell, the baseball player, and he has four daughters and I have four daughters. You know, I, I wonder if people ever ask him, are you Buddy Bell, the preacher? You know, but
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (32:02):
Yeah. So type in Buddy Bell, the ministry of Helps and you’ll come
Buddy Bell (32:07):
Right up. Yeah, you can do that. Yeah. Or go to mo i.org that stands for Ministry of Helps international.org or Buddy Bell Ministries. Okay. And you know, I went 21 years straight every weekend for 21 years. Wow. And
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (32:26):
That’s
Buddy Bell (32:27):
Amazing. I’ve never written a letter. I’ve never called a pastor cold Turkey and asked for a meeting. Never. And they still keep coming in. You know, Fred Price said something one time at, at Bible’s. He says, you know, if you’ve got a word from God, God will open the doors. I remember sitting there thinking, oh, come on now, how they gonna know unless I hound them on the phone? You know? And, but it’s true. I’ve got the, one of the littlest words in the Bible, and it’s opened over 3000 doors around the world. We’ve been in 29 countries. And right now I met a gentleman, oh, about 30 years ago the International School of Ministry, Baron Gland. Today, every year he was telling me between two to 300,000 people around the world will hear my teachings on the ministry of helps in 150 nations in over 80 different languages.
(33:28):
They hear the teaching on the ministry of helps. And and so I remember before the internet, the Lord spoke to me and said, you know, you’re gonna be on the staff of thousands of churches around the world. And I thought, well, you know, that’s gonna take a lot of money to do that. You know, but one day I get a phone call from Baron Gland, and I’ve never met, met him before. He says, I’m in Tulsa, I like to take you to lunch. I thought, Hey, free lunch, I’ll go. And he says, I, I’m setting up these Bible schools in local churches. And he says, I like to use some of your your teachings that was on VHS tapes. And I said, sure. And today it’s in a, they’re in 150 nations around the world. Wow. 80 different languages. And so yeah, we have a book, the books we also have ’em in Spanish we’re working on French coming out because we have 10 teachings that come in, what we call the School of Helps.
(34:41):
School helps, has 10 teachings 10 30 minute teachings with notes and quizzes and discussion questions. That’s in English. It’s in Spanish. And just a few weeks ago they converted it into French. Wow. And and so get ahold of us. Yes, I I love traveling. I love coming in the churches. Doesn’t matter what size they are. I’ve been in churches that run 30,000 and I just came from a church that had 15 on Sunday morning. Doesn’t matter. You know I love it, Daniel. I love what I do. I love it. And I love to see people light up and realize, you know, if Jesus comes back and I’m in the nursery, he’s gonna let me in. If Jesus comes back and I’m an, I’m out in the parking lot, he’s gonna let me in. Cause we’re all valuable.
(35:42):
We’re all important. And, and I can’t leave without doing this. So let me give you one more definition. This was, this is becoming pretty famous around the world. It’s by a man by the name of God Bay. He was a Pentecostal Holiness preacher back in the 18 hundreds. And he wrote a commentary on the New Testament. And this is how he defines the ministry of helps. He starts off with the word o h o. It’s not, oh, that’s how simp some people respond to rendering assistance. But he’s excited. He starts off, oh, the infinite value of the humble gospel helpers. Thousands of people have no gifts as leaders are number one helpers. How Grand revival work moves along When, when Red the heart platoons a fire baptize helpers crowd around God’s heroic leaders of the embattled hosts.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (36:41):
Woo. That’s powerful
Buddy Bell (36:43):
<Laugh>. What a definition for a dirty diaper changer. Amen. <laugh>, what a definition for an usher. What a definition for those who serve in our outreaches outside of the church for those who clean the church. Why? Cause we’re in this together.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (36:59):
Amen. Amen. Well, Dr. Buddy Bell, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast. Ah-Huh. I love your ministry and just love your heart for helping pastors and helping build up the helps ministry in the church. God bless you.
Buddy Bell (37:14):
Amen.
Evangelism Podcast Host (37:15):
Is there evidence for God’s existence? How do we really know Jesus was raised from the dead? Can we trust the Bible? Do miracles happen? Does God care about me as an individual? In Dr. Daniel King’s book, proof God is real. You’ll find the answers to these three vital questions and more Is God there? Does God care? And do I dare to follow him? It is powerful, easy to read book. Daniel provides seven convincing proofs of God’s existence. You’ll learn about the evidence of cause. Design, logic, morality, scripture, miracles, and religious experience with proof God is real. You’ll read about topics like, was Jesus the son of God or just a crazy preacher? If God does exist, is he interested in your life? If God is there, why do bad things happen to good people? Proof God is real. Daniel King shows you, God is there and he cares for you. Plus, how to take a leap of faith and start a relationship with a God who deeply loves you. Order proof God is real today by calling 1-877-431-FOUR 2 7 6 or find the book on Amazon.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (38:18):
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 (39:39):
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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John Albiston | Coaching Churches for Growth
John Albiston is a church growth expert who works with the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. He grew a church from 300 to 1,500 people in a span of five years. The last year he was there he saw seven hundred salvations. Then he was asked to help the one hundred and twenty churches in his district to grow. Today he shares some simple secrets that are guaranteed to lead to church growth.
Learn more about the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada: https://paoc.org/
Connect with John Albiston: https://albiston.com/
Transcript:
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King. I’m excited about telling people about Jesus today. I have a special guest with me, John Albertson. And you are with the Pentecostal Assemblies here in Canada, and you are a church coach. And so I love coaching, I especially love coaching evangelists, but you’re going into churches, helping churches to grow, helping them to think strategically about how to reach their community. So how did you get started doing that?
John Albiston (00:32):
Well, my story was my last church our church grew from 300 to 1500 people in the span of five years. And the last we were there, we saw over 700 salvations. That’s when I got a phone call from the Pentecostal Assemblies just saying, John, would you like to show other churches how to do that? And I was like, yes, I would love to show other churches how to do that. And that’s when we got started. I got started doing that in 2017. And when we started here in our district, we’ve got about 120 churches. We ran the numbers and we found that only 18% of our churches were growing. 82% of our churches were either plateaued or in decline. We’re happy to say that within a couple of years, by 2019, we had doubled the number of growing churches and doubled the number of annual reported salvations.
(01:26):
So we, our churches weren’t growing because we were trying to convince Baptists to come to our church instead. But no, we were genuinely reaching unchurched people in our community. Now Covid hit that threw our numbers right out the window. But now that we’re coming out of C O V and started re getting our, our bearings, it’s looking like we’ve got pretty close to 50% of our churches growing. And by the end of the year, we think we might be able to get 60% of our churches are growing, accomplishing real great commission salvation growth.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:54):
And so what are some of the things that you are helping churches with when you are encouraging them to reach out to their community?
John Albiston (02:05):
Well, one of the first things is just to understand their own purpose as a church and what they need to do in order to grow by reaching lost people. Because if you want your church to grow, what you need to do is you need to reach people in your community, bring them in, introduce them to Jesus, and then have them stay and learn how to follow him. Now, when I have conversations with pastors, like, are you doing that? Are you reaching people, introducing them to Jesus and then teaching them to follow him? The answer is, oddly enough, no. You know, we’ve been trained in Bible school and seminary, how to run services. You know, I was trained on how to be an ec eal preacher. I wasn’t taught how to speak to non-Christians. I wasn’t taught how to disciple non-Christians. You know, when when someone accepts Jesus their savior, what’s the first five things I’m supposed to teach ’em? I don’t know that that was never a class. So organizing our Church of War, actually accomplishing our mission is just something that most of us as pastors were never trained to do. And before we were too eager to blame our professors. Nobody trained those guys how to do that either. So if we want our churches to grow, that’s what we need to focus on doing.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:22):
I think one of the challenges is that everyone who pastors a church has been around churches for a very long time, and so they don’t look through the eyes of a visitor or a first time guest or someone who is seeking spiritual enlightenment, who just wanders into the church. What would you tell a church to help them to make that person feel welcome?
John Albiston (03:52):
Well, I’d tell ’em a few things. One, just the importance of it. As a general rule of thumb, on any given Sunday, 96% of the people in the room are your own people. And it’s so easy and so comfortable just to focus on that. 96%, only 4% of the people in the room are first time visitors. So if I focus on my 96%, I, I know they’re vocabulary, we’re comfortable through vocabulary. When I use churchy vocabulary words, they like it. We all know what
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:23):
The rows of Sharon
John Albiston (04:24):
Is. Oh, that’s right. Like it, it just like home. Feels like home. The problem is 100% of your growth comes from the 4% and just put yourself in in, in their shoes for a second. I mean, it’s a golden rule. Like Jesus teaches us to do this. Say you’re, you know, Larry from across the street you come home from a business trip and your wife is gone. You thought you had a good marriage, but now the house is empty and you realize everything that I’ve believed about the success of my life is falling apart. And all of a sudden God is speaking to them. And if they’re like, you know what? I’m gonna try something crazy. Maybe I can find hope at church. And so I go in my desperation and need for God, I go to the church across the street and what do I hear is a sermon about Calvinism versus Arminianism?
(05:13):
And then I realize, yeah, you know what? It was a really stupid idea to come here. Okay? We we’re not talking to the people who need the gospel the most. We’re not sharing the gospel. Most churches don’t preach the gospel. Yeah, maybe if you’ve been there for a couple years, you’ll pick it up a bit. But we’re just not focusing on our job, on how we reach our community. We’re just focusing on our frozen chosen. And that’s not good for our people either, because quite frankly, they’re gonna be living kind of a weak and limp Christian life. If you’re living the Christian life where I go to a church where people are getting saved all the time, where I can invite my non-Christian friends in and I know they’re gonna have a fantastic time in their encounter. God, that’s very exciting for me. And even if I’m an introvert, it’s easy for me to invite <laugh> somebody, somebody to something I know they’re gonna love. So if I know that you’re a fanatical football fan and I’ve got two tickets to the game, it’s easy for me to invite you cuz I know you’re gonna love it. And when our churches are places where I know when you come, you’re gonna feel welcome. You’re gonna understand what’s gonna go on, and you’re gonna meet Jesus. It’s easy and exciting for me to invite you to that.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:35):
And even to create that culture of people inviting their friends, I, I’m amazed as I travel the churches all over North America, every weekend I, I minister in a different place and I walk into a bunch of churches and there’s no signs showing where the children’s ministry is. There’s no sign saying whether the coffee is free or you’re supposed to throw a dollar in the, the cup there, there’s no sign showing where the bathrooms are. Like you can wander around the church for a long time just trying to find the bathroom. And I’m like, this isn’t friendly for visitors. Like, you’re not even thinking about visitors coming to the church.
John Albiston (07:17):
Oh, absolutely. That, that is a major problem. And it’s, again, we’re focusing on the 96%, we’re ignoring the four. And it, it’s such a tragedy of opportunity. So here’s the math of it. 4% of the people in your church on any given Sunday are first time visitors. Next Sunday it’s a different 4%, and next Sunday it’s a different 4% different 4%. And when you add that up over 52 weeks, you get a 200%. So you take the average attendance of your church, say it’s a hundred, over the next 12 months, you’re gonna have 201st time visitors. What would happen to your church if you kept half of them? You know? But we’re losing them because we’re ignoring them. We’re not putting ourself in their shoes. Yeah. That includes signage
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:06):
Or even know where to park. You come into the parking lot and where’s a visitor supposed to park? Or Absolut? Is there even a parking place for them?
John Albiston (08:13):
Absolutely. And when someone comes in, does anybody talk to me? Does anybody engage? Now a lot of our churches will have greeters, you know, who’ll say, hi, welcome. But I’ve, my local Walmart has greeters who say, hi, welcome. When I walk in, and I’ve been going to Walmart for I think 40 years, and in all those years, you know how many Walmart employees have gotten to know my name? Like Zero. Do you know how many friends I’ve ever made at Walmart? Zero. being friendly, whoopie, doof, we can find friendly anywhere. What we can’t find anywhere is friends. And so we need to actually love and care for those people that God are sending us because they’re already coming to our church. They’re coming in droves, people that God is calling them. And it’s hard for them to get here. Like we need to understand their journey.
(09:07):
I’ve, I’ve heard so many stories of people who would tell me that it took them three or four attempts to come to our church because they drive in, they were parked in the parking stall, white knuckling the steering wheel for 20 minutes before driving away in tears because they were too scared to come in the door. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Okay. We don’t know the journey that they’re going through, and when they come in and we just ignore them and we’re blind to them and we don’t care for them. If you come into my church and nobody cares for you, you don’t feel loved. I can be on the stage standing on my head, juggling fire, talking about the love of God, and you will
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:48):
Not believe I’ve tried that before. I’ve tried to juggle fire
John Albiston (09:51):
<Laugh>. You won’t believe me.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:53):
Yeah.
John Albiston (09:53):
But if you come in here and you feel welcome and you feel loved and you feel part of the family and like, you’re not getting just like a fake Walmart greeting that No, I feel included. I’ve never been in a place like this. I’ve never met people like, here, what is going on here? And then I talk about the love of God. You are gonna believe me because you’ve already experienced it.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:16):
So walk me through the process as you’re coaching a church, what recommendations do you give them for the, for the ushers, for the song service, for the offering time, for the message, for the altar call, for the follow up process. Kinda walk me through what an ideal process would look like for a visitor.
John Albiston (10:40):
So if a church is at that stage that like, hey, they actually wanna reach people, because sometimes I have to deal with stuff like, we don’t care about a lost people <laugh>, so we have to,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:48):
So that’s a theological and a heart issue. That’s
John Albiston (10:50):
Right. So sometimes, you know, when I’m going into coaching church, that’s what we need to do the work. But they’re ought that if they’re at this stage where no, no, we wanna reach our community, what do we do? The fundamental principle is the golden rule. Put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. When I walk in here, do I know what to do when the service starts? Are you speaking in plain English? So just talk about like, choosing lyrics for your songs. There’s a, a song that’s popular in a number of churches called Reckless Love. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it or not, but if you look at the lyrics of that song, 95% of that song’s gonna make sense to anybody in your community. Like, there’s one line about he leaves the 99, okay? They’re not gonna get the reference, but most of that song makes perfect sense. They’re gonna understand what we’re talking about. There’s another song that are, that is popular. Our God is the lion. The lion of Judah. Our God is the lamb. The lamb. Who is slain? Who’s Judah? Well, he’s one of the 12 patriarchs. Why are we singing about him? What’s
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:48):
Patriarch? Well, because
John Albiston (11:50):
The messianic lion goes through the lion of Judah. Why are we talking about lions? Oh, that’s symbolic. It refers to the Davidic kingdom. Who’s kingdom, okay. You see? So David was one of the descendants of Judah. Messianic line not only goes through Judah, but also goes through through David. Now Lamb saying you need not understand the sacrificial system and the Old Testament, how that pre prefigures Christ and Leviticus and the Lan of course, and Nasco logical figure, we’ve seen a book of revelation. Okay? That’s what you need to know for the song to make any sense. Okay? Did we have to make the climb that steep like half the time when people come in to our churches and don’t encounter Christ? It’s not that they rejected what we were saying, they just didn’t even understand what we were saying. It was just confusing. Gobbly good.
(12:28):
Our sermons are no better. And for our churches who actually do attempt to preach the gospel, we’re preaching the gospel in Christianese gobbly book, and they just don’t understand the words that are coming out of our mouth. So the first thing you want your church to have an impact on, people preach and sing with clarity, not to water things down. And we’re not trying to avoid offending people. I mean, we’re not gonna poke people in the eye, but okay, that’s not what we’re focusing on, is inoffensive sermons. We’re focusing on clear sermons that anybody coming in is gonna understand what we’re saying. So when it comes to the gospel, for example, I understand theologically that repentance and faith kind of a big deal when it comes to accepting Christ. But I also know that the people I’m trying to reach have never heard those words and don’t know what they mean.
(13:19):
Now, I know from studying Hebrew that the word repent, that the Hebrew route is make a u-turn. It’s how you give directions. Like go down fourth Street in repent <laugh>. So I will be on the stage walking one direction saying, I’ve been going down my own road. I’ve been the master of my fate captain of my destiny living my life the way I want to. Well, that ends here. Jesus talking about making a U-turn and following him, even when it’s scary, even when I don’t understand, I’m putting my whole life in his hands. Everything that I am, my hopes, my dreams, my sorrows, my shame, you know, my anger, my hurts. I’m putting everything I am in his hands and trusting him to make me to someone new as I follow him in a new life, in a new direction. So I explained both repentance and faith without necessarily using those words.
(14:13):
Okay? That’s a skillset we have to develop because I was raised in a church. Christianese is my mother tongue. I speak English as a second language <laugh>. So are we preaching with clarity? Are we singing with clarity? When you preach, you know, when you, for your own people, when you preach clearly in plain English, guess what your people learn in plain English. Because if I preach in gobbly G your congregation learns it in gobbly G. And then when they go out to the workforce, when they go out to the baseball game, when they go out to anything else, the only thing they know is gobbly go. Why would we be surprised that our people in our congregation are so ineffective at reaching their friends? But if we preach in plain English and explain the gospel in plain English, we’re equipping our people in plain English to reach their friends and neighbors in plain English.
(15:08):
So you wanna make the biggest difference in your congregation in being able to reach newcomers and actually seeing your own people be more effective at evangelism and discipleship. Learn how to speak in plain, ordinary English. It’s a discipline. It’s hard. People don’t know what discernment means. You, if you have to use the word, take 10 seconds, explain it to explain it. Don’t make a casual reference. Hey, just like Joseph, you know, okay, who’s Joseph? Okay, take 10 seconds to explain, give people on-ramps to what you’re talking about. And that is probably gonna make the biggest difference.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:47):
What about the follow up process for that 4%? How do we close the back door so they don’t just come in and leave, but we can retain some of the 4% that are visiting every Sunday? Well, I think
John Albiston (15:59):
The key is gonna be developing relationships of friendship. So sometimes you know, I talk about, you know, we, in order to have someone follow Jesus, they need to make f make friends with us. Because if you read your gospels, Jesus discipled the disciples within the context of relationship. So when someone say they, they raised that hand When I made that gospel call, I’ve already trained my ushers, they’re already at the back. Everybody else’s head is bowed, eyes are close, not my ushers <laugh>. They’re already at the back and they see who raised their hands, and they’ve already been trained to come up and approach them after the service. Introduce ’em. Hey, my name’s Tom, da da da, da, how you doing? Da da da da da. You know, how long have you been coming here? Da Hey, I would really like to introduce you to my pastor.
(16:47):
Is that okay now? Because I saw their hands, like when they’re my ushers, bring somebody to me. I know this is a new believer. Well then I can have a conversation with them. I can give them a new believer’s Bible and say, Hey, you know what? We’ve got this small group program called Alpha, it’s a free meal. Why don’t you come out? It’s a fantastic way to, you know, to get started. But we want to get them in relationship as fast as possible. So follow up is crucial, crucial, crucial. And we want to connect with them as soon as we, we possibly can. We don’t wanna let that get cold. And again, it comes down to the, the whole love of God experience. If they don’t f experience the love of God from us, they’re not gonna believe in the love of God.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:35):
Let’s talk about the, the Canadian context here. Most of the churches that you’re, you’re working with here are in Canada. Is there anything unique to Canada that might be different than say the United States or other? Or are these principles, do they work everywhere?
John Albiston (17:52):
So I’ve used these principles in, in other countries and like, like Canada, the United States are fairly culturally adjacent. So if you’re an American coming to Canada, like the least foreign country you could possibly visit is this one. And vice versa. But I’ve seen this work very effectively in Thailand, which is a completely different culture. And that’s because we’re talking about some basic human principles. People need to be known. People need to experience love, people need to experience acceptance. And none of us feel that way when we’re being ignored. So we wanna be certainly culturally sensitive. So if you’re going to Thailand and you’ve got a habit of touching people’s heads, don’t do that in Thailand. That’s considered very rude. Mind you, seriously, dude, that’s weird here too. <Laugh>, you know, but you know, sometimes our own, we have got
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:49):
Little, let’s bring all the visitors up and I’m gonna pray for you right now.
John Albiston (18:53):
<Laugh>, sometimes in our church we develop weird microcultures. Like I remember my, my last church if you were sick, the only way to heal you was to bring you out to the front of the service in front of everybody. We would hit you in the head to try to make you fall over. And that’s how healing happens. Is there anything in the Bible says we have to do it that way? No. And we kind of realized, you know what? That’s actually kind of weird. And people coming in here are kind of terrified by what we’re doing. Maybe we should find like non terrifying ways of doing things. So there’s ways where we can think about, well, things happen in context. So you look at the Apostle Paul apostle Paul said, I am all things to all people. So by all possible means, some might be saved to the Greeks, unlike a Greek to the Jews unlike a Jew.
(19:42):
Well, that wasn’t just words for Paul. If you look at the book of Acts on how he behaves, when Paul’s in a Jewish setting, man, he turns into super Jew, Hey, I’m a Pharisee and you know, I studied on a gamma meal and he’s quoting the Old Testament left, right and center. Like, I mean, he, he puts it on really thick with the Jewish stuff. But when he is talking to a Gentile lobby audience, he doesn’t talk about any of that. In fact at Mars Hill, he starts quoting their poets and using their cultural references to bring them to Jesus. So he adjusts the way he talks depending on who he’s talking to. And I mean, we understand this when it comes to age group. You know, I’m not gonna talk about substitutionary atonement when I’m talking to preschoolers. Okay? So we, we’ve got some kind of understanding of that. Well, we need to know who we’re talking to and then adjust our vocabulary and how we explain and how we act compared to who we’re talking to.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:37):
Well, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast. If someone has some questions about how their church can be more effective at reaching their community, what’s a good way to get in touch with you? What, what’s, what’s your email?
John Albiston (20:50):
They can reach me@justjohnalbertin.com. My last name is A L B I S T O n.com. And there’s some free resources on there, but yeah, anybody can get in touch with me and I am more than happy to help.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:05):
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much and I love what you’re doing. I, I love coaching evangelists and people who are excited about reaching the lost, and I think so many churches need to have that heart for their community and, and, and for the lost, and, and not just talk about it, but take tangible steps to make it happen.
John Albiston (21:28):
Absolutely.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:28):
And so, just so much love what you do and so valuable.
John Albiston (21:32):
Well, thanks for having me on here. Thank you.
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How to Plant a Church
Planting a church can be a rewarding but challenging process. Here are some steps you can follow to plant a church:
- Pray for guidance: Before you begin the process of planting a church, it’s important to seek God’s guidance and direction. Spend time in prayer, asking God to lead you and give you wisdom as you consider planting a church.
- Gather a team: As you begin the process of planting a church, it’s important to gather a team of people who can support and assist you. This might include other church leaders, members of your community, or people who have a passion for evangelism and outreach.
- Identify a target audience: Consider who you want to reach with your church. Are you looking to reach young families? Seniors? Singles? Knowing your target audience will help you tailor your message and approach to the needs and interests of the people you are trying to reach.
- Develop a plan: Once you have a sense of your target audience and the resources you have available, begin developing a plan for planting your church. This might include identifying a location, developing a budget, and creating a timeline for key milestones.
- Launch your church: Once you have a solid plan in place, it’s time to launch your church. This might involve hosting a launch service, inviting people to attend, and building relationships with members of your community.
- Stay focused on your mission: As you plant and grow your church, it’s important to stay focused on your mission and the people you are trying to reach. This might involve adapting and adjusting your approach as you learn more about the needs of your community, and being open to new opportunities for outreach and evangelism.
Planting a church requires patience, persistence, and a willingness to adapt and learn as you go. By following these steps and seeking God’s guidance, you can be a part of starting a new church that has the potential to make a positive impact in your community.
ABOUT DANIEL KING
Evangelist Daniel King, D.Min is on a mission to lead people to Jesus. He has visited over seventy nations preaching good news and he has led over two million people in a salvation prayer. He is often called “The Evangelism Coach.” To support King Ministries in our quest for souls, click here!
How to Grow a Small Church
Here are some tips for growing a small church:
- Focus on outreach: Make a concerted effort to reach out to the community and invite people to your church. This could include hosting events, participating in local service projects, and being intentional about inviting people to attend your church.
- Offer engaging and relevant programming: Make sure to offer programming that is relevant and engaging to your target audience. This could include worship services, Bible studies, youth groups, and other activities.
- Create a welcoming atmosphere: Make sure your church is a welcoming place for visitors. This includes having a friendly and helpful greeting team, providing a welcoming environment, and making sure to include newcomers in the life of the church.
- Provide excellent customer service: Make sure to provide excellent customer service to all members and visitors. This includes responding promptly to inquiries and concerns, and being proactive in addressing any issues that may arise.
- Use social media and other digital tools: Utilize social media and other digital tools to reach out to potential members and keep current members informed about church events and activities.
- Partner with other organizations: Consider partnering with other organizations, such as local schools or community groups, to reach out to new people and collaborate on projects and events.
- Focus on member retention: Make sure to focus on retaining current members by providing opportunities for them to get involved in the life of the church and by addressing any concerns or issues they may have.
ABOUT DANIEL KING
Evangelist Daniel King, D.Min is on a mission to lead people to Jesus. He has visited over seventy nations preaching good news and he has led over two million people in a salvation prayer. He is often called “The Evangelism Coach.” To support King Ministries in our quest for souls, click here!
How to Grow Your Church
There are many ways to grow your church, including the following:
- Reaching out to the community: Consider ways to connect with people in your community, such as hosting events or participating in local service projects. This can help raise awareness about your church and attract new members.
- Offering engaging and relevant programming: Make sure to offer programming that is relevant and engaging to your target audience. This could include worship services, Bible studies, youth groups, and other activities.
- Creating a welcoming atmosphere: Create a warm and welcoming atmosphere in your church. This includes having a friendly and helpful greeting team, providing a welcoming environment, and making sure to include newcomers in the life of the church.
- Providing excellent customer service: Make sure to provide excellent customer service to all members and visitors. This includes responding promptly to inquiries and concerns, and being proactive in addressing any issues that may arise.
- Using social media and other digital tools: Utilize social media and other digital tools to reach out to potential members and keep current members informed about church events and activities.
- Partnering with other organizations: Consider partnering with other organizations, such as local schools or community groups, to reach out to new people and collaborate on projects and events.
- Focusing on member retention: Make sure to focus on retaining current members by providing opportunities for them to get involved in the life of the church and by addressing any concerns or issues they may have.
ABOUT DANIEL KING
Evangelist Daniel King, D.Min is on a mission to lead people to Jesus. He has visited over seventy nations preaching good news and he has led over two million people in a salvation prayer. He is often called “The Evangelism Coach.” To support King Ministries in our quest for souls, click here!
How to Welcome a Visitor to Your Church
The best way to welcome someone to your church is to approach them with a warm and friendly greeting, such as “Good morning” or “Welcome to our church.” Make eye contact and smile, and use their name if you know it. Offer assistance if they seem to need it, such as directing them to the restrooms or coffee area, or introducing them to other members of the congregation. You can also provide them with a church bulletin or any other materials that might be helpful.
It’s also important to be patient and understanding, especially with those who may be new to the church or unfamiliar with its customs and traditions. Remember that church greeters are often the first point of contact for visitors, so it’s important to make a good impression and create a welcoming atmosphere.
Finally, be sure to thank people for coming to the church and encourage them to come back again. It can be helpful to offer information about upcoming events or activities that might be of interest to them.
ABOUT DANIEL KING
Evangelist Daniel King, D.Min is on a mission to lead people to Jesus. He has visited over seventy nations preaching good news and he has led over two million people in a salvation prayer. He is often called “The Evangelism Coach.” To support King Ministries in our quest for souls, click here!
Tips for Church Greeters
Here are some tips for church greeters:
- Wear a warm and friendly smile. Your smile is one of the first things people notice when they enter the church, so make sure it’s welcoming and genuine.
- Make eye contact and greet people with a friendly greeting, such as “Good morning” or “Welcome to our church.”
- Use people’s names if you know them, or ask for their name if you don’t. This helps create a sense of community and personal connection.
- Be attentive to people’s needs and offer assistance if needed. For example, if someone is looking lost or confused, offer to help them find their way or answer any questions they may have.
- Remember that church greeters are often the first point of contact for visitors, so make sure to give them a warm and welcoming experience. This could include providing them with a church bulletin, directing them to the restrooms or coffee area, or introducing them to other members of the congregation.
- Be patient and understanding, especially with those who may be new to the church or unfamiliar with its customs and traditions.
- Lastly, be sure to thank people for coming to the church and encourage them to come back again.
ABOUT DANIEL KING
Evangelist Daniel King, D.Min is on a mission to lead people to Jesus. He has visited over seventy nations preaching good news and he has led over two million people in a salvation prayer. He is often called “The Evangelism Coach.” To support King Ministries in our quest for souls, click here!
Karl Hargestam | One Chance for Every Person
Karl Hargestam believes every person on earth deserves at least one chance to hear the Gospel. Why should anyone hear the Gospel twice when some have never heard it for the first time? Karl is an innovative missionary who uses helicopters to go where no missionary has ever gone before. He is also leading City Serve which has given away millions of dollars worth of food to the hungry and he is the founder of Joshua Campaign in Ethiopia. On today’s episode you will be inspired by his innovative ideas.
Learn more about City Serve: https://cityserve.us/
Learn About One Chance for Every Person: https://ocfep.com/
Transcript:
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Karl Hargestam believes that every person on Earth deserves at least one chance to hear the gospel. Why should anyone hear the gospel twice when some have never heard it for the first time? Karl is an innovative missionary. He uses helicopters to go where no missionary has ever gone before. He’s also leading city serve, which has given away millions of dollars worth of food to the hungry. And he’s the founder of Joshua Campaign in Ethiopia. On today’s episode, you will be inspired by his innovative ideas.
Evangelism Podcast Host (00:49):
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 (01:13):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King, and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. Today I am with a very special guest, Karl Hargestam. Thank you for joining me today.
Karl Hargestam (01:24):
Well, thank you. It’s good to be here with you, Daniel. We always, It’s good to see you always when we get to, It’s not that often we get to meet, but this is good. It’s good to be with you here today,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:32):
Brother Karl. You have been involved in evangelism and missions for many years. You have a great heart for reaching the unreached people. And my knowledge of you begins when you were a missionary in Ethiopia, going to the unreached there, and you founded Joshua Campaign, which has done many gospel campaigns across Ethiopia for the last, almost 20 years now. And tell me a little bit about how Joshua Campaign got started and your early vision for reaching Ethiopia.
Karl Hargestam (02:07):
Well, you know, the, so the call, the call that got on my life and the, the vision was really when Jesus spoke to me, and he did very clearly was for Matthew 24, in fact, the whole chapters about Jesus return. And I felt this incredible overwhelming urgency of his term. But they spoke to me from Matthew 24 and also Revelation where, where the gospel clearly has been preached. That that, you know, John in seven, nine sees his multitude dressed in white robes from every tribe, language people nation. Five nine says that what his blood has been purchased, men from every tribe, language people, nation. So the final church that Jesus comes back, the bride of Christ is a full of blood washed church from every tribe, language people nation. But what Jesus was speaking to me is that this is not finished.
Karl Hargestam (02:59):
Will you give your life to reach the final reach. Verse 14 says, The gospel of the kingdom will be preached, not should, not, maybe not. Hopefully the gospel prophetically Jesus says, the gospel of the kingdom will be preached as a testimony to the whole world and then, then will come. I felt this overwhelming thought idea that Jesus come back soon and he’s asking me. So he was asking me to preach the gospel towards Unre and finish assignment I didn’t know about unreached. So 30 some plus years ago, that was not a big talk book in mission or churches or anywhere. And and in fact it was embedded in a vision that was literally a movie. And in India was a helicopter. I didn’t understand much of this other than I said, Please see the Lord. And somehow, you know, the Lord answered the miraculously.
Karl Hargestam (03:46):
So I was on my way very quickly to Africa where the helicopters planted churches and unreached. What I did not know is that in that vision was a mass hillside of people coming to faith. It was like flames over sides of people. And within a few years, we start having meetings with a helicopter, 50,000, 40,000 hillside of people. I just kind of didn’t see me being the one preaching and signs and wonders start happening. I didn’t plan on being a massive evangelist or crusade evangelist. There was just kind of were happening within just a few years of that vision. So outta that, Josh Sch campaign was born. In fact, the clarification came when my son was born 97. So I’ve been in Africa a couple years. You know, story is long, lots of water under the bridge here. But really clarification to the vision of how to finish that assignment that I felt law Lord asked me was, which is the gospel for every tribe, nation people.
Karl Hargestam (04:45):
And from the first chapter of Joshua you know, Jesus speaks to his people and he reminds Moses, you know, the Lord ruins Joshua and Moses is dead. My sermon is dead. But then he reminds Joshua, the assignment he gave to Moses. And he’s not saying, Here, I have a new assignment for you. You know, a lot of times each generation we think I have a new thought, new idea, a new generation new anointing, double portion. You know, there’s a lot of things that we preach sometimes, but the Lord is telling to Joshua, really same here’s assignment, same assignment. Then he says, as I was with Moses, would be with you. So same anointing, same promise. Josh I used responds by faith in verse 11. And he says, Go through the camp, tell the people already we’re gonna be taking action. We’re gonna finish assignment cross Jordan and conquered at land, meaning not the promise land inheritance by faith in salvation but the gospel assignment that we’re all called to be part of. So that became clear out of that was Joshua campaign born and gospel crusades were launched into it’s really 3m, it was mobilization, massive man mission network. And I can talk about all three. And there are three organizations today that Joshua campaign was initially born from that.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:01):
Yeah. And I’m very thankful for Joshua Campaign. We’ve been, I think, either eight or nine times to do crusades with Joshua campaign in Ethiopia. Yeah. And we have always seen a tremendous harvest. It’s always so beautiful to see what God is doing there. The Bible says that Ethiopia shall quickly stretch out her hands towards God. And we see that over and over again. Now, in your ministry, you have a motto, one chance for every person. Can you explain why that’s important?
Karl Hargestam (06:30):
Wow. That became a very clear, you know, early on the finishing of the assignment, that every person born should have a right to hear the gospel should be birthright. We talk about right to water, right to school, right to healthcare give you all kinds of things that the world debates what’s important. And they’re all important. But the right to hear the gospel of Jesus once not saved, not only the Lord can do, but to hear it as Paul says, anyone who calls on the name of the Lord can’t be saved, shall be saved. But how can they, unless they believe, how can they believe unless they have heard, how can they hear unless someone preaches to them? So the right to hear the gospel should be birthright. So one chance to hear the gospel, only the church of Jesus can give. So the right to hear the gospel’s a birthright for every person and all the church can give it.
Karl Hargestam (07:19):
You have when they unreached challenge tribes that never heard of gospel since the cross. That should be an embarrassment for the church with all the money and resource and people we are. So you have places, tribes that never heard of gospel. You also have today with population growth. More people that have no access to the gospel that was alive when I was born on planet Earth. I mean, that should bother us too. Now obviously that can only be given up by Red Cross United Nation or any other kind of great institution or even Christian organization. Only the church of Jesus would preach the gospel to that. That’s why it’s so important we focus on this. So Joshua campaign, what about a massive evangelism initially one of, one of our initiatives and, and in Ethiopia, you know, we kind of were blessed being part of an early season where we prayed with, we had over 4.2 million decisions kind in a decade span to Christ there. But, and then we expanded into, you know, Pakistan and Indonesia and a couple other India. We, we done meetings in several places. That was not though my primary, even though that’s part of God’s call in my life. It was really about finishing Simon every tribe language people nation. So thus not just massive evangelists, but mobilization and a mission network that mobilized God’s church towards finishing Simon.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:35):
So you’ve been
Karl Hargestam (08:36):
Really three cycles. So
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:37):
You’ve been very interested in frontier evangelism going where Jesus has never been preached before. And in order to train people to do that, one of your initiatives is Mission one 11 training school to send people out into some of the hardest reach places in the world. Talk to me about
Karl Hargestam (08:58):
That. Yeah, that’s happening. So that’s kind of the second a, which is being in cycles of seven to 10 years. So the first was Joshua campaign. The second has been the second, a Michel 11, same also from the first chapter in Joshua verse chapter one, verse 11. He says, Go through the camp, mobilize the people. Get ready. So the mobilization or pioneers is martial 11 schools in the west. You know, we have worked in the developing countries, charting mission schools that is focused on church planning and national churches and leaders that we still work with. But in the west, us and Europe, we have mission schools that is challenging young people to give their life to a greater call, especially on rich people. So we take young people through training program and, and, and our big focus in tribal people that has never heard of gospel isity. So we bring them into tribes and mission schools and several countries around the world.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:53):
So tell me about how that works. Students go to a mission one 11 school and then you actually send them somewhere.
Karl Hargestam (10:01):
It’s really almost like a boot camp. It’s very catalystic. You know, the challenge for me was even when we started schools you know, in Africa or even Indonesia, but Africa, mostly our big schools would, lots of church planners in evangelists, they come to the city, they get kind of, you know, and I’m mo for higher education. But you know, they get trained and the more they get trained, the less effective they become, which kind of was grieving for a lot of us. I think even though we need you know, high quality leaders this has been true also in the west, US and Europe. So bringing students into a place where they don’t lose the call but actually find it, we knew that a istic experience has to happen. And for us, it used to be mission trips or youth camps. People are baptized in a fire call to a greater cost.
Karl Hargestam (10:49):
But we knew that there’s no greater place to bring people into an other than to an A 29 experience, an apostolic experience. The most unreached places Jesus will show up. It doesn’t matter how pray through they are, how holy they are. If they just choose to say yes, Jesus will do this supernatural through people’s lives. So we train in six weeks. It’s a 12 week course, actually that’s tic where we prepare the students for an experience. We call that preparation, that it’s an immersion experience and that it’s a debriefing experience. What to process the experience, the immersion is to, we fly with helicopters. Sometimes we take the students into an honor tribe where they are coached to share the gospel in chronological storytelling, science and wonders will happen. There’s nothing, The number one issue, the number one question actually asked worldwide is, why am I here?
Karl Hargestam (11:39):
Whether to believers or not for Christians, the number one question is what’s God’s plan for my life? I believe there is nothing more important, especially in the west young people. They will, they feel, and they will say, most often, I’m a spectator in God’s kingdom. I see all these players down here, but I’m into bleachers and don’t know how I can participate. There’s nothing more powerful than when the Lord is using me, affirming of God’s call. So when the Lord’s doing great things in their lives, in those tribal settings, they come back and say, Wow, God maybe has a plan for my life. If we process that and we see Missionary challenge to pathway for God’s assignment,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:18):
And now you’re working with a brand new initiative called City Serve. And with City Serve, you are helping churches all over America to reach out to their communities. Talk to me about what City Serve is doing.
Karl Hargestam (12:32):
Yeah, so, you know, this has been an incredible journey. So this is kind of the third for me mission network because what we’re challenging the church is to for the anti harvest, which I believe Jesus is returning soon. And the anti harvest, the big challenge is the church that is not ready or we have become very production driven. I’m all for great church. We have church, we’re seeing better. But in big parts of the world, the church kind of resorted into just, just being good, having church, singing better, preaching better, and kind of not caring that much about what’s happening around in the neighborhood. And part of that is just caring about people and issues. So we’re talking about mobilizing the church to be the church, not just having church. That shift is about mission from the neighborhood to the nations.
Karl Hargestam (13:22):
And, and we’ve been able to tap into resources to help churches to use, reach out in their neighborhoods very tangibly. One of the big challenges when we see especially the American church across the world, is that you have an average church is say under 80 people, around 80 people, and most of the churches buy vocational pastors in neighborhoods. There’s nothing more underuse. There’s no network in America. And, and we have proven this to be true also in, in Ukraine for example, right now around the world, we’re launching Canada. We’re in several places, but the, the church of Jesus, there’s nothing, no network that know the neighborhood better than the church. But most of the time, by vocational pastors under resourced, they hardly have money to keep their light on, nonetheless, having an outreach budget. So we’ve been able to tap into incredible resources, helping the church to be the church, start just loving their neighbors and reclaiming the right to preach truth.
Karl Hargestam (14:18):
It is only the gospel of Jesus and that truth that say people set people free, lead them on a pathway to some restoration, redemption. But sometimes our society has, we become so isolated, our gospel, even though we preach really loud, people don’t care anymore because we lost that credibility. So city deserve, it’s about empowering the church. We’ve been growing incredibly fast tapping into, we have really the center of the vision of city service based on Isaiah 58 where it says, this is the true fast. This is what the Lord is asking of you. If you spend yourself on behalf of the broken of the poor, then your light will shine in darkness. Then you will be like a well watered garden, then you will be known as the rebuild of cities. What the Lord is saying, this is a qualifier for being blessable. If you do this things, I will bless what you do.
Karl Hargestam (15:06):
We’ve seen the window heaven open over us. So in five years, last year, we moved over $430 million through our, I mean, so we’ve been growing incredibly fast in five years, resourcing churches to be the church. It’s the incredible amount of people saved through the basic idea of just challenging god’s people to lean out into the broken and reclaim what it means to, to just care about your neighborhood. Because of that, the credibility to preach the gospel is just released in a powerful way. So I, seef 58 is centered around 10 initiatives, including unre people, which is, you know, my passion, but it’s everything that Jesus talked about, the prophets. And Jesus match 25, He talks about the poor, the widow of the orphan, you the presser. You know, when you do this, then you do it for me. So in the resources we’re asking the church to focus on those that we have two support pillars for that.
Karl Hargestam (15:57):
One is the supply chain of goods and kind that over production from national retailers like Amazon, Costco, Walmart, and others are donating through supply chain of hubs, pods, points of distribution, which is churches to God’s people, which is heroes, loving their neighbor, sharing faith with somebody. That supply chain helps the church to lean into it. Then we have a grant center helping with resources around those initiatives. And it’s been powerful. But the whole idea is that the church joins with the idea of we’re gonna become missional again. What does it look like for us to reach from the neighborhood to the nations, even unreached people, refugees coming into our cities, across America. We’re, we’re having a hard time reaching another language or cultures downtown that has been there for a hundred years or 50 years or so, The new people coming into our cities we’re not even missional enough to reach over into those cultures in our churches many times. How do we reach a tribe somewhere around the world? So it’s about, it’s about the, it’s about a paradigm shift. How do I see the harvest in my city, from the neighborhood to the nations?
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:05):
I love how you bring together compassion and evangelism to help churches, to help neighborhoods and help the churches to, to reach out to people. But then maintaining that evangelistic focus in helping people to, to make sure that they know Jesus and are going to
Karl Hargestam (17:24):
Heaven. Well, I said, I mean, it’s, we are, what we say is the hero for us needs to be, of course, Jesus, but that local church, not about city serve. So, so what we empowered church to be the church you know, we’re not even about our, we’re not about compassion. We’re about compassion, evangelism or sharing compassion in Jesus’s name. You know, the process of reclaiming credibility to preach truth. It’s not that the truth has changed. The gospel of Jesus has not changed. It’s still the gospel of Jesus and the truth. When you as a church, we start losing credibility to preach truth, people don’t pay attention anymore. And we think that compassion is a gateway. No, it’s, it’s Romans to force that the kindness of Lord draws us the repentance. It’s like a superpower. No one can argue with kindness as the church is criticized, that we’re more known for what we’re against.
Karl Hargestam (18:13):
What we’re saying is we’re for a bunch of things, the church of Jesus is for restored marriages. <Laugh> delivered people, people set free from oppression, from addiction, from demonic possession. We’re for all kinds of good things, right? Why don’t we reclaim the message that we’re for people finding hope in Jesus destined, in Jesus, a purpose and a pathway that only the gospel of Jesus can bring. But we’re become so defined and for kind of what we’re against, instead of what we’re for, we’re for people, right? We’re for our neighbors, finding a better way. And it’s only Jesus they can give it. So this has been a way to ask churches to join that mission challenge. So we’re working very wide, it’s big tent. We’re helping churches across the country. In fact, we proved that this network, the church of Jesus is the most underused during farm and a family during the pandemic.
Karl Hargestam (19:04):
You know, this part of that is being white cities have grew so fast. We we were able to prove in fact, you know, many of you know that their pandemic, you know, country shuts down. Half of the American food goes to restaurants. So trucking industry, farming industry is all herding. The president then, at the time, President Trump, he decided a program called Farmer to Family rescuing the trucking industry, the farming industry. The issue was how did we deliver? Now when we suddenly overnight at 50 million Americans struggling with food, they might have a good job, furl, little without pay, have a car payment, a house payment, don’t look poor, but you don’t have money to buy food. So the farmer family was that idea, Take rescue this the industries and help help the people. They’re now at home because of the pandemic. And but how do we deliver it?
Karl Hargestam (19:51):
What we argue is there’s nothing like the local church knowing the neighborhoods the last mile. The church is the best last mile there is for any need anywhere, anytime. And we see this also in Ukraine right now. In fact, we feed in Ukraine over a hundred, 2000 meals, hot meals a day through churches, 1800 churches across Ukraine, seeing amazing number of people coming to faith, finding faith in Jesus. But during farmer to family, we delivered over 600 million pounds of food through churches in every parking lot across America and every city and county. Amazing amount of people served in Jesus name. People prayed with, in fact, s a they were saying in the beginning, you know, normally when we get this kind of a government relief, they’re like, you know, you can’t you gotta, you gotta, you gotta verify that these people need it. We said, Really? What does it mean? Doesn’t mean that we have to turn on the wind. We asked them to turn on the window and say how can we help you? Do you need, do you need <laugh>? Do you have a special need? Do you really need help? Yes. Can we pray for you? Yes. You mean because you’re faith with them? Yes. You know, so across America, we got to have conversations with people.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:04):
Yeah, I got to participate in some of the outreaches with Pastor Rod Baker, who is one of your yeah. Distribution points in Oklahoma. We went out with him and people would line up for two hours in order to get food. I mean, some of them had very nice cars and they had obviously been successful. They didn’t look like they would need food. But I think if someone is willing to wait two hours in line to get food, obviously they need it. And we, we prayed with people and God moved in such a, a powerful way. And so that was such a, a tremendous ministry.
Karl Hargestam (21:38):
It proved, it proved that the church is underused in our country and it’s proven the same in Ukraine. There’s no network like Jesus paper. Yeah, knowing their neighborhoods. Let,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:49):
Let’s talk about the last mile because like for the post office, they ship packages from one side of the country to the other side of the country, but it’s that last mile from the post office to going and putting the mail in the mailbox. That is actually the most expensive part of the process. And what you’re saying is that the local church is the most effective at bringing help to the people that need it the most in neighborhoods because they can do the last mile very inexpensively compared to anybody else that you could find a
Karl Hargestam (22:22):
Hundred percent first into donations in goods and kind. There’s no network like it. But also, think about it, when we think about brokenness in some of the most broken neighborhoods across America, you have a local church. The way that we done church for a long time is we sending buses, bring the kids into some great big church somewhere. And that small church that’s struggling is keeping the light on is almost like raising the wide flag, surrendering that neighborhood to the devil. I mean, as an enemy, that’s terrible. How do we resource that church that knows the kids to live on that street, know the issues with the houses down that street to be lighthouse for Jesus again, it is nothing better than empowering that church. In fact, if you’re gonna win in America, we need every church to share Jesus in any way, being resourced, loving their neighbors, and sharing the faith bold in Jesus name.
Karl Hargestam (23:11):
So that’s what we say when we talk about empowering the last mile, not just one church or one group or one network. The church of Jesus just gotta kind of rise to the moment. That’s how we’re gonna reclaim our country. Again, sharing the faith boldly. And that last mile delivery obviously is kind of what we’re able to be affected with when it comes to the goods and kind donations for sure. But there’s also other needs. You know, we will talk about that also in even grants. And I know people are afraid of money that is on the table, but grants are used by somebody and most of the time by things and values we don’t agree with. So it’s gonna go somewhere and it’s our money. We paid the taxes for. So our argument is why don’t god’s people to do last mile there?
Karl Hargestam (23:50):
You talk about prison and reentry. You know, our attrition for people coming outta prison, state of California is 67% returns back to prison. Why is that happening? I mean, we can say our country’s broken, our issues system is bad. Sure, all of that’s true. But the honest answer is they go back to their old community because our society is not able to provide a new community. What’s the community that would change that? The church of Jesus, it’s a community, can change their pathway, their projectory, because the gospel of Jesus changes from within. And that community can wrap around and be that new pathway. Restoration. This is true from homeless reentry, press and reentry, diction, reentry back into society. We need a life disciple people more than just giving a handout on a parking lot. If the church reclaims that place that we’re for people, we have the answer.
Karl Hargestam (24:43):
There’s even funding for it. We will do better job than any institution in our country because we care about it anyhow. We wanna see prisoners restored, redeemed on a pathway back to healthy life. We wanna see the addicted set free and the pathway back to healthy life. So we have really both the conviction we want to do it for us, and especially for me, because my call is about really primarily unre people. If I can’t get people to even see the harvest in their neighborhood, I have a real hard time for them to see the harvest in some unreached tribe somewhere in Africa where I need a helicopter to get to. So this has been a pathway to kind of say from Jerusalem, udia to Samaria and anso the earth. We we’re taking churches again, I think on a journey back to mission, that was the call in the church, preach the gospel to every person, one chance for every person, right? That gotta begin in our neighborhood somehow.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (25:37):
So just to review, what are the three s? Mobilization,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (25:40):
Mobilization, evangelism, massive evangelism. Mission network. In mission network. And you have worked in all three about seven to 10 years in each one. And I’ve been inspired just seeing your strategic thinking innovation, Joshua campaign, doing mass evangelism and Ethiopia, the helicopter going to unreached tribal groups where you can’t get there by road. And now city serve, helping to serve all the churches across America and, and really helping people in both America and Ukraine and other parts of the world. So thank you so much for your, your passion for Jesus and your innovation, your your strategic thinking. It really inspires me. And thank you for being on the Evangelism podcast. Yeah,
Karl Hargestam (26:28):
Man, Thank you. Thank you Daniel. Good to be here.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (26:30):
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 (27:49):
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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Zane Bousum | An Innovative Idea for Attracting Visitors to Your Church
Zane Bousum is the pastor of Spirit of Life Church near Indianapolis, Indiana. He has a big heart for reaching out to his community. On today’s podcast he shares a unique outreach idea any church can use to attract people to come to church.
Connect with Pastor Zane Bousum: https://spiritoflifechurch.org/
Transcript:
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Zane Bousum pastors, spirit of life, church near Indianapolis, Indiana. And he has a big heart for reaching out to the community on today’s podcast. He’s going to share with you a unique outreach idea that any church in America could use to attract people to come to church.
Evangelism Podcast Host (00:24):
Jesus said, go into all the world and preach the gospel. Everyone who calls in the name of the Lord shall be saved.
Evangelism Podcast Host (00:35):
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 (00:59):
Welcome to the evangelism podcast. I’m Daniel King, and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus today. I am right near Indianapolis, Indiana with pastor Z Boso pronounced like awesome Zane Bossum and we’re at spirit life church. And it’s so wonderful to have you on the evangelism podcast. I’m glad to be here. Thank you so much. We are excited about what God’s doing here on the west side of Indianapolis, and we believe that God wants us to not only live the life that he’s called us to, but to tell people about it yesterday, I came as a guest minister to the church here, and you had a really unique outreach idea to bring people into the church. Tell me about it.
Pastor Zane Bousum (01:55):
Yeah, so basically what we did is we had a $50 gas card giveaway. And so what we did is we went to a local gas station and we bought 50, $50 gas cards. And our goal was for that each new visitor that came in, we would put this $50 gas card in our visitor bags. We already have visitor bags we give, but for every new visitor and what this, what our goal with this was, was to not only have new visitors, obviously come into the church, but was to get our own people, to invite people to come. And so I couldn’t think of I mean, I just thought this was a great idea. I believe God gave it to us to encourage our own people, to have bait, to have something really neat, to give to someone as their guest, that they invited a church. And so so yeah, I think this is a, a really wonderful outreach idea. And, and you had emailed me a couple of months ago and it was right at the height of all the gas prices when all the gas prices America were going up and everyone was concerned about the cost of gas and it was in the news.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:06):
And you said, you know, this would be a really great idea to bring people into the church and everyone’s concerned about gas. So why don’t we give away gas? Now Jesus said that we are called to be fishers of men. And the way that you go fishing for fish is you gotta find the right bait to attract the right kind of fish. And so if you go deep sea fishing, you’re gonna use one kind of bait. If you go down to the Creek, you’re gonna use a different kind of bait. And so what better bait is there to use when people are concerned about gas prices than to use a $50 free gas card for everyone who comes to the church. And so we, the, the, the church gave away these, these invitations. Yes. And how many invitations did you print
Pastor Zane Bousum (03:57):
Up? Yeah, so we printed 900 flyers that our goal was then to pass these flyers out at, and actually the local gas station that we bought gift cards from. They didn’t give us the a hundred percent right away, but the manager said, if you come and tell people about ’em, I’m not gonna say anything. And she was actually in the store, why we were doing it. And we had so many people and actually a few of them that I had personally invited. So I knew that they were invited there. They actually came and so we passed ’em out that way, passed ’em into a local trailer park. We passed them into neighborhoods. We had people that passed them to their own connections that they have, whether that was their family, their friends, people they work with. And so just, it really was an encouragement for us to share the gospel for us to invite someone to church. And and I think it went really well.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:53):
All right. So the church for the last couple of weeks been passing out these 900 flyers. You’ve had volunteers come and, and right across the street from the church, there’s an apartment complex. And so you’re giving out the, the invitations there. Now. Now why I think this is an innovative idea is because it’s so important to, to get people into the church. And sometimes you have to go outside the walls of the church to, to go after people, you know, a, a fisherman who goes fishing in the forest, isn’t gonna catch any fish. You gotta go down to where the fish are. They’re they’re in the stream, or they’re in the river, they’re in the lake. So you gotta go where the fish are to catch the fish. And so I think sometimes people are, they, they stay sitting in the church and they’re just waiting for fish to come into the church or is like sitting in a boat and, and waiting for fish to just jump in the boat. Like maybe every once in a long while that might happen just by accident. But if you’re really going to catch someone for Jesus, you gotta go out where they are. And, and so your church spread out into the highways and byways giving out these invitations and you gave out 900 invitations. And how many visitors came and filled out visitor cards at church yesterday.
Pastor Zane Bousum (06:10):
Yeah. So yesterday, and, and, and just to tightness in here too. So one of the reasons why we brought in Dr. Daniel King is because he is an evangelist. And so one of the, the things with all of this was that we wouldn’t just be inviting people who were churchgoers already, but our goal was really to get people who were not going to church unsaved, people who had maybe been questioning about God. And so that’s why we had Dr. Jano king in. And so when he came, we were fully expecting for the gospel to be preached for people’s lives to be changed. And so we had 17 bags, actually, we’re I forgot tell you that 17 bags were given away. 16 cards were filled out. So I don’t know how one bag ended up going, but, but either way we had 16 visitor cards that I’m gonna get now to share. We follow up with those people. I’ll follow up with them, I’ll call them all. And so we’ll get to now connect with them. And this is actually, I can honestly say this. This was the best outreach that we’ve had when, when it comes to people coming in, we’ve had other outreaches, but never had the return on it, of people actually walking through the door to where they can now hear the gospel message and then get a really good connection.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:32):
And yesterday I preached a crystal clear gospel message. And we had the 16 visitors and we counted, there were about 14 people that came up for salvation and at least three people that testified that God had healed them. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and some other great things that happened. We had one young man who came and he, he said, I’m a pagan. I don’t serve God anymore. I’m a pagan. He said, I just came because I wanted the free gas card, but at least he came and we had a chance to, to talk to him and pray with him and share the gospel with him. And he may be a pagan now, but I think he can come to Jesus.
Pastor Zane Bousum (08:19):
Amen. And he also that same guy I was able to connect with as well, and he will, I’m gonna meet with him this week. And so, you know, that’s, that’s one of the things as, as we’re, whenever we do evangelism events, whenever we do things where we are attracting people, we do, we do want that moment to be impactful, but we also need to remember that relationships and connections are so important. So now all these people, even if, even if they don’t come back, they’ve now been connected to our church at least once. But my goal is that of those 16, whether all 16, even if only four, come back, then there’s four new people. We’ve had to do our church. But no matter what, we’ve made a connection with them. And that’s our goal is to connect them to God, connect them to the church. And and praise gods, see their life’s changed.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:08):
Now, I think this is actually a, a really great investment for a church to make, because often you’ll go to Costco. Our family likes to, to eat, to buy food at Costco, and you’ll go down the aisle and they’ll have little free samples yeah. That they give. And, and so they’ll, they’ll give you a little sample of cheese or a little sample of pizza, something, and you eat it. And you’re like, oh, I like that. And, and then you go ahead and buy it. Now, Costco does that for a reason. It’s not just to give away free food, they’re giving it so that you can sample their products and then see if you’re interested in it. And, and so somehow a church has to get people to come in and, and sample a service. And not everybody who tries the sample at Costco is going to buy that product.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:57):
They know that, but they know that enough people are going to buy it, that it makes it worth their while. And it keeps people coming back. In fact, my wife, and she says, let’s take the kids to Costco and gotta feed ’em lunch, you know? And, and so we’ll try all the samples two times each, and that’s like a free meal for the little kiddos, but then we spend like $400 at Costco. Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, this is a really good investment for a church to make. You’re investing in outreach, you’re investing in souls. You know, somebody might say, well, $50, you’re for a gas card. You’re bribing people to come to church, but really what you’re doing is you’re using bait. Jesus made us fishers of men, and you’re using this bait to, to go after people. And in every country, we find that different bait works.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:46):
So sometimes we go to a country and, and people come because they want a miracle from Jesus mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so our posters say, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever, you know, the blind sea, the lame walk, the deaf here in the miracles is what brings people. Other countries music will draw people. Hmm. And if we’ll advertise a local band that that’s well known, people will come specifically to, to hear the music. We went to one country where they had had some war and some famine. And so in that country, we were able to buy several dump truck loads full of, of rice and beans to give away. And people came for the food. And, and so what we’re doing is we are using different kinds of bait and here in America, sometimes it’s hard to figure out what bait there is that that’s effective for reaching people, because people are, you know, they’re sitting at home watching Netflix, they’re watching TV. They, they don’t really think about what their spiritual needs are. But somehow you gotta get them to come in to church or reach out to them, reach out to where they are. And,
Pastor Zane Bousum (12:03):
And, and that, and that’s what I was gonna say. Like, not, not only the miracle of them coming, like the miracle of them changing their schedule to come on a Sunday morning, like all the habits that, that each of those 16 or 17 people had gotten that they had to rearrange their schedule, like something, something, we did something we said, as we were either passing out the, the, the flyer for it, got them to say, you know what? This is worth me changing my schedule. And I think that, that in America, that’s one of our biggest hurdles is, is not just finding a bait, but even whether it’s the, the way we present it, or, and that’s, that’s one of the reasons why I really felt like we needed to have flyers. And we did, we passed some out, we did put some social media stuff, but I really feel that the, the flyers was the most important thing of having a one-on-one connection of having us invite them and really try to get them to see the importance of coming that morning.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:59):
Now, your church, pastor Zane has a tremendous heart for, for reaching out to the community. And so this is just one of many different outreaches that you’ve done. What are some of the other ways that your church has of reaching out to the community? Yeah,
Pastor Zane Bousum (13:15):
We’re, we’re, we’ve been of a church of about a hundred, 150 people for the last 10 years.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:20):
And now, now let me just say for a church of a hundred, 150 to have 16 visitors on one Sunday morning is really a, a great outreach that that has to be counted as a success.
Pastor Zane Bousum (13:30):
Oh, totally. And so we usually, so we usually try to be mindful of our people. So we have three large events that we do. And one of ’em is kind of two in one, we do a, a summer outreach where we have big splash night. We do two of those. We rent an 18 foot water slide, and then we invite the community and we’ll do a seven to 10 minute gospel presentation during that we invite the local local fire truck. We invite a Kona ice truck, and we just love on the community. And then we do a hallelujah night, which is on Halloween where we’ve had up to 900 people in our building because we open up the doors and we have candy, we have games, we have food, all kinds of stuff. And the community kind of knows that it’s coming.
Pastor Zane Bousum (14:15):
So we’ve done that for over 20 years. And so that’s a, a large outreach and over COVID we just moved it outside. And we even had a, a drive up one year where it was, we had different things, different stations that we did. And so, so those are three big things. We do. We also have a connection with the local schools. We have a relationship with the superintendent and a relationship with the local principal. We also, and so with you want me to go into that? Sure. So with the schools, we do two things where we give for teacher appreciation week, we’ll bring breakfast and the school actually lets me come in and give a three to five minute gospel message and, or just whatever that law is on my heart to share with them. And then in the in the beginning of the school year, we will do a, we’ll give them lunch.
Pastor Zane Bousum (15:05):
And so that’s just two times we get the love on, and we’ll take a stand that says spirit of life, church. And we say spirit of life, church loves robe. And so we, we do that when we’ve done that to multiple schools, but Rob’s the main one that we do. And then we also have a relationship with our local police department where we bought two kennels over the last 10 years for their dogs. We just, we love our community and we want the community to know that God loves them and he loves them through the church. And so that’s why we do it this way.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:35):
I, I think this is so important for the church to be involved in the community because over time people get to know that the church cares about the community. And so just one outreach may not be successful in, in drawing lots of people in, but if you just keep doing outreach after outreach, after outreach people in the community, get to know you, then when someone in the community suffers from a, a tragedy that you are the one that they call and you actually have this happen really recently, we
Pastor Zane Bousum (16:10):
Did. Yeah. So with the school robo elementary on a weekend, there were two children of that school that it was just a, an awful accident where their mom and dad were driving a a golf cart and the children were on the back and a tree fell on them. And so instantly they died. And so this, this community was grieving. And so the principal who has my number texted me that that day and said, Hey, this tragedy happened. Could you come and be here to minister, to the teachers, the kids that may come in on that morning. And so I came in that Monday morning and I just loved on the kids, loved on the, the teachers and they already knew me. So then they saw me come in the door, two of ’em in particular, one teacher that I’d known for years, I just went up and gave her a big, big hug.
Pastor Zane Bousum (17:02):
And she said, I was fine until I saw you. And just the tears started flowing. And then another teacher did about the same thing. And it just because of the connection we’d make through made through outreach when the, when that school was in need. And we know that in those situations, people are looking for God and the comfort of God that we were able to be there for them. And, and in the following week, I was able to share a messages on heaven with all the teachers. And that’s, I don’t think that was by chance or accident. I think that had to do with us already developing relationship.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:37):
Another way that you are present in the community is through your preschool. Yeah. How does your preschool work to help pull people to Jesus?
Pastor Zane Bousum (17:46):
Yeah, so we always tell anyone who, so we do do have a preschool and we have it’s and we’ve had up from ones all the way up to the kindergarten level. And so most of the people who come to our preschool aren’t even from our church. And so it really is an outreach. And we always tell ’em, we say we are a, we are a church with a preschool. And so we let ’em know that our main reason for the preschool is to share the gospel, to love, to have the love of God. And so we’ve had, haven’t, hadn’t even told you this, we’ve had Muslim families come and be a part of our preschool. We’ve had Hindu families come be a part of our preschool, just cuz they see that not only are there children treated right, but they see that there is the quality of education is very good. And so, so we get to preach to Muslim families and, and I even had one Muslim mom say, can you not tell them about Jesus while they’re here? And I said, no, that’s what we do. <Laugh>. And she said, okay. And we still continue to share the gospel with them. But yeah, we see our preschool as a, a ministry. All of our teachers are Christian teachers. And so we get to love on the kids, love on the parents. And so yeah,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:59):
Pastors in a lot of pastors listen to this podcast for pastors who are looking for advice on how to reach out to people or reach out to the community, what, what would you tell them?
Pastor Zane Bousum (19:13):
You know, I would say do what is connected to you? So do be led to the Lord. One of the reasons we reach out to, to schools is because my wife and I were teachers. And so we have a heart for teachers. We’ve also done things for nurses, but we kind of gravitate toward what we know best. And so I would say, well, number one, ask God, be led to the Lord on it. And then number two do things that you enjoy. Like I enjoy talking to teachers, I enjoy getting out and about talking to the community. So do those things that the Lord has put on your heart, the areas that he’s called you to, to witness to, and there may be others that God brings a alongside you that can help you branch out. And as he, as he, as that happens, then be led to the Lord on what things to do. Don’t feel like you have to do everything, just do those things that God’s called you to do.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:07):
That’s awesome. Well, I love your heart for evangelism. I love your heart for, for outreach. You are a tremendous pastor, pastor Zane. Thank you so much for being on the evangelism podcast.
Pastor Zane Bousum (20:20):
Dr. Daniel King, thank you so much. And I pray that this blesses you guys!
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:24):
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 (21:43):
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.
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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Brad Sullivan | Developing a Vision for Your Church
Pastor Brad Sullivan leads Surge Church in Mobile, Alabama. He is a third-generation preacher and he has a heart for reaching his community and the world. In today’s episode you will learn about the power of having a vision.
Brad Sullivan’s Website: https://bradsullivan.org/
Surge Church: http://surgechurch.tv/
Transcript:
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Brad Sullivan leads Surge church in Mobile, Alabama. He is a third generation preacher, and he has a heart for reaching his community and the world. In today’s episode, you will learn about the power of having a vision for your church.
Evangelism Podcast Host (00:28):
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 (00:53):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King, and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus today. I have a very special guest pastor Brad Sullivan from Surge church in Mobile, Alabama. Thank you for being with me today,
Pastor Brad Sullivan (01:07):
Daniel, what a joy it is to be with you. God bless you, man.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:10):
And I so much appreciate you and Surge church. Your church has been supporting me for the last several years. Few years ago, you invited me to come down and, and speak. And ever since you’ve been very faithful in helping us go to different nations around the world and, and preach the gospel. So thank you for sewing seeds into evangelism. Oh,
Pastor Brad Sullivan (01:32):
It’s our pleasure. You’re doing a great job. You’re a great asset to the kingdom of God and your heart, your spirit you’re anointing, we just feel is worth sewing into, and we’re just excited to be a part of the harvest that God is using you to to reap in these last days.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:49):
Your church really believes in reaching out to the community around where you are in, in Mobile, Alabama. Tell me a little bit about the, the philosophy of your church towards soul winning and leading people to Jesus and, and reaching out to the community.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (02:07):
Well, you know our church, we are in an area of west mobile. It’s called the Daws community. It’s about, it’s a bedroom suburban area of mobile, and it’s like two miles outside the city limits. And so we have just over the years, labored a lot in the community. And so we’ve become like a community hub. We we’re blessed to have the acreage, so that helps we have a 20 acre campus. And so, man, my goodness, I don’t, I don’t know where to start. Daniel spent so many years we’ve been laboring in the community, but we started a business network from the local businesses years ago, as in 2011, as a community started really growing more people were moving out west businesses were popping up and one day I just had this, this idea came to me to start a business network.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (02:54):
And we started that. Then we started the dolls community’s Christmas parade and that’s been going now for, in 2012. So I mean, it’s almost 10 years now and it brings out thousands of people. We stage it on the grounds of the church. We’ve worked with the schools our churches of voting center. We have ball fields, baseball fields where local teams and little league teams will use it for practice. We’ve become almost you know, our main auditorium has become an event center for so many like different ceremonies and events. It’s just been, I don’t know because of that though, it’s giving us a lot of influence and it’s given me as a pastor way more influence than I would have just preaching every Sunday inside the walls of the church.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:43):
Now you’re actually a third generation preacher and the church was started by your father, a great man of God at Jerry pastor, Jerry Sullivan. And then a few years ago, he started to pass the church over to you. And now your father has gone on to heaven. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, but you are continuing the church. But in that process of taking over the church, you, you took the old name, which, what was the old name of the church. It was
Pastor Brad Sullivan (04:12):
Living word church,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:13):
Living word church. And, and you switched it over to surge church. Talk to me about that process of rebranding it, why you decided to call it surge church and what type of impact that’s had.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (04:26):
Yeah, well, I took over the church in 2015. I was born and raised raised in the church and traveled, you know, I’ve been traveling in ministry, doing a lot of missions, work myself over the years, but when I became the pastor of the church I, I about even though I grew up in the church and I was established ministry by the time my dad turned it over to me, I was already preaching more than he was anyway. But I just being the pastor, I, I, I waited a few years and a couple years I was just establishing myself as a lead pastor. And then about two years in the Lord began to deal with me about what is this church gonna be in the future? You know, this is what it has been, but what’s it going to be?
Pastor Brad Sullivan (05:07):
What is the vision gonna look like? And so it was about a two year journey, Daniel of just praying, seeking God, writing vision, mission, and values. Because we, we actually didn’t set out to change the name of the church, cuz a lot of times what happens and if there’s any pastors watching, this will be great information. What happens is they’ll fill the need to make a change. And what they’ll do is just change the name of the church, but it’s really the same church. Just put a and just put a new name on it, but what you have to do you want, if you’re gonna change the name of an organization or a business it needs to be born out of the vision, not just slapping a new name on it. It’s gotta be born out of where you’re going. And so we really sought God long time for vision and mission and what our values would be as a church.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (05:51):
And then we read acts 2 42 through 47 hundreds of times during that timeframe about the culture of that first church after Pentecost. And it was something about their life together that we were just like kept focusing on it was their life together. The Bible says, and one night in a dream, the Lord just woke me up and it was like, so clearly their life together created a life beyond limits. And I just sat up in bed. I was like live beyond limits. That’s it. So once we had the it was a arduous two years of just praying and seeking and writing and rewriting vision. Once we came to that live beyond limits, then the very last thing we did was actually choose a name and we kept coming to surge because surge means a rapid increase forward to try to find one word that would encapsulate the phrase live beyond limits.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (06:38):
And I, I would just say though, for any minister pastor or even a business person, I’d be watching, you know, you have to change, you have to adapt and culture, doesn’t ask permission to change. It just changes. And we sometimes are resistant to change, but look, we don’t change. The Bible tells us, Paul said to hold fast to the traditions of your faith. He didn’t say hold fast to the traditions of how you express it. And we have to stay relevant. And relevance is simply the, you know, the permission to speak to the culture. And so our goal was to like, let’s pick a name, let’s have a, let’s simplify the name. You know, we live through the air of Christian centers and outreach centers and all these different fads and all these, you know, really long names. Everything
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:23):
Has like 12 initials.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (07:25):
Exactly. You know,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:26):
And no one knows what it is.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (07:27):
If your church name will not fit on the side of your church van, you might want to consider <laugh>. But anyway, it’s a bad joke. But our, our goal was let’s come up with a name that when Christians ride by, they’re gonna know it’s a church, but when the unchurch drive by, they’re gonna be like, Sege, what is that? And so that was really the essence of it. And so once we did that, then that’s allowed us to now begin to start working on reshaping the culture of the church to fit the, the new era. Well, we still have the DNA of who we were from when my dad founded it. But you know, as the leader now, the next season had to be born outta my spirit. And so that’s what, you know, that’s where surge church was born.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:12):
And I love how you’re describing the process of building the vision. It wasn’t something quick that happened. It’s over a period of time. So talk to me about some of the elements of your vision and then how that drives the, the ministry that the church does.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (08:29):
Well, it’s all based upon that phrase, living beyond limits, it’s encouraging people that you can have a surge. It’s funny, Daniel it’s like once we I, I took me a while to, to, to land on surge because we were, we were researching words that would, you know, kind of encapsulate live beyond limits. Surge just kept popping up because it means a rapid increase forward. Well, my wife loved it immediately. It took me some months, but I just wanted to have a witness because, you know, when you’re changing the name of something and my dad at the time was still on staff with us and he was fully behind what we were doing, but you only got one shot to make it right. It can be a hu big, it can blow up in your face. So I wanted it to be a God thing, not just a, a theme we were doing.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (09:09):
And but we didn’t know that it was gonna be a surge of C <laugh> and a surge surge became a buzzword for all the wrong reasons, you know, but it really is just based upon that live beyond limits to tell people, you know, your life can change. It doesn’t have to stay the same. You can break through to another level. You can experience a surge of God’s power and grace in your life. And so, you know, when we re re just kind of established a vision statement, we try to repeat our vision in as much as we can. And I would’ve really encouraged leaders. Don’t, don’t apologize for repeating your vision over and over whether or not.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:44):
So what’s your vision?
Pastor Brad Sullivan (09:46):
Well, our vision is the whole statement. I should be able to give that to you about heart, but I did notice you have surge church website up in your web browser. If we go to that and you’re putting me on the spot here but our, we envision a church that is changing lives through the message and power of Jesus Christ and making disciples to live beyond limits something along those lines, look at it. How close was I? We envisioned a church that’s changing lives to the message of power of Jesus Christ and mobilizing. I missed that one believers to empire our community and the world by living life beyond their limits. So I, I was really close. And so
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:23):
You have to repeat the vision over and over again until people even in the church say, ah, pastor, we’re tired of hearing it so much, but you just keep repeating it and, and drawing pictures of it and, and communicating.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (10:37):
Yeah, I think pictures are really huge after we a couple of a few months after we, we, and we made it a big deal. I mean, we went, we swung for the fence when we rebranded and, and did the launch, we kind of kept it a secret. We kept promoting something big’s coming. So we already had the legal, all the legal things done in the background. It wasn’t just like doing business as living word church. It was, it was changed legally. It was the, actually the, the, we, we trademarked the name and the logo and the icon. I mean, we did, we did all of our bases covered before we launched. Cuz what happens is a lot of times you see it in churches, they have nightmare scenarios where they I know one going around the mountain to your question, but this is just good information because what happens is in some cases, men will, pastors will change the name of their church and then there’ll be some type of trademark issue or whatever.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (11:28):
And then they have to go back and change it again. And so we made sure we had every T cross, every I dotted, I would really encourage people for you thinking about changing your business name or your church name to make sure you have all the legal things done before you announce it. So we went really big, but shortly thereafter though, Daniel, we came, we came up with a picture and we took our past and it showed our church back in the old days, our present where we are now, and then just a picture of this auditorium with huge screens and everything, our future. And just the, and it’s just for the point of showing people that, you know what, we’re, we’re gonna surge. We’re gonna keep moving forward and everything. We thank God for our past. We appreciate our present by, Hey, we’re, we’re not gonna say satisfied.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (12:10):
We’re gonna keep moving forward towards our future. And you know, when Abraham was struggling with his vision, what did God tell him to do? He said, look up and count the stars. And if you can number them, so will your descendants be? And so one of the things that we try to tell our people and I tell leaders this a lot when it comes to vision is that, Hey God, when God speaks, he doesn’t just use words, pictures come out of his mouth as well, because he understands the value of a picture because picture conveys a vision. You know, when Joseph dreamed of rulership, he saw a picture of it. And so if you don’t get a picture of your, of your future, your present might be permanent. And so we tell our church, look, that’s not, we’re not satisfied with that. We want, we want to do more, be more, make a more impact, reach more people. So we’re not gonna be just sit here and be satisfied with where we are.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:59):
I believe that every pastor should do at least one mission trip every year, just to see what God is doing in different countries around the world, just to get a feel for the, the amazing thing that God is doing overseas. And also that helps to, to season their preach and giving them some good stories to share and casting out demons. And, and, and I know that you have a heart permiss missions and you’ve done a lot of traveling to different parts of the world. Where are some of the places that you’ve done out outreaches
Pastor Brad Sullivan (13:29):
To? Well, I mean, I’ve traveled ex I’ve been to India nine times, Philippines, eight times. I’ve been in Africa four, five times. I’ve been to Europe Singapore, Hong Kong, central America, south America. So I’ve been on five of the seven continents. And I think too, for a pastor, one of the things that’s so valuable to get outside of your world is because what happens is we grow up in certain cultural, a Christian cultural context. And I, I, one day several years ago I was preaching Daniel in Singapore at a spirit filled Filipino Anglican church. It was like, go figure. And it’s
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:16):
The amazing thing is God works the same in every culture.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (14:19):
Exactly spirit filled Filipino Anglican church in Singapore. And you just sit back and think, you know, who would’ve, I would’ve never even thought it that exists, but it just goes to show you that the church is huge. It comes in all shapes and sizes and colors. Jesus is the head of the church and he has an amazing way of weaving this tapestry of diversity into the global unified body of Christ. And I think that’s so valuable for a pastor because you’re talking about vision and leading your church forward. You know, the church is so big. It’s bigger than what you, you may know, it’s bigger than what you’re used to. It’s bigger than what you, his maybe culturally have seen church as. And you know what, you can grow, you learn from it, you grow from it and it’s, it’s, it expands you. And if the leader isn’t expanded, then he’s not gonna be able to bring, you know, visionary thinking to his congregation.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:18):
Being a pastor right now is extremely difficult. The world has just gone through C, which had lots of challenges. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> there are lots of disagreements politically, and then you have economic challenges and there there’s so many demands and, and, and pools on a pastor. What advice would you give to other pastors to stay strong and to, and continue in their calling in the midst of what really is, is a very difficult task.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (15:52):
We have the saying in our church, Daniel, that we repeat so much, actually I repeat it more than the vision statement or, or our vision because it’s just a great reminder. It’s very simple, but it is very profound and it’s almost becoming ingrained in our congregation’s mentality. And we’ve actually just recently put it on the sticker form for people to take, but it’s wake up, be faithful and go to bed. And if you’ll just,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (16:17):
If you just do that for 40 or 50 years, you’ll make it. If you’ll
Pastor Brad Sullivan (16:21):
Just get up and be faithful, now you can get up and be faithful just to be stuck in your routines. But if you’ll be faithful to do what God’s told you to do, and every season, you know, you’re gonna look back and find out, you’ve come a long way. You know Noah had to build an arc for a long time, but he finished, you know, Charles Spurgeon once said by perseverance, the snails made it to the arc. You know, it’s kind of a funny Quip of, of conveying a powerful principle, but I would say, you know, just stay, stay fateful, stay the course, and, but be willing to adapt and to change. The fact is, again, things change, culture changes. You can sit here and say, well, what people ought to be doing, or you can find ways to go adapt so that you can reach people where they are.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (17:06):
You know, you can even fight it and lose, or you can, again, you’re not compromising your message or beliefs. You’re just showing an adaptability. COVID forced everybody to adapt. And so after we, after we changed our church over to surge and look here, we are about two and a half years in as surge. We’re still building what surge is going to be trying to reshape a culture around that, that whole thing. But a few months after that, I told some of our team members one day before a service and a team huddle, I said, look, guys, we made change our name again to CCC with constantly changing church. And I only said that as a, just as a joke, but serious joke to put in their minds that you know what, we’re not gonna be blessed. God, <laugh>, we shall not be moved from the you know, we we’re gonna change whatever needs to be changed.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (17:56):
And this is where I would encourage any leader, whether you’re a business leader or pastor or whatever, if you’re leading anything that is be married to your vision, do not be married to your strategies. You know, what, what happens to churches when they get stuck in this? Like going back into the eighties when it’s 20, 22 is because for so long, they’ve been married to their strategy. How we do it, bless God, this is how we’re gonna do it. But what that shows is you’re not married to your vision. You’re married to your strategy of how you do something. But when that strategy no longer works, you have to be willing to divorce it and get a new strategy. You never divorce your vision. You marry your vision, but you need to divorce strategies and be, get rid of things. If it doesn’t work, get rid of it.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (18:42):
You know? And, and be honest with people like that way. Sometimes I think pastors flight, they have egg on their face. They’re like, Hey, we’re gonna try this if, but don’t work, don’t work. You know, that way you’re up front. And it shows people, it gives people confidence in you that, Hey, you’re willing to blaze the new trails. You’re willing to push forward. You’re willing to try new things and they’ll, they’ll buy in with you and they’ll support it. And I think that’s powerful and just making tweaks and, and making improvements, solve, finding ways that you can improve even down to the way your building looks, find a little thing. That’s just, it might be something small, but every so often they come in, they see something different. I think it’s important. You know, Walmart, I don’t know if you know this, but Walmart changes the shade of blue in their buildings and stuff, you know, in their logo every so many years.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (19:26):
And it’s so subtle that you wouldn’t even be like, oh wait, it’s a different blue. It’s just a subconscious. It just shows you that they’re changing. They’re adapting. They’re, they’re willing to tweak anything right down to, we’re gonna tweak the color blue. You know what I’m saying? And I think as pastor, sometimes because we, we, we hold fast to our, our doctrine sound doctrine and, and, and the word of God, but we don’t have to express it the same way all the time. You know, we can find new ways to express it, new ways to get it out, just like you’re doing with technology.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:59):
And we’re looking to reach a new generation. So we use whatever tools and ideas that communicate the best with a new generation.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (20:08):
Absolutely. Absolutely. And pull your kids in on it. You know, I think that’s important. You know, my, when we were rebranding the surge, my kids were young. They’re 16 and 11 now, but they were a little younger then they kept it a secret, you know, <laugh>, I was shocked. They were able to keep it a secret until we had the big reveal one Sunday, but I, I had them pulled in on the logo designs, what colors, you know, us making them a part of it because you know, kids today are much more brand conscious because they’re on Instagram, they’re own TikTok. They, and so they’re really brand conscious down to how things look, how things are supposed to look what looks good, what doesn’t look good. And so I would get their opinions. Even at that younger, like 13 years old, I was getting my son’s opinion.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (20:54):
You know, what, what do you think of this? You know, because very brand conscious. And so, Hey, you know, there’s a business side to church, right? And so I think branding is important. And when you have a brand, you, you, you really promote that brand. But then we have to I think what we try to communicate, well, our team is that there’s a brand, then there’s a brand experience. That is what people, when, when they may come to your church because they see a brand, right. But when they come, they need to have, what, what is the brand experience you’re gonna have? And the brand experience will either create brand loyalty or they’ll, you know? So it’s kinda like when Amazon came out back in the day, no one knew what Amazon was. They thought it was like the, the Amazon river in south America. Right. But when people started liking Amazon later, they put that smile in their logo. What they, that was, they were, they were, they were conveying a brand experience that people were having. And and that created brand loyalty. And so I know that doesn’t sound spiritual and churchy, but it’s practical. And I think in a post COVID world, it’s important to think like that so that, yeah,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (22:04):
I think every church should look at everything they’re doing in through the eyes of a new visitor, rather than someone who’s already been there forever. They already know where to park. They already know where to take their kids to nursery. They already know what sit their seat. They’re gonna sit in, but a new visitor may not know where the restroom is. So you need to put up a sign so that they can find the restroom and find the nursery. And, and if a church can think through that and create, like you’re saying the brand experience, that they feel comfortable all the way through
Pastor Brad Sullivan (22:37):
That’s right. And that’s kind of a business way of saying, saying it, but it’s just the truth. I mean, this is how businesses think. And I know Walmart takes a lot of hits from people, you know, there’s jokes about Walmart, but Walmart’s pretty, if you look at ’em, they’re very impressive. Our local Walmart right down the street from our church had me come a few years ago. I think it was like 2018 when they launched the new online story. And I, and I, I gave a talk in a debt prayer of dedication for the first day of the grand opening, but I was just kind of seeing the process, seeing their plans. I was blown away. And it showed me that, that you know, Walmart was not going to let Amazon get the best of them. They were staying ahead of the curve. They’re like, all right, if Amazon’s delivering, we’re gonna deliver. Now, you can’t even rent a minivan or a 15 passenger van anywhere because Walmart, Amazon have ’em all rent <laugh>, but it just showed me, Walmart was willing to be on the cutting edge and change and adapt where other businesses weren’t, you know, it was like, who would’ve thought that Kodak would’ve ever ceased to exist, but Instagram put ’em out of business, you know, or, you know
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (23:42):
Yeah, I think I read that Kodak had the opportunity to be, have one of the first digital cameras and decided not to, because they thought it will hurt our business. If we allow digital pictures. And now everybody takes digital pictures and Kodak is nowhere to be found. That’s
Pastor Brad Sullivan (24:00):
Right. And, you know, look at blockbuster, remember back in the day, you, you had to be kind and rewind. You had a 50 cent charge. If you didn’t rewind your VHS, but I mean, Netflix on streaming and you know what it, when, when, when society change, when culture change and the church refuses to change, church is shut down and there’s a lot of churches that are shutting down. And so you have to be like, Hey, this is God’s ministry. And we got to adapt. We gotta learn. We gotta grow. We gotta do better. And we’ve gotta be forward thinking. And, you know, a pastor has to think, you know, you know, a decade down the road, you know, all the, you asked me earlier about influence and things that we’re doing. We’re about to launch a food ministry outreach in our, in our, in, through our church that we actually are hoping to grow it, to become something that can be mobile. It can move around our community. We could set up and do few distributions and prayer tents and things like that for, to reach people and to help people. But you know, I have been laboring in the community outside of, you know, just,
Pastor Brad Sullivan (25:12):
Just, even in a civic way for so long that I, I, I really started heavy in 2011. And then when I started the Christmas and it sounds crazy a Christmas parade, but man, that parade has been so successful, brings out so many thousands of people it’s given me so much influence. And, but it’s been years of doing this and it wasn’t, I didn’t do it in a way that, you know, cuz sometimes preachers are famous for trying to wor get people into their church. I just did it for the love of community. I didn’t do it in any way to, to try to, to use it as a tool of gaining people in our church. We, we, but it was just sewing and sewing and sewing into the community. Now I’m reaping the influence of it. I mean, politicians line up to try to get into our church when it’s election season, you know, I mean, it’s just, it’s been really remarkable to see how the influence is just in the last year and a half, just really blossomed across the city really. But it’s just been those years of sewing and, and for, for a pastor, he has to think long term like that a 10 year strategy or a, you know, what’s he anyway.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (26:14):
Yeah. You don’t wanna do something that makes the whole community mad at you. You wanna reach out, even if people don’t agree with you, reach out and be serve the community, be a blessing
Pastor Brad Sullivan (26:24):
That’s right. And if you just love them and win ’em with win them with kindness and generosity and serve <affirmative> they’ll, it’ll prove for them that you’re legit and that you’re genuine and that you’re doing it for the good of everyone, not just, Hey, been a community, prosperous, a church prosperous. And I just think that there, you know, and I even had a word from a pastor a few years ago, said that the Lord’s saying that he’s gonna give you influence with politicians. And I’m like, okay. I mean, it’s happening, you know, and I don’t even know what the end game of that is. It’s just, you know, but there’s still value for a pastor. You know, back in the day, a church was the cornerstone of its community. It was the meeting place. It was the community center. The pastor was respected.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (27:10):
His voice meant something. And that’s been taken away in society today. And if we can find unique ways to get that back, there’s still something to have an influence with politicians, to have an influence in the community, to be a voice and a figure in your community as a pastor, that’s a big deal in today’s world. And you just have to find a unique way in our community. We are outside the city limits just outside. So we could build that in that suburban area. Other people, you meant to find a different way of doing it, but there’s ways of, of getting your influence in the, in the community that just preaching every Sunday to, to the same people is not gonna, is not going to acquire that kind of influence.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (27:53):
Well, I really appreciate your insight. Absolutely tremendous. And if you wanna find out more information about pastor Brad Sullivan or invite him to come speak at your church, go check out surge church.tv, and you can find out more information about him and, and I just so much appreciate you and your church. Again, thank you for supporting king ministries and helping us to go to different nations around the world. You guys are much appreciated and thank
Pastor Brad Sullivan (28:20):
You. Thank you, Daniel. And whenever we, we announce in church, you know, when we talk about the, the different ministries we do it regularly, the missions outreaches that we support. I mean, almost every time when we mention Daniel King ministries, applause breaks out because people see what you’re doing and we appreciate it and we love you. And I would, I’m also available for leadership talk. So if anybody would be interested in talking about these things and talking through these things for churches, and I would be glad to glad to do that.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (28:49):
Awesome. Thank you for being on the evangelism podcast.
Pastor Brad Sullivan (28:52):
You Daniel, God bless you.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (28:53):
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 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 (30:13):
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.