1 877-431-4276Shane Degen | Jesus Loves America
Shane Degen is a from Australia, but he has a heart for America. God gave him a vision to do fifty stadium events – one in each state in America. Today we talk about how God set him free from a life of addiction to heroin and gave him a passion for evangelism.
Learn more about Shane Degen: https://jesuslovesamerica.com/
Discover Shane Degen’s Two Hearts Gospel Presentation:
Transcript:
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Shane Deagan is from Australia, but he has a heart for America. God gave him a vision to do 50 stadium events, one in each state in the United States. Today we talk about how God set him free from a life of addiction to heroin and gave him a passion for evangelism. You’ll be inspired as you hear his passion for living for eternity.
Evangelism Podcast Host (00:43):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast with Dr. Daniel King, where Daniel interviews full-time evangelists, pastors, missionaries, and normal everyday Christians to discover how they share their faith, their powerful testimonies and amazing stories that will inspire you to reach people with the good news. And now here’s your host, missionary, and evangelist
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:06):
Daniel King. Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King. I’m excited about telling people about Jesus today. I have a very special guest with me, Shane Deagan from Australia. Thank you for being on the Evangelism Podcast.
Shane Degen (01:20):
Good morning, Daniel. Thanks for having us.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:23):
Alright, so you are an evangelist.
Shane Degen (01:25):
Yes sir.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:25):
And you have come here to America as a missionary because God has given you a vision to reach the nation of the United States for Jesus.
Shane Degen (01:38):
Yes sir.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:38):
And your ministry is Jesus loves America. Yes,
Shane Degen (01:42):
He does.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:42):
So I love us.
Shane Degen (01:43):
Yes. It’s the gospel in three words.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:45):
Well, let’s start at the beginning. How did you become a believer and then how did you start stepping out in evangelism?
Shane Degen (01:56):
Okay, right. So we’ve only got half a day. No, I’m kidding. Give an evangelist to Mike, he’ll take over the show, but okay. So I met Jesus in the jail cell in the year 2002, January 16. So up until that point in my life, I’d gone to church as a boy. But in my latter teenage, some stuff happened to me as a kid and I got kind of tempted by the enemy as it were for that big wide world of sin and depravity. And so as a teenager started taking drugs, trying to probably numb the pain, but looking for hope. Never really as a boy, I went to Sunday school and church. I never really met the Lord. I just had lots of good teachings, but I did love God in my heart. Anyway, at any rate, I went off into the world, got tempted and started taking drugs as a teenager, starts with marijuana. But by the age of 19, I was a heroin addict. I had a $3,000 a day habit, but I was always very, that’s pretty expensive. Yes sir. It’s
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:10):
After a few days I’d run out of money.
Shane Degen (03:13):
Yeah, I guess. So thus eth the lifestyle of crime to support that. And so there’s a lot of people either deal or steal in that world. And I was selling a lot of drugs to support my habit and it just went from the lighter, lighter party drugs. It just got worse and worse. But I was studying science at university and my major was chemistry. So I kind of fell in with some meth cooks and I was using that to support my heroin habit and all that. Started around 18, 19 and continued up until about 24. I owned some businesses. I had an internet business, a nightclub, and a rave production business. So I was a bit entrepreneurial. Within a year I dropped out of university. I didn’t finish my undergrad at that point. And by the age of 24, the police caught me, sent me to jail.
(04:16):
Then six months later, I was laying on my bed of the Toowoomba Watch house, which is kind of like the holding cells in Australia. And I was just laying there and I was thinking about what am I going to say to the judge because the next day I had to stand before him and give an account and he was going to sentence me and I realized I am not going to be able to talk my way out of this one. They had me, had me on some, I had stabbed a guy. I was on production of methyl amphetamines. So very serious charges. I was going away to jail for a long, long time. And as I was laying on my bed trying to come up with an excuse, realizing going to, I can’t took my way out of this, God spoke to me in that moment.
(05:08):
I wouldn’t say I necessarily heard an audible voice or I didn’t see a light just deep within my heart. I knew I knew and it was like God said to me, how would I like to be standing before him on judgment day, trying to come up with an excuse for hell because that’s what I was doing, trying to come up with an excuse for the judge and I didn’t want to go to jail for a long time. The idea of hell and eternity, that’s not just a couple of years, that is forever. That struck me. The fear of the Lord struck my heart, eternity became real. And so I surrendered to God in that moment. In my heart, I just chose to do the Christian thing, whatever that meant, I’m going to do that. So read a Bible, get to church on Sunday, try and pray. But really what happened in that moment, even though it was a fear of the Lord moment, I had an amazing encounter with the love of God that just changed the trajectory of my life. I did do a couple of years in jail, but when I got out, I met my amazing wife, Amanda.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:24):
And now you have eight kids.
Shane Degen (06:26):
Yes sir. So our oldest
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:28):
Is 22. A big family.
Shane Degen (06:29):
Yes. Well, God has blessed us. Yeah, without a doubt. My joy.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:37):
So your oldest is 22,
Shane Degen (06:38):
That’s Locklan.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:39):
Yes. Going down to what’s your youngest?
Shane Degen (06:42):
So I’ll go through it. So Locke’s 22. Then we have Elijah, he’s 20, they’re kind of one’s in the army and one’s a mortgage broker. Then I have Noah, he’s 18, just finished school. Then Gabriela is 16. Then we have Moses is 13, Abe, Abraham. Oh, sorry, I missed, Evangeline is 11 and then Abe is nine and then Isaac is
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:10):
Seven. Okay, so then you got out of jail.
Shane Degen (07:14):
Yes.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:15):
You became an engineer.
Shane Degen (07:16):
That’s true.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:17):
And then God called you to be an evangelist. And so how did that happen?
Shane Degen (07:24):
Okay, so from jail. Yeah, I got out. I started studying engineering in aerospace, avionics and I did undergrad. I worked for Boeing for a season in Australia. And then my professor offered me a scholarship to do a PhD. So I was about six months into that scholarship, enter revival now. So from 2002 I went into jail. 2004 I got out and started college straightaway. And then up to 2008 was my undergrad years. And then my last few years I worked for Boeing and I was going to work for them full-time when the scholarship opened up. But in the mid of 2008, there was, that’s the year I started my PhD. There was a revival that was broadcast on God tv and that just changed my world. I saw lots of people getting healed. I saw wheelchairs getting empty.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:19):
Which revival was that?
Shane Degen (08:20):
That was in Lakeland, Florida.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:23):
Okay.
Shane Degen (08:23):
Yep.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:24):
And who was leading that?
Shane Degen (08:28):
I forget the name of the evangelist, but yeah, but that revived.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:33):
I remember hearing about that. Yeah, it was powerful. It was a big deal.
Shane Degen (08:36):
Yeah, they had like 35 people get raised from the dead over a series of 120 days.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:44):
Wow.
Shane Degen (08:45):
Now I’d been a Christian for six years and I’d never seen any miracles. We believed in miracles. I just never saw them in the west. You’d hear about happening in places like Africa and that kind of thing. But I was seeing them live on TV every night. I mean 55 people got up out of wheelchairs over the course of 14 days watching these people get up and walk. And then every couple of days there was a new dead raising testimony. There were 35 different testimonies. I tuned in about day 55 and tuned out about day 80. But that 30 days was enough to catalyze me into the things of God. So up until that point, if you had have asked me how long was I going to live, I would’ve said, oh, 70 years, 80 years would be good. But after that, I just knew that I was going to live forever and I had to reprioritize my life for the forever.
(09:45):
As an engineer, I won’t in this major international competition for UAV design, I was a workaholic. We would be up to 80 hours in the lab or field testing. And I realized in that revival that everything I was working really hard on meant nothing in eternity. I was going to get to heaven bankrupt as it were, that I couldn’t take any of that stuff to heaven with me. The only thing I could take to heaven with me was people. And I needed to reprioritize my life to help others get to heaven. So that mobilized me out onto the streets to start showing the gospel, the message of that evangelist, it was essentially, Hey, the stuff we are doing up here, God will use you to do it. Get out there, tell people about Jesus and you will see these miracles break out. Gone are the days where we just tell people about Jesus. Now we need to demonstrate the power of the kingdom. I’d been a Christian six years, never shared the gospel. Once I had seen one person come to the Lord just through living it, he’d seen the change in my life and he started coming to church with us. I was too scared to be honest with you. But since that revival, I see a handful typically get saved daily.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:08):
Wow. So in Australia you had the opportunity to do a stadium event.
Shane Degen (11:15):
Yes sir. Yes.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:16):
Jesus loves Australia. Tell me about that. It took a big step of faith to do it
Shane Degen (11:21):
Right. Wow. Let me just tell you the process to that. So I stepped out of my postgrad in 2010, took a masters just for an early exit just because I had this fire for souls in me. The word of the Lord is shut up in my bones, like a fire says Jeremiah and I grow weary of trying to hold it back and indeed cannot. And so I just had to go after God. So I stepped out, started going out on the streets. But then within a couple of weeks I went to a conference, had a visitation from the Lord and he said, stop, wait. I had stadiums and crusades and everything in my heart, but the Lord said to me, wait, I want you to pray for three years. And if we do that, then we would see the birth of a worldwide revival in 2018.
(12:15):
So this is the year 2010. I needed that word from God. It was a very clear conversation, two-way conversation. It was only a few sentences, but I had it with the creator of the universe. And up until that point, I had very little faith for hearing God’s voice, but I needed that word to sustain me through a three year prayer meeting. So from 2010 to 2013, I just prayed like about eight hours a day, up to 16 hours a day. Instead of going to work, I would go pray, but I would still go out on the streets once a week into 2013. That’s kind of when I stepped into the ministry just started. But even since then, I spend the first half of my morning with the Lord just in prayer and worship, really trying to hear direction from him. And then we mission in the afternoon, go do whatever it is God’s called us to do.
(13:11):
So just in our local area, we started off with a seven university campaign across southeast Queensland in Australia. All this kind of transition happened in Brisbane, Australia, which is the capital of Queensland. And so we did seven university colleges kind of doing revival and harvest. But I was very frustrated at the fruit I was seeing, wasn’t seeing much. But then we stepped out and we did cities. We started doing country towns. We did three major towns, but again, there was only some getting saved. We weren’t filling the arenas and the stadiums we were booking at that stage. And so I left Australia, I packed up, moved to North India, poured my life for a few months into North India as a missionary, trying to reach the largest, most unreached people group on the planet in the states of Uta, pian, Bihar. But that door closed after a few months.
(14:16):
We couldn’t work there any longer. So returned to Australia, just started seeking God, what do you have for us? What do you have for us? And it was stadiums, big stadiums in the capital city. So went in and had a lot of conversations with those guys. Went and booked this massive series of gospel events and then went back to my prayer closet and prayed for the 80 million to do it. And it didn’t come, but that caused me to go get alongside churches, start to rally churches, work with pastors. And then in 2017 I went to Sydney because I kept having dreams about Sydney. Sydney’s the largest city in Australia, has a population of about 5 million people. And I kept getting words about Sydney. So I said, okay, Lord, well which part of Sydney do you want to do? Like this area or this area or this area? And God just said, stop. He says, come up here, see what I see. I saw the whole city of Sydney. I went, all right, well if it’s going to be Sydney, then we need Stadium Australia, which is right in the middle of Sydney. It’s the largest stadium in Australia at that time. Its sponsored name was a NZ stadium. And so we booked it by faith, this multimillion dollar stadium. At the time I was still believing God for a bottle of milk for breakfast some days for our family. But whilst we booked the $2 million.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:55):
So you booked the stadium while you were praying for milk for your family,
Shane Degen (16:00):
Right? Yeah.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (16:00):
So that’s a big step of faith
Shane Degen (16:03):
That actually the word that caused that to happen actually started eight years earlier in 2010 after I first stepped out. So one day I was in my backyard really trying to figure out how I was going to get a bottle of milk to feed my children. The next day we had no milk and I just cried out to Lord. I said, Jesus, I need $2 for a bottle of milk. And I very clearly heard the audible voice of the Lord say to me, son, right now you’re learning to trust me for $2. One day it will be $2 million. I woke up, went to bed that night, a great peace came on me. I went to bed, I woke up the next day, milk was on our doorstep. And so God showed his faithfulness with the milk. And indeed it happened almost a dozen times over the next 12 months where we would go to bed, no milk, and it would just be on our doorstep the next morning. So that really sustained me through that eight years until we saw the fulfillment of that word December 1st, 2018, where we booked the $2 million stadium.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:15):
And so God enabled you to raise the budget, and what were the results of that outreach?
Shane Degen (17:24):
So we had a couple of thousand people turn out growing in the grace of fundraising. So yeah, we didn’t have any money two weeks out, but we got enough money for the deposit six weeks out and then two weeks out we made the final payment on the stadium. But over the course of watching it unfold, churches when we came to town, they knew we had no money. And so it was hard to get them to come on board. But as we just kept going back to the churches, letting them know what’s happening, helping them with their evangelism programs, we had a point where we had a couple of major breakthroughs, either financially or with connections, and it was those breakthroughs that the churches saw, oh wow, God is in this. So they started signing up and in the end we had 2002 people come in the door according to the counter.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:34):
Wow, okay. So then God gave you a vision for America.
Shane Degen (18:40):
And
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:40):
So you’re from Australia, but you’ve come here to America as a Australian missionary and you’ve started, Jesus loves America. What do you see God doing here in America?
Shane Degen (18:54):
Well, first of all, the harvest is so ripe. It’s just amazing the number of people who know about Jesus but don’t know him. So we see a lot of people come to the Lord here.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:08):
Do you feel like the United States is more open right now than Australia?
Shane Degen (19:15):
Yes.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:16):
Just in conversations that you have with people.
Shane Degen (19:19):
Without a doubt, I would say that America is probably four to five times more Christian than Australia, particularly in the southern states, which is where I mostly am. But even in the northern ones, the ones that a lot of people would consider heathenistic states, they’re twice as Christian as Australia. So yeah, there is definitely an openness for the gospel.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:43):
I think that’s an encouragement for people in the United States to hear, Hey, we have a great place where we can really make a big impact for God.
Shane Degen (19:52):
That’s right. Yeah.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:53):
I mean, you talk to pastors everywhere you go, it doesn’t matter where you go in the world. They say, oh, in this place it’s really hard. It’s hard. But I’ve found that wherever you go, there’s people that are open to receive Jesus.
Shane Degen (20:05):
That’s right, absolutely. The harvest is ripe. It’s the laborers that if we need people to know their God, that lion of the tribe of Judy, he wants the raw and he wants to save souls. So yeah, it’s definitely very ripe here. What’s kind of mobilized me for stadiums and those kind of events is personal evangelism. Everything that I’ve just learned on the streets, we just take into churches and we take that from churches to the cities. So our typical campaign philosophy, what a typical campaign would look like is we’ll go into a city and tried to connect with the gatekeepers in the city, the senior leaders, senior ministries, just share with them. We’re evangelizing pastors. Go in there, share what we do, asking them if they need help with their evangelism programs. Could be bible colleges, seminaries or just ministries in general. And then typically they’re a little bit standoffish until they get to know you. But once they see some of the fruit, then they’ll open their doors and then we go and train, mobilize their people. But it’s right from the beginning, it’s with this vision of we are going to bring the city together. So at the same time we’ll start talking to the stadium, start negotiating with them the price, because that takes a lot of money plus faith and yeah, whilst rallying a team that’s going to help us pull this event together.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:42):
So what does that look like when you go into a church
Shane Degen (21:47):
And
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:47):
You’re training them in evangelism, what are some of the principles that you share? How do you motivate normal church members to get involved in sharing their faith?
Shane Degen (21:59):
Okay, well, so the key is the Holy Spirit. We always start with without the Holy Spirit, he is the master evangelist. We are wasting our time because the number one reason you probably know these statistics that people don’t share their faith is fear. 22% don’t share their faith because of fear. 17% don’t share their faith because they dunno what to say. Another 17% don’t share their faith because they don’t have opportunity and 9% don’t share their faith because they are too busy. So the fear thing, the Holy Spirit is the key. The spirit of power and boldness dunno what to say. Well, we’ve got simple little tools that we train people and what to say. But also what we’ve found is that once people know what to say, many Christians actually dunno how salvation works. So when we train people in tools, they just got saved, they made a decision, they prayed. Now they come to church on a Sunday, maybe go to a midweek group meeting, but they don’t know the process of salvation. So by training them in how to evangelize their friends, we’re actually giving them the confidence in how to be able to share the gospel. So that lowers the fear factor as well.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (23:24):
So what do you want to see God do here in the United States?
Shane Degen (23:30):
Well, we were just at Lasagne and I just came back from, well, okay, a few weeks ago now, about a month ago I think, or six weeks. Yeah. I came back from Anne with such a fire. God shifted something in me that it is possible if the church collaborates for us to evangelize nations. Two years ago we had a prophetic word given to our ministry. We came to America to Dallas based on two words and a dream a friend had. So that sent me to America and really it was just to do a citywide event. But while we were there raising the money and bringing churches together, training churches, getting a team and everything, we received this prophetic word around 50 states, 50 stadia simultaneously. One day, 20, 25. Now at this point in time, I was struggling trying to pull together a multimillion dollar campaign, one team, one budget, one city, the whole,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:39):
It’s interesting how God works, like our biggest vision, we’re like, we’re going to dream so big, we’re going to take the whole city. And then God says, no, my vision is 50
Shane Degen (24:50):
Because you start once you’ve
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (24:52):
Done, because God thinks way bigger than we do.
Shane Degen (24:55):
And sometimes when you’ve done something once, he wants to stretch you.
(25:00):
My background’s engineering. We have project management plans with roadmaps and milestones and yeah, that’s not how the Lord works. He wants you to get out of the boat, walk on the water. It defies all science. So yeah, that’s often what we find, which is why I don’t always have a management plan anymore. Our project management plan is the Lord. We seek him daily. He kind of shows you, I’ve found the big picture, but the mistake that we can make is trying to get to the big picture in our strength, leaning on our own gifts and talents and that kind of things. If we want to see God type fruit, God type results, we need to become 100% dependent on him letting him do the work, letting him bring it together. And we are just following him that way because he does the work. It’s a lot more effortless, it’s a lot more fun, and he gets the glory.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (26:04):
Now you also have a passion for entrepreneurship.
Shane Degen (26:09):
Yes.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (26:09):
And God’s given you a mandate to raise up believers who will be so entrepreneurial successful that they can give 90% and keep 10%.
Shane Degen (26:27):
What
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (26:27):
Would you say to the entrepreneur who wants to be used by God to put resources into evangelism?
Shane Degen (26:36):
So this whole concept comes from a man, I’m pretty certain his name is Rg Lano, about a hundred years ago. And what he did, his testimony is he was just a business guy who went to his local church, but they were always telling these stories of missions overseas and how God was moving. And so he went to his pastor from memory, he went to his pastor and said, what can I do? I really want to help more. He felt called to go be a missionary overseas. And his pastor said to him, no, how you can help the most, you’re an entrepreneur, how you can help the most is get more money to give to missions and let the missionaries do it. This was kind of the mentality, the philosophy at the time and just with that church. And so he was like, alright, God, well bless me more so I could give more because the missionaries, they need the money and the more money they can get, the more souls they can reach.
(27:41):
And on both levels, number one for eternity. But number two, helping them just here on earth. And so what he did was he signed 90% of the equity of the shares of his company over to the church. That way he could give 90% tax free. Now, yes, in America people can give tax free, but the limitation not many people know is that it’s at 60%. You can only give up to 60% of profits tax free. Above that you have to pay taxes because he wanted to give above the 60% threshold. He gave ownership to the ministry and then lived off the 10%. Well after he did that, God exploded his business. I forget the exact figures, but like a thousand fold type thing because God could trust him with the little God gave him much. So he did retire very, very wealthy. There’s a university at Tyler now called Larna University, but his entrepreneurial activities were in earth moving equipment. I think he built one of the first or had a patent for one of the first one ton moving Earth equipment a hundred years ago. But he had many patents in that area.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (29:03):
A lot of evangelists. Listen to this podcast. What advice would you give to evangelists?
Shane Degen (29:13):
I love Jesus. Everything. The number one thing that just has made the biggest difference in my life as it’s that first watch recently, this is what I’ve realized it is I spend the first three hours of the day just with the Lord and in the Bible from Hare culture, it’s called the first watch. But I think giving that first part of your day and your morning to Jesus, number one, you fall more in love with him. People want to not just know about God, they want to meet people who know God. We want to bring them into a relationship with God. We’ve got to know him. So kind of, I think I meet evangelists all over the world and I’m very blessed to be able to do that. But that’s the key to everything for me has just been that first few hours with the Lord in the morning.
(30:16):
From there, I get the ideas from there, I get the direction. He’s my CEO. When you work in a business, a lot of businesses, not every business starts with a staff meeting. People get delegated their tasks for the day. But so I get my instructions for what to do next or where to go for the ministry from that place. But David says this, he says this one thing I have desired that I will seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life to behold his beauty, number one, to inquire in his temple. Number two. So I think when we come before the Lord, there’s got to be this place of letting go of your to-do list, and I need help with this, this. And it’s really just a place to worship, to praise, to behold his beauty and his goodness and to fall more and more in love with him.
(31:10):
And this ever number one pursuit to mine is this deeper intimacy with the Lord. And then from that place, half the questions actually get answered, that God just sorts ’em out for you. But we typically still have our questions. So he just starts to speak and then you can go about and do what he says. And I’ve found that’s the way to be the most fruitful. The days where I get busy, and I don’t do that because you’re pressured, because of some deadline. I get up and I start phone calling, emailing, you’re kind of hitting the target with 10% of the phone calls, 20% of the emails. But if I would be disciplined in setting that first part of my day apart, when I come out of that place, people are contacting me. I don’t have to ring them. The phone calls I’m making, it’s hit, hit, hit, hit. So I can actually be more fruitful, even though I’m working less, but I’m spending more time with him because he’s ordering my footsteps.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (32:18):
Let’s finish with a word of prayer for America. Would you pray that God would send revival to this nation?
Shane Degen (32:29):
Amen. Yes, Lord. Oh Lord God, there is 50 states, Lord here, 50 states, 50 states, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. We thank you Lord for what you did last Tuesday. God, there was a mighty breakthrough for this nation and just, I really believe the word of the Lord now is run. The doors are open, wider, wider than before. There was already so many people getting saved before, but for the evangelists, for the missionaries, for those in ministry, there is such a port says one Corinthians 15, A great effective door for the gospel has been opened for me. And so God, we just, I pray, Lord for the revivalists, the evangelists watching here, Lord, that you would mobilize, mobilize, run now with the vision, run, run, run, run, run. Now is the time to run. Go up your loins and run. Because we have this window, we have this window where things are going to rapidly accelerate.
(33:49):
There is going to be just I, just a massive advancing. I see just this rapid acceleration. The interesting thing about the harvest fields is once a seed goes into the ground, it grows for months. The Bible says a man sows seed to the ground, goes to sleep all by itself. The ground produces first the blade, then the head, then the seed in the head, then he puts the sickle in. It’s like there’s all this time of preparation, but in one moment the harvest comes. I really feel like this is that moment for America. Everything we’ve gone through for the last four years has just been ripening the harvest. But now is the time. Now put your sickle in, says the Lord. Hallelujah.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (34:54):
Amen. Shane, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast.
Shane Degen (34:59):
Thank you for having us. Daniel,
Evangelism Podcast Host (35:01):
Are you called by God to be an evangelist? Do you want to lead millions of people to Jesus? Do you desire to be trained in the practical side of building a ministry? Then check out the Daniel King School of Evangelism. Learn how to be an effective evangelist from Dr. Daniel King’s 20 plus years of experience. Daniel King has done crusades all over the world in over 70 nations and is seen over 2 million people give their lives to Jesus. But it wasn’t easy. There was no crusade school. So Daniel traveled the world learning from and observing top evangelists, noticing how they successfully won souls for Christ. Now he wants to share decades of knowledge and experience with you. Topics of the Daniel King School of Evangelism include what is an evangelist, how to be a master soul winner, how to give an altar call, how to organize a crusade, how to raise money for your ministry and much more. If you want to be an evangelist, but don’t know where to start, the Daniel King School of Evangelism is for you. Enroll today in the School of Evangelism by going to Daniel King ministries.com/evangelism.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (36:03):
Thanks so much for listening today. I am excited about telling people about Jesus, and I want to invite you to be a part of helping us to rescue people from Hell and take them with us to heaven. There’s two things you can do to help. First of all, can you go find the Evangelism podcast on Apple iTunes and leave us a positive review by giving a review. You will help other people find these valuable resources about sharing our faith. And second, would you become a financial partner with King Ministries. Every single dollar that people give us enables us to lead at least one person to Jesus. And so that means for only $1, you can help start a party in heaven. And so today I want to invite you to become a monthly partner. You can start out for just a dollar, but if God puts it on your heart to do more, of course you can do more. But please go to king ministries.com and become a monthly partner with us today to help us to lead more people to Jesus. Thank you so much, and God bless you. For
Evangelism Podcast Host (37:23):
More information about how to share your faith or to financially support our worldwide evangelistic outreaches, visit king ministries.com. Again, that’s king ministries.com.
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Tim Hall | Evangelism in Oceana
In this episode of The Evangelism Podcast, Evangelist Daniel King interviews Tim Hall, an evangelist from Australia. Tim shares how he got started as an evangelist and the challenges he faced along the way. He emphasizes the importance of trusting God for finances and not waiting until you have the money to book a crusade. Tim also talks about his recent trip to the Solomon Islands and the amazing things God did there. They discuss the potential for evangelism in Thailand and the need to make every second count for God.
Visit Tim Hall’s website: https://www.timhall.com.au/
Transcript:
Evangelist Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King. I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. Today. I’m with a very special friend, Tim Hall, great evangelist from Australia.
Evangelist TIm Hall (00:10):
Great to be on your podcast, Daniel.
Evangelist Daniel King (00:13):
So brother Tim, tell us how did you get started as an evangelist?
Evangelist TIm Hall (00:20):
Right from the word go. I saw the power of God and I met a guy that was, I don’t know how he was going. He was full on for God. He gave me some books on prayer and fasting by a guy called Franklin Hall. And I read about fireballs coming into rooms and lightning flashing out of these things and all these manifestations. And I went to a couple of meetings and I saw demons coming out and bodies going everywhere. And I went and I was an artist. See, I was a bit of a crazy artist and a mad drinker and I thought, oh, I want to be in this stuff. Some people get nervous to have manifestations of God in their church. I just saw it and I went, oh wow. This is what I want. I want to see this stuff and I want to carry this stuff. I want to be in the thick of it, right from the word go. So I met this camel guy called Camel, and we started fasting two days a week.
Evangelist Daniel King (01:19):
You said, I met a camel. I was like, I thought you were going to say you met your wife,
Evangelist TIm Hall (01:23):
An Indonesian guy called Camel. Okay. And he was into fasting and prayer. So we would fast two days a week and on Saturday we’d pick up hitchhiker. That’s how I started picking up hitchhikers. We picked up weirdos, we picked up strange people and probably risky, but every Saturday picking up hitchhikers, that’s how it started. And I was a high school teacher and I just wanted God. And so I’d go down the river, walk along the river, and I would fast two, three days a week and most weeks, two or three days. And I’d walk down the river every night for four or five hours, walk up and down the river crying out. The guy didn’t know what I, I’d have demons attack me. I would tell ’em where to get off in old language and I didn’t really know quite how to deal with them.
(02:11):
So I used language that I’d used really before I’d. I was slowly being sanctified and I’d walk around and there’s demonic powers and I’m fighting through stuff and life just was this crazy adventure. And then all these kids at school started getting saved. And then I went to these fast seeking God. And anyway, I was really saying, God, I want to go to Bible college. But the Lord kept saying, no, I want you here. I want you to do something. So I’ve been seeking God really diligently and I was at my parents’ place and I saw this half house and it had archways three archways. It had hangers for clothes down the side. And I saw it exactly, and I was sitting in the chair looking, I’m going, what is this? It was my first ever vision. And the Lord said, that’s your house. I was living in that in a week 17 Stewart Street. And so God said, get these people together. I want you to start having meetings in the house. And so I said, well, what will I do? He said, just go and find people. I’ll bring people your way. So I was just witnessing and sharing. And we finished up with about a dozen people and I got ’em in for a meeting and we had this meeting in the house. And at the end of it I said, look, maybe 14 people, something like that. I said, stand up. I think God wants to do something. And the Lord said, ask me to come. I said, Lord Jesus, would you come in the house with that, the window, God hit everybody. The whole lot got poleaxed. The bloke knocked on the door, what’s happening in the house and came in and down. He went under the power of God. And the next couple of weeks, I think 13 members of his family got saved. And the next thing we got a church going, packing the lounge room out. I didn’t know what I was preaching. I’d open up the Bible, I’d go and fast and pray and go down the river and cry out to God for something. People would all fall over, we’d preach heresy, then they’d all fall over. And that was the start.
(04:26):
And that went on for a while. And then I’d go up to the church in Andrew Evans church up at the weekend. I’d take car loads, we’d take five, six car loads. We’d have meetings in the house Friday night. And then we’d go with this parade of cars, 50 Ks to 50 Ks to Adelaide and 80 Ks up there, 50 miles, whatever it is. And so we do that. And then a guy wanted to come and join me, rang me up. He said, I’d love to come and help you there. I’ve just come out of Bible college. I said, you come and run it. I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing. He said, no, you run it. So he came. He needed a house. It’s a long story, but we needed it on a Saturday. And a lady moved out of this property across the road that had big sheds in it. They moved in, she moved out and they moved in. And it was a place where aboriginal ministry had happened. And any rate, we did up all the sheds there and started a church. So I’m only saved 18 months, something like that
Evangelist Daniel King (05:39):
Already pastoring,
Evangelist TIm Hall (05:41):
Pastoring, but not knowing what I was doing plenty
Evangelist Daniel King (05:44):
Of. At what point did you figure out what you were doing? Have you figured it out yet or are you
Evangelist TIm Hall (05:48):
Still I’m still a bit the same and I’m still sort of chasing my tail a bit at 75, but it went really well. Then I got invited to go to a church as a outreach pastor, and that went all right for a while and then it just didn’t work out. And I went tiling roofs and pulled out of everything, got out of teaching and just tiling roofs. And Andrew Evans came to me at the biggest Pentecostal church in Australia and he said, Tim, he said, that’s Russell Evan’s father. He said, Tim, would you consider being my youth pastor? And I said, I would love to. And the Lord said, don’t do it until you’ve been away with me. So I took a bus up to a place called Lee Creek right up in the outback, got a lot in a light plane. I got them to drop me off.
(06:46):
And I stayed out in the bush for up in the mountains for 20 odd days just on my own out there seeking God and just really going after the things of God and came back. First meeting, God just poured his spirit out and the kids were screaming and deliverance and everywhere you walk, people were just going under the power. And the youth group exploded in 12 months from 70 to maybe three or 400, which was a huge youth group then. And that took off. And we did that for a few years. And then I went back to my hometown. God spoke to me to go back to my hometown and started meetings there. First meeting 160 in the church. And from there, just a lot of fasting and prayer. And I wanted to go on the road as an evangelist and this church kept inviting me and I said, no, I’m an evangelist.
(07:51):
I don’t really want a pastor. And God said, have you sought me about this? I said, no. And I went up to the mountains, fasted and prayed for a couple of weeks. And while I was up there, God said, I want you to take that church. That thing went berserk in 18 months from 70 to 700 and doors just started opening now and they’ve already been opening to go and preach everywhere. And now we were all over preaching. And then it was opening up into New Guinea and healing began to really flow. And once the miracles were happening and we started to see really significant miracles. And in many ways I feel like it was a little early for me to quite cope with, but it’s almost like you seek the gifts before you really got the character to handle it. And so when the doors were open, you start praying for the sick and seeing miracles and up into New Guinea and things went off there and it grew from there and it’s just kept growing.
(08:58):
And then you’re daring and you’re growing and you’re believing and fasting and praying, you still seek the Lord the same as you did. You still want the power of God. You try and stay as fresh as you can and you just watch it grow. And I think your faith grows and your daring grows to believe and your capacity to be for money just keeps growing. And where you could hardly scratch yourself to put a crusade together, now you start to have the confidence to do big crusades and bigger and take big stadiums and book ’em before you got the money.
Evangelist Daniel King (09:35):
Now how many crusades have you done in Papua New Guinea now?
Evangelist TIm Hall (09:40):
Minimum 50. Wow. We’ve had the national stadium seven times. We’ve had some great crowds up there. Crowds 80, 80,000, 60,000, 50 here. Some of the regions, 50 plus thousand, seen the dead raised up there, seen every miracle up there. And that’s been my happy hunting ground. But the whole South Pacific has been the passion. All the islands, there’s just something about the South Pacific. The first place I ever did a crusade was Guadalcanal in the Solomons. And we’ve just been back there. Guadalcanal was really a great place. And we went in there, started with a thousand, 2000 people. And after five days the stadium was just jammed to the doors. The power of God, cripples, getting healed, people getting off beds, sticks and stuff that you dreamed about. So it’s been progressive, it’s had its ups and downs. I’ve been through deep valleys. The mountains have been wonderful. The valleys have been pretty awful. But you keep growing. You just grow into it, I think. And many highlights.
Evangelist Daniel King (11:02):
So I’m still a young evangelist. In comparison to you, what advice would you give to younger evangelists?
Evangelist TIm Hall (11:12):
Stay very hungry in the spirit. If you want to go long term,
(11:20):
Keep your prayer life strong. Keep your word life strong, stay in the word. Don’t depend on yesterday’s anointing. Don’t run. I mean we’ve all got key messages. You’ve got your best ones, I’ve got my best ones. And they work wherever you go. But keep building. Keep building the word, keep feeding, keep developing messages you’ve got and keep in that place where you’re staying in that place of intimacy with him because it’s very easy to get too busy and run a little bit on yesterday’s manner. And then you get weary and then the joy goes out of it. When you’re weary and you’re pushing and you’re running on yesterday’s manner, which you’ve all done at times, the joy goes out of it. When the joy goes out of it, you better not in it. And so stay as fresh as you can, develop your prayer life.
(12:21):
And I suggest that every evangelist should at least once a year go away into a place for a few weeks, get away from everybody. I go up in the mountains, I’ve got places I go and go out there in the mountains and wait on God and hunger for God and don’t seek the gifts, just seek him and walk with him. And I find more and more that when I get out there now, it’s not about gifts or power or demonstration of the spirit, it’s about just love relationship. And I think if we can keep that love relationship sweet and strong and consistent, we can do this thing. And don’t get carried away with yourself. Don’t let your ego run ahead.
(13:15):
Don’t let success go to your head. Let success and failure deal with ’em both the same and with people. Stay humble, walk humbly. Keep a humble attitude. Always treat everybody like they’re more important than yourself when you meet people. Don’t be the person wanting to as an evangelist. Most evangelists try to. There’s a lot of competition in evangelism. I think if we can avoid that and work together, which is something I love with what we’re doing, walk humbly preferring one another, not wanting to be the be the kingpin of evangelism. I think we get that knocked out of us. We all want that at some stage. We all want to be the Rhine heart or we all want to be at some stage. But I think just all of us working together, keeping a loving attitude and helping each other and staying close with the Lord, walking with him and also knowing when to take a break and guarding your family.
(14:34):
When your wife starts to show signs of that she’s had enough of everything that’s going on, give us some time and take time, take weeks. And that’s hard because we’ve got to keep the finances rolling. We’ve got to keep everything but trust God too for finances. Don’t feel you’ve got to be out every weekend laboring and working to make money. Dare to believe God that money will come in from many sources and supernaturally and that comes be a giver, be a sower and dare to believe that the financial thing that God will supply. God spoke to me at one stage about the little woman with the bowls of oil and he said, you organize the bowls like stadiums. I’ll bring the oil, the finance and the power. Don’t wait until you’ve got the money to book the crusade. Book the crusade and then watch God bring the money, which is often,
Evangelist Daniel King (15:42):
It’s a little scary sometimes. But faith building,
Evangelist TIm Hall (15:46):
You’ve been there many times when you know that you’ve got a week to find 75 grand or something like that or more. And you are looking at your accounts and you begin to say, Lord, it looks like you’ve got another opportunity to come at five to 12. And I mean we are talking the same subject. We know and I mean, you know what I’m talking about, but that financial thing you’ll learn to trust. And when it’s not happening, don’t get despondent. Don’t let yourself get down. Just trust him. His provision. If he’s organizing what we’re doing, he’ll provide. And just that, I think if ever I’ve had a point where I don’t worry about the account the last couple of years, up until then, I think I was always a bit anxious. He kept us through the whole of the lockdowns in Melbourne and I was able to finance other ministries right through that time. And I was amazed. I said, God, I dunno how we did that. And the last few years, God’s provision has just gone to another level. But it grows, doesn’t it? You watch it grow. And where you used to panic, get really nervous, beating your head against the wall wondering, how’s this going to happen? You settle back and then you go, Lord, you’re unbelievable. And it’s a rest. We’ve entered a rest even though it’s hectic.
(17:35):
That’s a long way around that question.
Evangelist Daniel King (17:37):
Some great wisdom there. You just returned from the Solomon Islands. We did. I saw some amazing pictures of what God did there. Tell me a little bit about what happened just a few days ago.
Evangelist TIm Hall (17:51):
Yeah, the Solomons, I love the Solomons for an American Guadalcanal is so significant. It’s so significant because it was a beachhead in World War ii. You had Rebel, which was a magnificent naval base that the Japanese had set up and they were aiming to set up a big airstrip that would’ve given ’em control. They probably could have taken Australia with that. New Zealand, Australia, it’s a very strategic area, certainly China are looking at it very seriously, that region. And we had the door open to go back and I feel like God’s bringing me right back in circles of places I’ve been. So had a friend in there and we were setting it up before Covid. I was hoping it would be a bigger crusade. It wasn’t massive. The biggest I’ve done there is probably the stadium was full. We didn’t even have room for an Alta, the first one, this is my fourth there. I worked with a guy who set everything up, did a very, very good job. And I financed him to go in, set it up, get around the key people, and it was very anointed. We had a great team on the ground and tremendous miracles.
(19:20):
A lot of deaf mutes. In fact, we were over on Gizo, which is the island where John F. Kennedy was. And it was a little bit, sometimes deaf ears are hard. You’ve probably had nights where you’re really taking authority to bust deaf ears. It was very simple. It was just one after another, deaf after deaf. And the miracles over on Gizo Island, which just one after another. It was the easiest flow of miracles I’ve been in for a long time. I thought, God, is this where it’s going? There was no struggle. Everything we touched was getting healed. And so I guess over the course of the time we had on Gizo, which is a population 10,000, I dunno how many it reached on the last night I flew here, but I’d say it had to have been over half the island or more. And I would estimate that we probably had half the island come to Christ. So it’s not a massive crusade. 5,000, that one. The first one was about 12 or 14 and we were probably seeing three or 4,000 a night getting saved and tremendous healings. It was just the South Pacific is, you haven’t been down there yet, but it’s just beautiful, the weather.
Evangelist Daniel King (20:35):
My wife lived in Papua New Guinea for a whole year as a missionary and loved it. Loved the people. They’re beautiful people. And so I’ve had a great desire to come. And actually other day we were talking, he said, Daniel, you got to come to the South Pacific. And so I’m praying that God will make that happen.
Evangelist TIm Hall (20:52):
We need to do something. I would like next year to take the, I had talk with Daniel Calender about, we talked the possibility, I dunno if that’s going to eventuate or not, but I’m talking to maybe Daniel, maybe C fan coming in. That would be great. And it’d be good to take some of the regions and get some of the guys from here. We’ve just got to know it’s ready and we’ve got to do a bit more research. It’s just opening up. But I’d love to have you come in and some of the other guys that
Evangelist Daniel King (21:27):
I’ve talked to, yeah, there’s some great C fan evangelists that have gone through the Evangelism Bootcamp that are from Australia. My friend Andrew Scarborough is coming
Evangelist TIm Hall (21:38):
To the conference tomorrow. Andrew contacted me tonight. Yeah, he’s is a wonderful guy. You know him. Yeah,
Evangelist Daniel King (21:44):
He was one of my students at C Fan
Evangelist TIm Hall (21:47):
Andrew. Andrew is.
Evangelist Daniel King (21:49):
And so I think we could put together a good team to bring in some good evangelists and
Evangelist TIm Hall (21:55):
Well, we will have a think about it. We are going back and we’re going to chew on a few things for next year. There’s a lot happening, isn’t there? Yeah, there’s a lot going on. Are you looking at Thailand?
Evangelist Daniel King (22:08):
Yeah. So we’re here at this Everyone conference where we’re talking about reaching everyone on earth with the gospel before 2033, the 2000 year anniversary of the Great Commission being given by Jesus and the first day of Pentecost. And so our movement has adopted Thailand as the next country we want to target. And I’ve been in meetings all day to day just talking to different people that have influence there and have done things there. And I think there’s great potential.
Evangelist TIm Hall (22:43):
Did you see the stuff with that village? With all the baptisms
Evangelist Daniel King (22:50):
That made me cry? I mean, we saw a video of a village in Thailand that had over 1200 baptisms of people that gave their life
Evangelist TIm Hall (22:58):
To do. Didn’t they take two days or something to baptize them?
Evangelist Daniel King (23:01):
That’s a lot of baptism.
Evangelist TIm Hall (23:02):
They just kept coming.
(23:04):
And that’s a village can imagine. When I remember yesterday we talked, I think it was yesterday or the day before, whatever it was. And I felt God speak to me and say, you don’t have to work out how we’re going to take this percentage of the population light. The fire fire’s got its own mind. And if you looked at those people being baptized, a fire just broke out there. And all it takes is Australia, we have bush fires and they can start real easy, but all of a sudden you’ve got a wall of fire, a hundred feet high on a 200 mile front, 200 miles moving at 50 or 60 miles an hour with fireballs going ahead of it, consuming everything a devouring fire. And Zechariah 12 verse six says, in that day, I will make the clans of praise or the governors of Judah, like a shovel of white hot coals cast into the dry sticks. And I feel as though the dry sticks are everywhere now waiting for us to just go and light fires and
Evangelist Daniel King (24:22):
Well, the harvest is ripe.
Evangelist TIm Hall (24:24):
It is.
Evangelist Daniel King (24:24):
It’s time to go after the harvest. Jesus is coming soon. We need to make every second count for God
Evangelist TIm Hall (24:30):
Very soon. I love what you do. I feel like we’re just getting to know each other, Daniel, and I love the way you get into it. You just quietly get the job done. And I’m a fan of you. Well, thank you. I’m a real fan of the way you go about things and just to share on your podcast. Pretty nice. And I thank you for that opportunity.
Evangelist Daniel King (24:55):
Well, thank you. Alright, let’s finish up by, if someone wants to find out more about your ministry or even support one of your crusades, what’s your website? How can people find
Evangelist TIm Hall (25:06):
You? Just www.timhallwhatever.com.
Evangelist Daniel King (25:12):
Tim, search for Tim Hall.
Evangelist TIm Hall (25:14):
Tim, just Google Tim Hall Ministries. You’ll find it.
Evangelist Daniel King (25:17):
Yeah. And you’ve got some great resources on there. I know you have some great books you’ve
Evangelist TIm Hall (25:21):
Written. I’ve just written another book. Okay. I’ve written four books. I’ve written one on the first 40 years. Giant Killers is probably the one that sold the most, and Armed and Dangerous a whole opening up of Ephesians. And I did a kid’s book, which is a crazy kid’s book, which is pretty funny. And it’s all alliteration with moan cartoons. And it was really for moan grandkids. But it’s gone everywhere. And I’ve just written one on the book of Daniel.
Evangelist Daniel King (25:54):
I need to read that. Daniel’s always been one of my favorite Bible characters.
Evangelist TIm Hall (25:56):
I’ll send it to you. I’ve done everything. All the illustrations are done with ai. And I really believe that. Somebody said, what does your eschatology do to your missiology? And for me, my eschatology tells me Jesus is so close and that drives my missiology to run. I’ve never run.
Evangelist Daniel King (26:20):
Amen.
Evangelist TIm Hall (26:20):
And that book is geared to giving people something that’ll answer the questions that people ask. So I’ll send you some.
Evangelist Daniel King (26:28):
Thank you. Well, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast.
Evangelist TIm Hall (26:32):
Absolute pleasure. I hope it was okay. God bless you, everybody.
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Tina Waldrom | Evangelism in Australia
Tina Waldrom is the host of the Win Win Evangelism Podcast and the director of Evangelism in Australia. She loves to equip believers and churches for evangelism. On today’s podcast we talk about how Aussies do not want anyone to shove religion down their throat but they are open to having spiritual conversations. You will be blessed as you learn about what God is doing on the continent “down under.”
Learn more about Tina Waldrom: https://evangelisminaustralia.com/
Transcript:
Evangelist 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 from Australia, all the way from down under Dr. Tina Waldrom. Thank you for being on the Evangelism podcast.
Tina Waldrom (00:18):
Thanks Daniel. It’s a great pleasure to be on your show.
Evangelist Daniel King (00:22):
Alright, we have just finished recording an interview for your podcast, which is called the Win-Win Evangelism Podcast. Tell me about how you got started doing an evangelism podcast.
Tina Waldrom (00:39):
Evangel. That is a great question. Well, before the Evangelism podcast was almost three decades of evangelism ministry. So I’ve worked with local churches and evangelistic organizations and then I kind of had stepped out to start my own organization as such evangelism in Australia. And one of the things that I felt the Lord speaking to us about was a podcast. And I’ve got to say, Daniel, I’ve never been a person that listened to podcasts up until that stage. And I was like, what on earth is this and how do I go about communicating through that medium? So that’s how it came about with the attempt to do the same as I’ve always done, try to equip the everyday believer to share their faith with the world around them. So yeah, had to learn the whole craft. And now we’re three years in weekly podcast. Absolutely love it.
Evangelist Daniel King (01:39):
Now, if you listen to my Evangelism podcast, I encourage you to go and subscribe to Dr. Tina’s Evangelism podcast because if you like mine, I know you’re going to like hers. We have the same heart for evangelism now you are in Australia and your focus is on training the body of Christ on how to share their faith. And so talk to me a little bit about the spiritual atmosphere in Australia and why you feel it’s so important to equip the church in Australia in evangelism.
Tina Waldrom (02:22):
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think like most Western worlds, a lot of people, the majority of people statistics show us in Australia are not interested in attending church. It’s pretty hard trying to get your regular secular Aussie into church, Daniel. And so my question is always, well, how do we move the church into the community? It’s a very biblical illiterate society that we live in now. How do we get the church there and how do we win the most people to Jesus? How do we get the most people to hear about Jesus? The answer for me is to equip every person that follows Jesus and to give them ways that are natural. And could I say easy? Because if Jesus said go and make disciples, he must have thought that everybody could do that. So trying to uncomplicated it, trying to make it a way that people can see this is doable.
(03:35):
Jesus thought this was doable, and so give them the skills to do that. So yeah, that’s the climate. And pretty much in Australia also Daniel, we have what’s called the tall poppy syndrome, whereas if someone’s really good at something, the Australian culture wants to pull those people down. We want everybody on the same level and we want everyone to feel like you are my mate, you’re my mate, my friend. So talk to me like that. Don’t talk down to me. Don’t come across superior in any way. So we like to have those discussions about how we can do that, how we can land it best in the Australian culture.
Evangelist Daniel King (04:13):
Now, I was looking at your website, it’s found@evangelisminaustralia.com, and you have a variety of resources there. Tell me a little bit about what people can find on your website and how you train people in evangelism and how you coach people who have a heart for evangelism.
Tina Waldrom (04:38):
Yeah, so basically our podcast is a fantastic free gift for people weekly. They can hear amazing interviews exactly like your podcast, and we are trying to ground it to the everyday believer all the time of how they can share their faith. But also we have online courses. So our most, well-known course on mission with god.com is a course that has four modules that people can go through basically to share their faith. And there’s a free sample for that course. In fact, you can go to on mission with god.com/free sample and you can see how it looks, the platform that the learning is on, so to speak. So yeah, brilliant stuff. And it’s all outlined there for you about what you can learn, but we certainly can make it easier for you. We can make it doable. We can give you tips that you go, oh yeah, absolutely, I can do that. So very relational, very personable in the approach. Yeah, thank you for asking.
Evangelist Daniel King (05:41):
Now, you have been involved in evangelism for many years now, but how did you first get started? How did you first develop this passion for evangelism?
Tina Waldrom (05:56):
Another great question. I met Jesus in the United States of all places. I’m actually call myself a missionary to Australia. I met Jesus in California in San Diego in 1992, and I went to church as much as I could go. It was such a game changer for me to realize that God was real, such an incredible blessing. And on a Sunday night, I would go to this church in Mira Mesa and the pastor did this series on evangelism, and he started talking about this thing in the Bible called an evangelist, which was all new to me. And as he was talking about that for a number of weeks, I just knew that I knew Daniel, that God had called me to be this thing, like share Jesus with other people and equip people to do that. I just knew that I wanted to do it in a certain way. So that’s really how it all came about. And in hindsight, you see that as the calling of God. I didn’t really know that then, but then I just walked that out and I’m just passionate. Every day I’ll wake up just thinking, oh, how can I equip someone to share their faith? How can I share my faith? So yeah, just love it. I’ve been arrested by the Holy Spirit.
Evangelist Daniel King (07:24):
Now, I noticed that you completed your doctorate of ministry at Fuller Theological Seminary, which is a great seminary there in California. Tell me a little bit about your dissertation or the project you did to graduate, and what did you learn about evangelism through that process?
Tina Waldrom (07:49):
Yeah, so that was a hard one. I really had to work through what specifically could I write about, it needed to be practical. I ended up doing a lot of research around my area of the church that I attend and how we can best engage with society. But then I articulated that into how do we reach people that are spiritual, but not so much wanting to know about Christianity but wanting a spiritual conversation. And so I love interior design and interior decorating. So I came up with a course so to speak, that people would go to over five or six weeks, they travel around to beautifully styled homes. It was really pitched at women. Not to say that guys aren’t into this, but women, some of us just love it. And you would go to different homes and you would go to a space in the home.
(08:42):
Let’s take the kitchen. And you’d talk about, I would have a stylist there talking about how you style a kitchen, how do you design a kitchen? But then I would talk about the angle of the kitchen is the heart of the home. And so I would have a spiritual teaching on the heart and heart issues to engage with these pre believes, let’s call them that would be there. And so I just loved every bit of it because so many people are interested in a spiritual conversation, not so much the Christian conversation. So putting the tools there for that space of the journey that they’re into. Then there was other areas of the home also. So yeah, that’s what I wrote on. I loved it. Love fuller, love it, love it, love it.
Evangelist Daniel King (09:28):
Now let’s say that a pastor heard about you and called you and said, Dr. Tina, I want my congregation to be better at sharing their faith and to have a heart for evangelism. What would you go and offer that church and tell that congregation that would help them to reach people for Jesus?
Tina Waldrom (09:53):
Yeah. Well, I don’t think it’s not information that you wouldn’t share or I wouldn’t share. And over the years I’ve learned that sometimes we can go in to congregations or you can say to a pastor years they’ll come and do something for a weekend. Actually, the real life change is when it’s consistent. So it’s more like, let’s not do an evangelism seminar, but let’s plan out maybe a six month or yearly plan where people are consistently getting resource and encouragement to share their faith. I think it was Bill Hybels years ago that said, every church has a high value of evangelism, but it’s actually, it’s not actualized, it’s not outworked. Of course, we all want to have encouraged people to evangelism, but we don’t get them to do that because they lose heart or they’re not receiving that consistent encouragement. So it’s more about putting weekly things in throughout a year or over the years that keeps that value outworked highly all the time rather than a, so that’s the conversation. That’s the conversation really. That’s the baseline, I would say. Yeah.
Evangelist Daniel King (11:17):
Talk to me a little bit more about Australia. What are some of the unique challenges and opportunities for reaching people in Australia?
Tina Waldrom (11:31):
Yeah, great question. So what are the challenges? Well, one of them, what I said to you, Aussies, just don’t give a rip about church, to be quite honest. And so the challenge is like never before, how do we get the church into the community? I actually think that Covid gave us some great insight to what God is doing in our nation. We saw the church become highly engaged with the community and pastors everywhere that I was talking to were so excited. They were saying, oh, our people are totally engaged in the community all the time, months and months ago on Melbourne, where I live was the most locked down city in the world. So we were locked down forever and couldn’t do anything. I saw it as a blessing and was praising Jesus in the right way. Of course, it was tragic, but the church continued to, because they couldn’t go into the four walls of the church, they stayed outside in their communities and they reached people for Jesus.
(12:29):
So the challenge is now, I believe Daniel, is that our churches are back open, that we can slip back into that about I love churches, but we’ve got to continue to keep the focus into the community. We’ve got to encourage that going forward. So that’s the challenge and the opportunity to be quite frank, is that there are great opportunities out there. If people are up for a conversation, people are up for a spiritual conversation. It’s not that people don’t want to talk about spiritual things anymore. It’s wide open in my country. So it’s more the upskilling of the everyday person to be able to share their faith in ways that can connect with the Australian society or ways that connect with the United States culture there or wherever you are. But in Western society, there’s definitely an openness never before.
Evangelist Daniel King (13:27):
So how do you start a conversation with someone who says, I don’t care about church. I’m not religious, but I want to be a spiritual person. How would you start that conversation?
Tina Waldrom (13:41):
Yeah, so I love sharing my experience, but I love sharing it in a way that provokes a question. So I don’t want to impose my experience. I want to share my experience and ask people to engage with it. So I’ll share an experience that, oh my gosh, I had all these coincidences happen in my life and my worldview actually is a Christian worldview, and I’m convinced that this is God moving. I’m convinced that he is real and really alive. And then I would just ask the question, what’s your own thoughts about God doesn’t need to be the Christian God, in my mind, I’m just asking the question, what’s your own thoughts about God or spiritual things? I’m always trying to gather information from people so that I know them more so that I know what’s going on in their head so that I can keep engaging. I’m big on trying to keep people on a journey with people. I’m big on discipleship. I want to actually go on a journey with people in the world that Jesus has placed me and I want to walk with them. And over time, they see Christ revealed in my life. I mean, I’m discipling people now. They just don’t know they’re being discipled, but they’re seeing Jesus all the time. So yeah, hope that answers your question.
Evangelist Daniel King (15:05):
And what would you say to encourage a believer who maybe has a heart for evangelism but has never been bold enough to start one of these conversations? What would you say to encourage them to look for ways to start a conversation?
Tina Waldrom (15:24):
Yeah, what I would say is every person, every person is not the person for the conversation. I would say that God is at work. God is at work in people’s lives, and we need to perceive where he’s at work and then engage. For example, sometimes you can have a conversation and you can sense, oh, there’s an ease and it’s natural. Now for me to ask this question and it feels natural, but there’s times where you go, oh, it just feels like this is a brick wall here. And it would be totally awkward if I mentioned something about Jesus. And I would say at that moment, for myself, I actually don’t say anything in that conversation. I’m looking for those places where God is already at work in people’s lives where I’m coming along and building on something that’s gone on their life in the past, and that’s where I engage.
(16:25):
So in my mind, there’s people in my world that I’m engaging with and we’re just building a friendship, me and them or Jesus and them and me. And then there’s people where there’s already work. That’s the holy Spirit’s done in their life, and that’s more open. And so I’ll add a few more seeds, and then there’s next people that are ready for me to say, oh gosh, a lot. Have you ever thought about asking Jesus into your life? So it’s perceiving where God is at work. It’s assuming that he’s the great evangelist, and I’m really just coming along and working with him or partnering with him. It makes it a lot easy for all of us, I think.
Evangelist Daniel King (17:05):
Amen. We’re not doing it alone. God is on our side. Well, Tina Waldrom, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast with me. It’s such a great blessing to meet you and to hear about what God is doing in Australia. He’s working here in the United States and down under as well. And so if you have an interest in evangelism, particularly if you’re from Australia, I encourage you to go to the website evangelism and australia.com and you can learn more about evangelism from Dr. Tina Waldrom there. Thank you so much for being on the Evangelism podcast.
Tina Waldrom (17:50):
Thanks, Daniel. It’s been a great pleasure. Thank you.
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