By Larry Rosenbaum
I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then said I, “Here am I; send me” Isaiah 6:8.
When evangelist Luis Palau came to San Francisco in 1980, he gave five reasons for having a mass evangelistic crusade:
1. The gospel goes to many thousands more people than if just one or two churches were involved.
2. The whole city becomes “God-conscious” for the period of the outreach, making Jesus Christ and the Bible common topics of discussion among all groups of people for much longer.
3. The powers of darkness are disrupted as the light of Christ is firmly held up by a united church.
4. As a result of this disruption of Satan’s strongholds, evangelism becomes easier.
5. Churches grow and plant new churches in areas of the city where crusade decisions reveal a need.
In 1980, we held our first SOS-San Francisco outreach. We held two large worship rallies in Union Square with over 1000 Christians at each, gave out 400,000 tracts, and the whole city truly became conscious of Jesus Christ during that week. The next year, about 3000 people came against us at Union Square, blowing whistles in our ears and tearing up our Bibles. They had been told that we “hated homosexuals” but God showed us we were only to worship Him, and the opposition dispersed as we sang “Oh the Blood of Jesus” over and over.
Since that time, several new churches have begun and are growing in San Francisco. Several thousand Christians have obtained experience in evangelism through SOS and many are now involved in outreaches in their own communities. Major city-wide outreaches patterned in part after SOS-San Francisco have been established in at least a dozen cities around the U.S. And only in heaven will we know how many people have been saved from eternal Hell because of those of you who took the time to come to SOS-San Francisco.
San Francisco is one of the most strategic cities in the world to reach for Jesus Christ. Many destructive trends have begun in San Francisco and quickly spread across the U.S. and around the world. The first of the violent 1960’s political protests began in 1960 at San Francisco city hall. San Francisco saw the initiation of the topless bar, the drug movement, “acid rock”, the “gay” rights movement, the “Church of Satan”, the beginnings of numerous cults and new age philosophies, etc. Faced with such ungodliness, we need to remember that “the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds” (2 Corin. 10:4). God has given us powerful spiritual weapons to come against Satan’s work: united prayer, worship, and proclamation of the Gospel. SOS-San Francisco is simply a vehicle through which Christians can unite for these purposes.
