ISEMA Newsletters
Help Wanted: Evangelist
When I came to San Francisco in 1975, I looked for a church that was committed to evangelism. I found a small church of about 100 that had two full-time staff members: a pastor and an evangelist. The primary ministry of the evangelist was to train church members to evangelize and oversee outreach ministries in the church.
Today, the staff evangelist seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur. I am familiar with hundreds of churches, but do not know a single one that has on staff an equipping evangelist. Some are large churches with thousands of members and 30 or 40 full-time staff members, yet nobody on staff has as his primary ministry to equip, motivate, and coordinate outreach ministries for the church.
There are two kinds of church growth–the addition of new converts (conversion growth) and attracting Christians from other churches (transfer growth). Most church growth that has occurred in the U.S. since 1980 is transfer growth. Adding a youth pastor, singles pastor, or music minister to your staff will make the church more attractive to Christians, contributing largely to transfer growth. Adding an evangelist to your church staff should lead to conversion growth.
Many churches today experience growth by attracting self-centered, worldly Christians and false converts who like attending church. Our churches would be healthier without such people. Instead, we need to attract true believers who want to die to self and serve Jesus Christ by reaching out to the lost.
“Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but from the strength of the ox comes an abundant harvest” Prov. 14:4. Evangelists cause problems for the church. They challenge complacent Christians to witness. They bring new believers into the church who have lots of problems. Often long-time church members don’t want these new people in their church.
What our churches need is a “back door revival.” We could use a few “blessed subtractions” of those who oppose the Great Commission. A good way to achieve this is to hire a full-time staff evangelist. Give him opportunities to preach on Sunday morning about the responsibility of Christians to witness and to train people in witnessing. Give him freedom to organize, facilitate, coordinate and promote various kinds of outreach in the church. Those who do not want to witness can find hundreds of other churches to attend. Those who believe in the Great Commission will be attracted to a church that is committed to evangelism.
I encourage each of you to speak with your pastor, elders, and church board. Urge them to make the next person they hire an equipping evangelist. You can show them this teaching. Then pray. Pray that God will raise up an evangelist in your church who can be on staff, or lead you to one who would work well with your church fellowship. Pray that God will move in the hearts of your church leaders to hire him. Please call or write me if I can help you with this.
Revival Spreading Over College Campuses
by David Briggs, Associated Press (From the Oakland Tribune, 4/29/95)
In Illinois, Wheaton College students lined up until 6 a.m. to publicly confess their sins. Drugs, alcohol and pornography were symbolically dumped in garbage bags as young men and women spoke of the differences between their public and private lives as Christians.
At Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Mass., students who normally fidgeted through the 40 minute morning chapel service sat spellbound for nearly six hours as classmate after classmate felt impelled to make public confessions. That night, the service ran from 9 p.m. until 1:30 a.m.
In a rejection of the Generation X label characterizing them as cynics who blame the sins of baby boomers for their own perceived apathy, students at evangelical college campuses across the nation are embracing a revival calling them to repentance.
“The call that’s going out is a call to return to the Lord,” said Chris Robeson, 21, a senior at Howard Payne University in Brown wood, Texas. “People are hurting, and we really don’t know one another. What I’ve been seeing at amazing levels in places that I’ve been is people have been set free.”
The origin of the national revival is traced back to a Jan. 22 service at Coggin Avenue Baptist Church in Brownwood in which Robeson unexpectedly got up at the end of a service and confessed his sins of complacency and apathy. An older woman joined him at the altar and, in the following weeks, many members of the congregation–which includes a number of Howard Payne students–came forward with their own confessions in services that lasted up to 3 1/2 hours.
Then, at a revival at the college, a number of students rose to give public confessions. From there, students at Howard Payne and the Rev. John Avant, the pastor at Coggin Avenue Church, visited other campuses telling of their experiences. The revival has now spread to at least 30 campuses, according to Avant. “I’ve never seen anything like it, except in history,” he said. “We haven’t seen a student revival since the Jesus movement days of the late 60’s and early 70’s.”
During the revival at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, a white student who confessed to the sin of racism was immediately embraced by two black students, as others at the service applauded and wept, Avant said. One of the black students is now his prayer partner.
At Eastern Nazarene College, junior Amy Zimmerman said after the chapel service of public confessions that she went out and mended a friendship she never thought would be mended. Although the dispute was over “big, serious stuff,” the two friends kept telling each other they were sorry….
After the revival began at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Ill., a student came to church historian John Woodbridge’s office and confessed he had cheated on an exam. “I have never seen anything quite like it in 25 years of teaching here,” Woodbridge said of the revival.
Even some school officials who were initially skeptical say they have been impressed by the sincerity of the movement. They say students are not trying to outdo one another with sensational confessions and that few youths are exhibiting the emotional cries and movements of some earlier revivals in U.S. history.
“What I have been sort of touched by, very moved by in this phenomenon, is the soberness, the propriety, the orderliness if you will, of what is taking place,” said Kent Hill, president of Eastern Nazarene College. “The reason that I felt that it was genuine and it was Christian and it was biblical was the depth and breadth of what the students were sharing,” said the Rev. Stephen Kellough, Wheaton chaplain. “It was clearly a genuine expression of sorrow.”
From the June, 1995 edition of the Intercessors for America newsletter:
At Iowa State University, 300 Christians spent several hours praying and repenting of sin. Male students at Colorado Christian University expressed a desire to be morally pure and to be trained as leaders. Over 500 people at the Illinois Baptist Convention spent hours in prayer and repentance after hearing accounts of the campus revival….
At a March 19 service lasting 10 hours, Wheaton students confessed and repented of sin, prayed for one another and filled five bags with pornography, alcohol and secular music. Lengthy services continued for days, involving half of the school’s 2,200 students.
Similar reports are coming from Indiana Wesleyan College, Gordon- Conwell Theological Seminary, Judson College, George Fox College, Multnomah College, The Criswell College, Houston Baptist University, Murray State University, Olivet Nazarene University and Louisiana Tech….
Many observers see parallels to the 1970 Asbury College revival in the early days of the “Jesus Movement.” At some colleges the video A Revival Account: Asbury 1970 (available for $22.50 incl. postage from IFA, Box 4477, Leesburg, VA 22075) was shown at the meetings where revival broke forth.
Coming Events
August 13-20. Challenge ’95. A week of intensive evan gelism in New York City. Contact Teen Challenge, 444 Clinton Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11238, (718) 789-1414.
August 7-11 St. Louis Outreach. Contact Rescue Atlanta Box 965039, Marietta, GA 30066, (404) 924-0201.
August 27-28 Fourth Annual Notting Hill Carnival, London, England. Europe’s largest street festival, comparable to the Mardi Gras. Contact Gary Lukas, 67 Melfort Rd., Thornton Heath, Surrey CR7 7RT, 0181-684-1603.
September 28-30 National Street Ministries Conference, Dallas, TX. Contact Scott Hinkle, Box 30642, Phoenix, AZ 85046, (602) 661- 6406.
SOS MINISTRIES is looking for two men with a desire to learn about and do evangelism to live in their ministry house. For more information, contact SOS Ministries, Box 27358, Oakland, CA 94602, (510) 531-5325.
A Final Word
1995 is half over, so we are offering 1995 ISEMA memberships at half price until the end of the year–$10 for individuals and $17.50 for churches and ministries. For $5 extra you can have a 1995 International Street Ministry Directory.
One of the purposes of this newsletter is to be a forum for discussion of matters of interest to those involved in evangelism. Let us know of other issues you would like discussed in this newsletter. Also, please send us a report of any outreaches you are involved in, so we can include it in this newsletter.
Our Tape of the Month is Evangelical Fervor: Explosive Bible principles to set you “on fire” for the kingdom of God by Ray Comfort. Ray has written over 20 books, including Hell’s Best Kept Secret. He was a speaker at this year’s SOS-San Francisco outreach.
Yours in His love,
Larry Rosenbaum
