Is prayer dead? Are you praying specifically for family, friends and neighbors to come to saving faith in Christ? In this episode, David Evans of the TBMB explains how prayer not only is the lifeblood of the Christian, but the key to reaching people for Christ. He also explains the Pray4TN resource that helps people pray strategically for their neighbors by name.
TRANSCRIPT:
Chris Turner: Hello and welcome in to this edition of Radio BNR. I am your host Chris Turner, Director of Communications for the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board. Today, I have David Evans who is one of our state missionaries. David, what is it exactly that you focus on?
David Evans: Chris, my job, my calling is to be the evangelism team leader here at the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board. What in the world does that mean? Well, that means that I serve along with our team, all of our Tennessee Baptist Churches and Communities to help outreach, to help evangelism, to help tell the story of Christ to those that are lost and unchurched. Any way that a church needs any kind of help reaching their community, that’s what I do. From A to Z, any kind of thing at all, so we just want to reach communities and help churches reach their communities.
Chris Turner: Yeah. You run around in the summertime in June at Bonnaroo at the Jesus Tent, but you’re also all over the state working with churches. One of the big emphases that you guys have going with reaching is the age-old church growth strategy of prayer and evangelism. Talk to me just a little bit about our first objective. We talk about 50,000 people, at least 50,000 people a year saved and baptized and set on the road of discipleship is our first objective as Tennessee Baptist. Tell me just a little bit about how you see that really playing out in churches and what it is that you are trying to help churches accomplish in relation to that goal?
David Evans
David Evans: Chris, I pastored for 16 years before coming on staff, and one thing that I always notice, we have this evangelistic type cycle where there would be a season in our church where we’re just red hot, on fire, telling people to come to church, to surrender their life to Jesus and then we go through a cycle of discipleship. Then we go through a cycle of just conflict and problem, but then when it was time to get back into outreach and growth again, it was almost like I had to kickstart it off, I had to jumpstart the car back off. Every single time as a pastor the one element that always came back to mind was prayer.
Every single time that we start sharing our faith best was when we are praying the most and prayer and prayer and prayer. It kind of surprised me, but it doesn’t. When I came on staff, the number of church leaders or churches or people that say, hey man, our church or my Sunday school or I am not sharing my faith, can you help us share our faith more? Can you help us reach more? And it always begins and is fueled and it ends with prayer. It’s amazing how prayer changes our focus and our attention and where we are at in life.
In Matthew 6, the Bible tells us that where our treasure is our heart will be as well. When we spend more of our time, more of our resource, more of our just focus and intentionality automatically our hearts are drug where we place our treasure. Prayer is that mode that God gives us to place, to invest to our treasures and our times and our resources in the things that we classify as important. If we start praying for our community, Chris, and we start praying for our leaders by name, we start praying for our neighbors by name, we just start praying for people by name eventually our hearts will be drug on because we’re placing a lot of resource in these names.
So, let’s just say hypothetically that we’re hanging out, and either I personally don’t really care about reaching my neighborhood, or I’m hanging out with Christians that don’t wanna reach the neighborhood and stuff like that, how do we start caring? How do we just care about people and actually get on track about it? Well, it begins with prayer. When I start praying and I start spending every single day of my life lifting somebody’s name up, eventually my heart will follow.
Chris Turner: So, let me ask you. We talk a lot about prayer. I’m gonna put you on the spot. Do you think we talk more about prayer than we actually pray as a people?
David Evans: Yes. Most definitely.
Chris Turner: Somebody might be listening to this, they might be thinking, well, we hear about that all the time, what else you got kind of thing. That may not be what they say, but that seems to be the response because it’s almost like we’re always looking for the next church growth strategy or formula or whatever.
David Evans: Next book. Something.
Chris Turner: We go from one seminar to another, and you’re saying that it’s actually the actual prayer.
David Evans: Yeah, and that’s the crazy thing, dude, is that we’re always seeking for another model. We’re seeking for the next program. We’re seeking for that next church that’s doing it so we can adopt what they’re doing and place that where we’re at where we spend most of our time comparing ourself with the church down the road when we’re called to be the church that God has called us to be. If God wanted us to be the church down the road, why are we even here. He’s already got them.
The way that we find our program or our mold is through prayer and fasting. Man, there are only some things in this world and outside of this world that can only be accomplished by prayer and fasting. True New Testament evangelism, at the very heart of the New Testament, evangelism is not a mold in which is forced upon every single church. It’s organic and very natural. It is birthed from the hearts, from the pains, from the experiences, from the education of the people within your body. Every single church will do evangelism outreach differently because you have different people. The moment your evangelism or outreach or ministry looks like somebody else’s, dude, you gotta step back and say, man, am I really doing the ministry God has called me to do or am I doing the ministry that God has called them to do.
Chris Turner: Trying to replicate it.
David Evans: That’s right.
Chris Turner: When you think about this, the first 50 years of churches in the New Testament, maybe in the first 100, there was nobody writing books about church growth strategy. They were all just praying and evangelizing. They were all very much unique churches. Corinth didn’t look like Thessalonica didn’t look like Rome didn’t look like the other. What you’re saying is there’s something very New Testament about just seeking what God wants your church to be.
David Evans: Yeah. There’s something about when your people fall on their face and they seek the Lord. I kind of wanna rewind back to just a moment ago when we were talking about do we talk more about prayer than we do. And I laughed a little bit then because honestly, yeah. There’s been times in my ministry I’ve talked more about prayer than I’ve actually done it.
When I first started in the ministry, I’d never really been around a real prayerful ministry before. I knew I was supposed to bless my food. I knew I was supposed to say a prayer at night, but I never really had this desire to pray and to fall on my face and spend seasons and hours in prayer. And until in my ministry as a pastor whenever I got to that point, things weren’t real. Things just did not move. Something happened.
There are a couple of churches that I was with in my area. They invited me to the church leadership meetings and stuff like that, and dude, they spent hours in prayer. And it just drove me nuts because I was not used to it. Then whenever I finally got used to it, when I got into a cadence, it changed everything about my life and my cadence.
Now, I realize, Chris, it’s the place where we find our direction, our orders from our Commander and our King. It’s where I’m broken. It’s where I repent through my lamentation, through my repentance. I think that’s where I find the greatest direction from my Lord and my King whenever I get to that point in life. It’s amazing.
When the disciples were on the boat and it was just rocking and rolling because of the storm, Mark’s account of that story actually tells us that Jesus did not intend, He did not have intention in going directly to the boat. He was walking past it. But these men started screaming because they heard something, and then you seen Jesus come back.
Now, does prayer change God? No, that’s an age old theological question. I do believe there are times that God’s waiting for us to be broken and waiting for us to get that posture of prayer, and God is giving us time. That’s what God has put in place as the instrument for us. When we fall on our face, we humble ourself to our majestic King, things move, and I think the Lord may be waiting on some of us to be broken. And when we get there, things will be [crosstalk 00:09:31].
Chris Turner: Well, you know what, as you’re saying that, I’m thinking about the story of George Mueller back in London in the early 1800’s, mid 1800’s, who had a burden for orphans. Before his ministry was over, he had housed and educated more than 10,000 orphans. But this is a minister who basically had given up a position to start doing this, he and his wife, and they had no money. But he was a man of immense prayer. He never solicited for money, and he never was in debt. But over the course of about 25 or 30 years, they served more than 10,000 orphans, and he attributes it all to prayer.
One of the storied that he had told was that he sat all the kids down for breakfast with no food, and they thanked the Lord for the food that they were about to receive. When they finished praying, there was a knock on the door where the milk man whose truck had just broken down outside the orphanage had to give away all of the milk. Right about that same the bread guy came by and gave bread for all of the orphans, and so they had food. George Mueller attributed his entire existence to that ministry, to prayer, and that God provided.
People hear those types of stories, they think, wow, that’s an amazing story, and we love stories like that, but really the same God who answered the type of prayers that George Mueller was praying 150 years ago is the same God we pray to today. Why do you think that we don’t necessarily see the same type of movement within our individual lives, our churches as we might’ve seen back then when people like Spurgeon and Mueller and others like that were ministering?
David Evans: Yeah. It seems like in that time of human history we needed God more. It doesn’t seem like we need God as much anymore. We’re extraordinarily wealthy. We’re extraordinarily comforted. We have so many pleasures. And Chris, when we as Christians have a problem, we just chunk money or resource or something at it, and it goes away. Have you ever thought that maybe the next time that you and your family have an issue, maybe God doesn’t want you to just finance it away? Maybe God wants you to fast it away. Maybe God wants you to pray it away. But we’re not willing to wait on him. We’re not willing to seek him. We’re willing to take our own resource that we’ve earned, and we’ve really, really put a lot of hard work into, right? But we are ready and willing nowadays to solve our own problems instead of waiting on the Lord to solve our problem.
And there’s something just about waiting, being patient and waiting, and being prayerful just to see what God is up to. To pray, to wait, to see where He’s moving, and then as the old experience in God teaching, and move where He’s moving, right? There’s something about that that we’re not willing to do anymore.
I feel that we are moving from this model of church from decades of this entertainment and attractional model where if we build it they will come kind of thing, and we’ve done this Christian thing in our lives where we’ve spent so much time focused on my pleasure and my comfort and my safety. Eventually, these monies are gonna start running out, and we’re gonna have to figure out how to do church different. We’re gonna have to figure out how to do church without money, and I think we’ve got two models of church that are staring us right in the face. Either a missional model of church or we’re just going out and we’re engaging the community.
We all know people are not just coming to the church anymore. They’re not knocking down the doors. The church is not the center of influence in our community any longer. I mean, we’re even lucky of somebody comes to our doorstep at all anymore, if they know where it’s at. For the church to be the church, it means that we have to go engage the community. We can’t be a y’all come. We’ve gotta be a let’s go, that kind of thing.
We’ve got this missional model, and I dare say that we also possibly have this suffering model. I say that because throughout Christian history the church, Christianity, the Gospel, being ambassadors have thrived through persecution. And I think right now we’re in this really weird era. We’re in this really weird step right now in transition that in a sense we kind of get to choose. Are we gonna continue to pad our lives and our comforts with this money and this resource that we have, or are we gonna take these kind of things and spend it to our community, spend it to the Gospel, spend it in carrying the Gospel out, or is God gonna have to strip all these comforts away to finally get us to a place of brokenness to where we will fall on our knees and we will say God, we need you, we’re desperate for you, use us?
We see even in Judges 6, Gideon, he was desperate. God put a task in front of him, and he says, God, I’m too young, my tribe, we’re a bunch of nobodies, we don’t have this, surely there’s somebody else. And it wasn’t until he came to that point of prayer, point of confession, point of desperation that God said, you are a mighty man and I’m gonna use you.
Chris Turner: You talk about we are wealthy. Even thought there is pockets of poverty across Tennessee, overall globally we are a wealthy people. And for decades, we really have tried to solve our problem by financially fixing it or working it harder. But one of the reasons we have 50,000 set as a number in our first objective of at least 50,000 people saved, baptized and set on the road to discipleship, is that number … In fact with the way growth is, it may not actually be keeping up with the population growth in Tennessee, but that’s why that number was originally set. We have 3,200 Southern Baptist churches that are affiliated through our network of Tennessee Baptist churches. We have Presbyterian churches. We have Assemblies churches. We have evangelical churches across our state, but our state is increasingly becoming more spiritually lost.
So, obviously what we have been doing isn’t working. We’re not even really incrementally keeping up with the population growth with close to 4,000,000 people out of about 7,000,000 people in our state currently with no relationship with Christ. So, talk a little bit about the prayer strategy, because you guys aren’t interested in talking about prayer. With what you guys are trying to accomplish on the evangelism side of what we’re doing here at the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board, you guys are wanting to pray. Not talk about pray, not host seminars about how to pray better, but talk a little bit about what you guys are trying to do in 2018 and where that’s headed with prayer.
David Evans: Yeah, I’m goad that you threw out that 50,000 number that Dr. Davis thought about, thought through, assigned, and man, we as Tennessee Baptists, we adopted. This is something that we wanna embrace. We wanna see at least 50,000 Tennesseans annually saved, baptized and set on the road to discipleship by 2024.
Currently, we’re seeing less than half of that, and we haven’t seen this explosion yet. If we keep going at the rate for which we’re going, we’re not gonna see these numbers double. There has to be something different, and for us prayer and the focus on prayer may not necessarily be different, because man, we got some praying people out there, it’s just vital. It’s extraordinarily vital.
Chris Turner: Let me interject before you go on, the whole point of the 50,000 is we’re not shooting for a number here. The reality of this is our state is becoming increasingly more spiritually lost every year, and we have missiologists out there like Jeff Forge who are saying that within five years, we will be at about a spiritually saved population as Colorado is and possibly in 10 years our numbers might diminish as much as what it is on the west coast. Our culture is significantly changing. Christians are not winning the day for the Lord where we currently are. So, 50,000 isn’t some arbitrary number that we picked out there, and it’s not about the numbers. It is a benchmark that if we’re not moving that direction, it tell us we are losing our state for the Lord, and we wanna win our state for the Lord. So, you guys are taking steps to do that.
David Evans: I’m glad you mention that, Chris. It’s not necessarily the specific goal. Once we hit 50,000, we’re not gonna be like yay, okay, now we’ve done it, now we can sit back and chill.
Chris Turner: It’s like we got to the starting line.
David Evans: Yeah, yeah. It is that starting line. It’s a cadence. If we’re able to jumpstart the car of evangelism throughout our churches in Tennessee and we just start moving and start moving, the cadence is gonna push us to that number and through that number. What that number does, it sits as a goal that once we hit 30,000 or once we hit 20,000 or 25,000, whatever it is, we’re not just gonna stop and be like, oh, man, we hit that, let’s do our next goal. No. Once we hit that type of number, then what that’s gonna tells us is that there’s a cadence, there’s something different that’s happening that the necessary ingredients are now in place for us to go from a regular road car to a race car. We’ve gotta get onto the boat of being a race car, and a part of us doing that is putting together prayer rallies throughout Tennessee.
We want to put prayer rallies together not to have somebody come in, Chris, and just talk about prayer and give us here are the five aspects of prayer, now go home and pray and that kind of thing. Those are good things. Those are great seminars. What we wanna do is just really do a public call and say, hey, man, here’s a prayer rally, will you just come and just pray for anything. Do you need prayer? Come. Will you adopt households in your neighborhood for evangelistic prayer after this? Please come.
So, the prayer rallies, we’ve got several for the next two months. We’ve got one in January 11th, the National Baptist Association’s putting one on at Faith Baptist. It starts at 7:00. Dr. Scott Shepard is gonna be there to lead worship. After he leads worship, then we’re actually gonna pray. We’re gonna just have the audacity just to pray. We’re gonna call folks to wherever they wanna go, and we’re just gonna spend time praying, lamenting, repenting, praising, whatever it is. We’re gonna pray and pray and pray.
After it seems like that season is over for that night, then everybody that’s come is gonna have an opportunity to adopt their neighbors for prayer. Let me share a couple more of these dates, and then I wanna talk about what this adoption is all about. So, January 11th, National Baptist Association is gonna be doing it at Faith Baptist, 7:00 p.m. January the 18th, Hamilton Baptist Association there in Chattanooga is gonna do it at Brainerd Baptist, and we’re gonna have the Jason Lovins Band is gonna come and lead worship and then again just go right into prayer, and that starts at 7:00. On February the 12th, the Concord Baptist Association is gonna be doing it at Parkway Baptist, and it starts at 7:00. And then February the 15th, Knox County Baptist Association is gonna be doing it at Wallace Memorial Baptist Church, and again that starts at 7:00. February 15th is also gonna be with the Jason Lovins Band as well. They’re gonna lead worship, we’re gonna pray.
And then what about this interesting thing about adopting households for prayer? There’s a software now that’s available to us that helps us do this very, very practically. If you go to-
Chris Turner: When you say us, this is available not to just us as the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board. This is available to us as Tennessee Baptists, so anybody out there can engage what you’re about to say.
David Evans: Thank you for that clarity. When I say us, I mean all of us.
Chris Turner: All of us.
David Evans: So, I’m thinking all of us from Memphis to Johnson City. I’m talking about everybody in Tennessee. If you wanna pray for your neighbors, that’s the us I’m talking about. If you got to pray the number four tn.com, so pray4tn.com, you’re gonna be able to go to a web page that will lay out for you how you can become a light, how you can become a prayer outpost for your community.
What is a prayer outpost? Well, it’s a group of people that are agreeing to adopt their neighborhoods, their community, by name and address for prayer. What is a light? A light is a person or a family that adopts their neighborhood, a hundred of their closest neighbors by name and address for evangelistic prayer. This is how it works. When you go to pray4tn.com, you’ll be able to click on that link, and it will take you to this software called Bless Every Home that we’re using. When you go there, you’ll be able to put in your email address, you’ll be able to put in your physical address, and you’ll be able to sign up. Once you sign up, they will send you five names a day and five of your closest neighbors by name and address. It’ll be in your email inbox. When you read that, when you open up your email, there’ll be a sample prayer. How do you pray for people? How do you pray for someone that’s not you? How do you pray when it’s not something that you want or you need? Or how do you pray when it’s not somebody that’s sick? How do you just pray for lost people? Well, there’ll be some sample prayers.
So, you pray for these five, and then you click the button that says click when done, and that will take you to the website. The website will keep up with how many people you’ve prayed for. The cool thing about this software, Chris, is this, not only does it keep track of people that you’re praying for, but it keeps track of people that you’ve shared the Gospel with, because my hope in the heart … Because, again at the very beginning of this, I used the word evangelism. I don’t think I’ve said evangelism since then, because for me the heart of evangelism is prayer, but for us to become evangelistic, we’ve gotta prayerful.
As an evangelism team leader, as an evangelism guy, my heart is that we start getting on fire, sharing the Gospel with people across Tennessee. Once you pray for them, hopefully one day you’ll start sharing the Gospel with them.
So, here are the things it tracks. Number one, it’ll track if you’ve prayed for your neighbor or not. Number two, it’ll track if you’ve cared for your neighbor. The thought is get out and know your neighbor, the people that you live around. I know we all live in our own palaces, we live in our own little kingdoms, everybody stay off my lawn, and I’m in my house, and then I go whenever I wanna meet people. But we’ve gotta change that.
Chris Turner: I just had a Willie McLauren-ism come to me. Praying and caring leads to sharing.
David Evans: You know, that is [crosstalk 00:25:14].
Chris Turner: That’s pretty good right there.
David Evans: That is beautiful.
Chris Turner: So, what you’re saying, when you start to specifically pray, you said earlier that it’s really through that praying by name for people God begins to give you a burden for that person. You’re naturally going to want to serve your neighbor.
David Evans: Let’s hope.
Chris Turner: It’s probably in the context of that. You don’t necessarily need four spiritual laws or the Roman road. All those things are good, but it’s probably in the natural context of building that relationship that a Gospel conversation is going to emerge. And then it’s just a natural bridge to begin to share the truth about Christ and sin and salvation, repentance and all those things that we call “evangelism”. Evangelism’s not a magical formula here, and it’s not relegated to a systematic process. It’s sharing the good news of Christ and the fact that we are separated from God, we need to repent, believe, and be saved.
David Evans: It is. I’m glad you mentioned that, Chris. I don’t think tools are our problem. I think we’ve got plenty of tools. I think we’ve got plenty of Gospel tracts. We’ve got plenty of educational tracts. We’ve got plenty of things out there to use. If you go to the Reaching app, just download the Reaching app, I’ve got a list of tools. The one that we got focused on this year is the John 3:16 tract. You can look at that, you can use that. NAM has been using Three Circles. We’ve got all these tools. Chris, I don’t know if tools are our problem because, one, you have to have a want to. You gotta have a care and a desire, and people that don’t care about other people, they’re not gonna pick up the tool. When you decide that you want to go gardening, you wanna go have vegetables all organic for yourself, well eventually you’ll have to go to Home Depot, Lowe’s or Tractor Supply and get a tool to design your garden. It’s when you have that desire and that want to that you’ll go buy the tool. Right?
So, we’ve got tools waiting on people that will finally find a want to. How do they find the want to? They pray. If Matthew 6 is correct, and I believe that it is, and you believe that it is, and I know most of your listeners believe that it is, where our treasure is our heart will be there as well. Our heart, our care, the want to, so put your treasure in your neighbors, start spending time praying, investing and thinking about them, and eventually what happens? You’ll start caring about them, and you’ll start thinking more than just of yourself, and you’ll start thinking more of others.
That software tracks prayer. It tracks if you’re caring for your people. It tracks if you’re sharing Gospel. It also tracks also if those people are being discipled, if they’re being in a church and something. So, you can keep track of yourself and how you’re sharing Gospel with your neighbors. I’m not talking about my neighbors. I’m not talking people coming to Springfield where I live and serving my neighbors. I’m talking about in your neck of the woods. Your neighbors. People I don’t know. People I may never get to meet to share the Gospel with. These are the people that God in his sovereignty allows us to live near.
Do you think, Chris, that if God in all his control and all his sovereignty, if God did not want you to live where you live that you would be living where you live? I think God is just so powerful that if he wanted you somewhere else, Chris, he would put you somewhere else.
Chris Turner: It’s one of those things people talk about, missionaries and all those kinds of things, and really a missionary is not just someone who goes to a foreign country. A missionary is anybody who has a burden for lost people and shares the Gospel whether that person’s door is 100 feet away from yours or whether it’s 100,000 … Well, there’s not 100,000 miles. You’d be on the moon. But the point is that you have the opportunity to be a missionary 100 feet away, and if you’re not gonna be a missionary 100 feet away, you’re not gonna be missionary 10,000 miles away.
David Evans: No. No, you’re not.
Chris Turner: And it’s not relegated to people who have a specific missionary calling because Christ has already extended to all of us a missionary calling. Go. When He says go, and he made it easy for us. He said Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the Earth. So, there is a circle in there somewhere that you fall, and your circle may be a quarter mile, but there’s a lot of people that live within that quarter mile more than likely that God’s called you to be a missionary to. This tool, this pray4, the number four, pray4tn.org, this is a tool that helps you be a missionary right in your neighborhood beginning with a way to strategically pray for people. There’s been people who walk about that prayer is that carpet bomb that breaks down those spiritual barriers for being able to then go in with the Gospel. The two are inseparable. Pray for people. Share the Gospel with people. There’s no secret formula to what we’re talking about.
David Evans: And Chris, let me go on and give a warning. If you don’t want to care for people around you, don’t start praying for them.
Chris Turner: Yeah, that’s right.
David Evans: If you don’t wanna care, it’s contagious when you start praying and caring. My little girl, for example, saw me praying and saw this list because it’s there nearly every single day and she caught me early in the morning. She saw this, she asked, “Daddy, what are those names?” I said, “Well honey, these names are people of our neighbors. These are folks that we live next to.” She’s like, “Well, what are they doing?” And then she just went on this barrage of just questions about them, and most of those questions I’m like, I don’t know what they do, I don’t know if all this. She’s like, “Well daddy, why don’t we know?” My little girl was just throwing one convicting question after another.
Chris Turner: I was gonna say it sounds like the Holy Spirit was talking.
David Evans: I tell you, she was doing it. And I told her, “Honey, I’m praying because I want our family to start sharing Gospel and caring for them.” And she said, “Well daddy, when can we do it? Can we do something today?” So, I’ve been praying, and I’ve been sharing, and I’ve been trying to do things. My little girl saw it and started asking questions. If you don’t wanna care for your neighbors, don’t start praying. Don’t do this. If you want to live a complete purposed life of Jesus Christ and be a following, surrendered believer of Him, then you are required and called out to pray for your neighbors. And watch out. It’s contagious. Your whole family will catch this fire of serving, loving, and leading these people to Jesus.
Chris Turner: Other than the fact that it’s completely disobedient to not care since Jesus called us to care and love your neighbor as yourself, if you don’t wanna pray you might wanna check some other aspects of your Christianity.
David Evans: Just saying.
Chris Turner: Well, that’s all good. People can go out to our website and the pray4, number four, pray4tn.org and get information about the application that David’s talking about. He also mentioned the Reaching app, which you can just go to your Google Play or your iTunes app store and download those. Lot of great resources on that. Lot of prayer rallies going on. Again, these are not prayer rallies where we’re talking about the process of praying. They’re actually gonna be places where people come and congregate and pray for people.
David Evans: Chris, it would behoove me not to tell you as well and the listeners that the four that I mentioned are just within this next couple of months. There are several more that are coming, and every day that I live I’ve got in my inbox right now two more email from pastors in areas that are like, hey, I wanna have one at my church.
Chris Turner: So, that’s the other point I wanted to make about that. Regardless of where you live in Tennessee, there’s probably going to come a Pray For Tennessee opportunity.
David Evans: And if you don’t hear of one coming and you want one where you’re at, you call me, you email me [email protected], and we here at the Mission Board will come, and we will be your errand. We’ll lift your arms up and help you lead a prayer rally in your area and adopt homes in your area and your community for evangelistic prayer.
So, here’s my challenge. If you’re listening to this, will you help me adopt every single household in Tennessee for evangelistic prayer? I don’t think we’ve ever done that before. I can’t imagine what in the world that would do if we’re evangelistically praying for every single household. If you will help me do it, I tell you, we’ll be able to see what it would do. And I know one thing, it’s not gonna hurt a thing, and I believe the Lord may just be pouring out some blessings.
Chris Turner: If we wanna see big change in Tennessee spiritually, we need some big prayers with some big faith in the big God that’s going to respond, because we know that God wants people to come to faith and believe in Him. We know that God wants to use His people to that end, so we already know that that’s what God’s desire is. But what God wants us to do is fervently plead on behalf of lost people for their salvation, and then He wants us to share the Word with them. It’s not that complicated. Pray and go. And that’s really what you and Rock and others are calling for here at the Mission Board is really just see those churches.
We have some great stories. We probably don’t have time for all of those now, but we have some great stories of some churches that are doing some amazing things and seeing some amazing things happen through them. So, we know it’s happening, we just need a whole bunch more people involved with it.
David Evans: That’s right, Chris, and whatever we can do at the Mission Board to help people do this, that is what we’re called to do, to serve churches, to make Christ known in your community. Whatever it is, please don’t hesitate to call or email us so we can just be a part, we can help. We can just rally and just cheer and pray for you. If that’s the least that we can do, man, I just wanna cheer some folks on. That’d be awesome.
Chris Turner: That’s what we’re here for.
David Evans: Let us know.
Chris Turner: Definitely. Well, David, thanks so much. We’ll look forward to touching base in a future podcast of just how things are going and give a report on where things have been with the prayer rallies, and then just kind of an update on opportunities that people might have to serve in some other way. So, thanks for being with us this morning.
David Evans: Thank you, my friend.