New Life hosted the South East Asia Prayer Center’s Spring Bible Conference on Friday and Saturday (April 21-22). The keynote speaker was Dr. Dick Eastman, president of Every Home for Christ. If you’ve never heard of EHC, through their ministry the gospel is presented in more than 290,000 homes around the world every day through their ministry. I found that statistic amazing. Anyway, one of the most important takeaways from Dr. Eastman’s talks for me was this truth: when we take the good news of Jesus anywhere we need to take both intercessory prayer warriors and evangelists. This may be obvious to many of you who are reading, but it was an aha moment for me.
My primary spiritual gifting is as an evangelist. I have always found it challenging to invest more than minutes in intercessory prayer at any one time. I have gladly invested hours in talking with someone about Jesus, or listening to their situations in order to know how to best help them through Jesus’ presence in their lives. I have learned to “think like a fish” that is to meet a person where he or she is to best know how to share the gospel with them. (More about thinking like a fish on Wednesday.)
The challenge for me has been investing the time in intercessory prayer in order to create the spiritual environment for such sharing to have the maximum impact. Dr. Eastman reminded us that we need a team when we’re sharing the gospel. That team needs to consist of at least an intercessor and an evangelist, because the work needs to be happening simultaneously. Those may not have been his exact words, but that’s what I took away from his talk. The key for me was the realization that some folks find it as easy to intercede in prayer as I find it to share the good news, and many of them I know do not find it as easy to share the good news as to pray. Of course each of us is called to pray for others and bear witness, but as we all have different gifts given by the one Spirit, we are going to have a tendency toward either witness or prayer.
This idea helped me realize the many applications of it. For example, this weekend when we gathered all the volunteers for our time of pre-service prayer, I asked them as they were standing in the parking lot, or greeting people, or serving refreshments, or providing security to pray for those who would come who didn’t yet know Jesus. I asked them to lift them before the Lord, to open their hearts to receive salvation. I reminded them, my message will nearly always call people to respond to Jesus’ offer of salvation, and their prayers will help provide the spiritual environment for a favorable response.
If you’ve been marrying evangelism and intercession in your leadership, praise God. If you haven’t, I hope this instruction from Dr. Eastman helps you. It will change the way I think of mission teams, prayer walking in our local community, how we prepare and carry out ministries and more. I’m grateful to Dr. Eastman for sharing this insight and pray it will either encourage you, because you’ve already been doing it, or challenge you to consider it.
Here’s to leading better by developing teams for interceding and evangelizing–today! (And into the future!)