Pastor Jerry Dorris on Evangelism
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Jon interviews Pastor Jerry Dorris on open air preaching, sharing the gospel in hostile environments, and other methods of evangelism.
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- Well, welcome to another edition of the
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- Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, and we have a special guest today to talk about a very important topic, really.
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- I mean, this is fundamental to Christianity, and that's the topic of evangelism. And often you'll hear me talking about the social justice movement and errors in the church.
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- And it's important. We need that. But honestly, the core teaching of Christianity is so much more important to grasp.
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- And if you understand that, you start to see the errors and you see the ways in which evangelism has been twisted and all kinds of other practices and doctrines.
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- But we have Jerry Doris with us, Pastor Jerry Doris from Reformation Church of Shelbyville.
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- And there's actually two, in addition to Reformation Church, two other organizations
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- I want to point you to that Jerry Doris is involved in, Reformation Frontline Missions. You can go to reformationfrontline .org
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- and they have tracks and evangelism resources and also Five Souls Press, where there's a number of other resources and books and reprints of older books, as I understand it.
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- So I'm looking forward to talking to Pastor Doris. Thank you for joining us.
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- Yeah, it's good to be on again, John. It's good to see and talk to you. It's been a couple of weeks since we saw you last year when you came to our war room that we had.
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- Yeah, it's been quite eventful. We've both endured diseases of various kinds and ailments.
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- So now we're both drinking. I'm drinking tea. What are you drinking? Are you drinking tea? No, I just have some water to clear my throat.
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- If people know my voice, they'll know that I've got a little bit of a head cold or something. I sound different today.
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- You need some Gold River tea. That's what I need to send you. Anyway, well, I'm excited to talk to you about this because as I stayed with you, we just had some limited conversation.
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- You told me a lot about the evangelism that you do and even open air preaching in the parking lot.
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- And honestly, things that a lot of Christians would find probably unusual or they'd be skeptical. Does that work?
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- And since your church, it's not that old. You've only been, what, three or four years, something like that.
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- We're year four right now. And you planted the church and it's growing and people are even moving there from other parts of the country.
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- But evangelism is certainly one of the ways that this is happening. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your story, maybe your testimony, how you became a
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- Christian and a missionary, and then give us your thoughts on evangelism. Yeah, sure.
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- No, I gave my life to Christ in, I think it was 84, if I remember the date correctly.
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- And the Lord radically saved me. And I remember even in my high school, this was in Aberdeen, South Dakota, that I would stand in my high school and with another buddy who is similarly, you know, radically saved.
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- And we would, he would say, Hey, Jerry, what do I have to be, do to be saved? And I would yell out the answers as students were weaving through the annex of the school.
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- So during that time, I just felt very impressed with the
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- Lord that I was to be a missionary and thought I was going to go right away. And the Lord took me to Bible college instead.
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- And then from there that my wife and she and I went to Istanbul, Turkey, we were on the Asian side of Turkey for a number of years.
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- And then we thought that's where we were going to be for the rest of our lives. And, but the
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- Lord saw fit to bring us home and I think it was 98, 99, somewhere around there. We'd had our two boys there.
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- And we moved, we moved to, back to Minneapolis where we had gone to Bible college and then just realized we hated the cold.
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- And so decided to move south and we moved to Louisville, Kentucky here. And it's there that we've, the
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- Lord has just blessed us. I would say it was in 2004 that I was first confronted with way of the master.
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- I think you're familiar with way of the master too, and just the good person test and taking people through that.
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- I first opened or preached at the university of Louisville in 2005 and the Lord has just blessed us.
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- We've been able to do a lot of evangelism around. The Lord called me to the pastorate that was in 2014.
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- And then in 2017, that group that I was pastoring, I said,
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- I suggested that we replant and the elders were in agreement with that. And so we replanted our church in a new location, took on the 1689 as our confession and called ourselves
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- Reformation Church of Shelbyville. And so that we try to correspond with the 500th anniversary of the
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- Protestant Reformation. But that's my quick story. So our DNA is evangelism.
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- It's in bread and me. It's the it's the all of the elders do evangelism.
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- And so our church, we go out four times a week, at least more like five times.
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- So even right now, we have one of our pastors is at the abortion clinic pleading there.
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- There will be other people that from our church that will be there. We go we go all over.
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- We open our preacher at our Kroger, at our Wal -Mart, at our gas stations. We hand out tracks on street corners.
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- We first name basis with our police in our city. They approve of what we're doing.
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- And then we go that's our small town Shelbyville. And then we go into Louisville. We will be at pride events will be at festivals.
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- We were, you know, University of Louisville football games, those kind of things, handing out tracks with their preaching one on one conversation.
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- So that's kind of a quick dump of of what we do. Well, I've heard it said,
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- I don't know who said it, but a church that doesn't evangelize is dying, that it won't last long.
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- And so that that being a fundamental barometer by which you can judge whether or not the church is actually excited about the gospel and the things of the
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- Lord and want they want to tell other people. And and so, I mean, you're doing kind of,
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- I would say, more than most of the churches that that I'm familiar with. I like I said,
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- I'm familiar with way the master going out, handing out tracks, starting conversations. I don't think I've ever seen anyone open or preaching a
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- Kroger, you know, or a grocery store or something like that. And so I was hoping maybe you could talk about some of the rationale you have and then maybe the fruit that you've seen from some of like open air preaching and going to even pride events.
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- That's something I think a lot of Christians would say, let's get out of town that weekend. Like, we don't want to be around that evil, but you're charging into it.
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- So what's the rationale behind that? So let me amend something that we would not stand in the middle of a
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- Kroger and preach, but our Kroger has public sidewalks that are adjacent to their parking lot and then
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- Kroger fuels. We have a very pretty, pretty unique situation where we can preach to several hundred cars and people that are going in and out of that place.
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- And we do that most Friday nights. We'll stand out there and then
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- Walmart. We've gotten permission. You've ever seen like the Boy Scouts or whoever.
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- They'll go to Walmart and they're handing out cookies or popcorn subscriptions. And I would encourage other people to do this.
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- Contact your local Walmart. You can be one of those groups and just stand there. We've set up our prayer station and we've handed on average, like before COVID, we haven't done it since COVID.
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- But before COVID, when we would do it, we would do it once a month and we would hand out close to 3000 tracks in a day that we were there and we would just take shifts as a church.
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- So we'd have four man shifts. So we'd just cover all the doors and people going in and out of the place. So, yeah, there's that.
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- Gas stations, you know, we will go to a gas station. We like gas stations because you usually have somebody there for probably a good five minutes, maybe, where they're standing outside their car.
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- They're listening. And you ask about fruit. I mean, we the fruit of that is, you know, we don't do this because we're, you know, we're trying to, this may sound weird, but that we're trying to win the loss.
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- We do this because we're being obedient. We believe the mission statement of Reformation Frontline Missions is make
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- Jesus unavoidable. And so the preacher, the track giver, the conversation, they're always fruitful because they're always leading everybody to Christ.
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- You're pointing them to Christ. So whether somebody comes to faith or, you know, whatever, whatever we would identify as being a positive result of those kind of things, you know, that's actually inconsequential to what we're trying to to do.
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- Evangelism is worship for the Christian. It's obedience. It's it's an opportunity to express the joy, what we have found, what
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- Christ has done for us. And so we get to do that. We get to and I kind of think of it like take your kid to work day.
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- You know, you bring your kid to work and he thinks that he's doing so you set him up a little desk next to you or whatever your job is.
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- And he thinks he's contributing. He's doing something and he's and that's kind of like evangelism for us, because God is the one who's awakening dead hearts.
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- He is the one who through the spirit is calling people. He's the one who is emphasizing the words that are being said and we get to go along with him.
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- He's the evangelist and we go with him. That's kind of how I like to to view evangelism.
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- Well, but we do see really cool fruit. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, no, I don't want to stop you now that you started that down that track.
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- So tell me, tell us a little bit about the cool fruit. Yeah, so we get people that stop all the time and just for conversation to hear our prayer station.
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- I love the prayer station and I call that spider evangelism. So it's spider evangelism is where you put out a sign.
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- So that could be like a, you know, a book table or free Bible sign or a prayer station sign or something and you're just waiting.
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- You know, you're sitting there with other brothers and sisters in Christ, you're fellowshipping. And for us, somebody will drive along.
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- We do this in front of our church once a week. Somebody will pull up into the prayer station area, into our parking lot because our church is in a commercial area.
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- Yeah, strip mall. And so we get a lot of traffic that way. So sometimes we'll throw our bodies in front of cars in order to get them to stop.
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- But most so people will pull up, though, and just they'll pull in. And we just heard some really amazing things.
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- We had a we had a lady who came. She was a high school or a college student, and she had driven from her college in Florida and had been driving and just wrestling with the
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- Lord and knew the Lord was wanted, you know, was speaking to her.
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- She was under conviction. And she said, Lord, just give me a sign. Give me a sign. And so she goes by and she sees our signs.
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- And so she pulls in and I'm able to share the gospel with her. I took her through the wall, shared the gospel with her.
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- And then a dear sister in the church, she said, I forget the gal's name now, but she says, do you want to sit down and pray?
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- Do you want to should we go inside the church and just spend some more time together? And she's like, yeah, I'd love to do that.
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- She went in there and just praying. We've had that happen multiple times where people have said
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- I was looking for a sign and here this sign was and they pulled in. I've had people pull up and have.
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- Like their husband had just left them, they wanted prayer, you know, we think in terms of triage, what's the what's when somebody comes, they are hurt, they're wounded and they think this is their biggest issue, you know, that my husband just left us.
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- I left my family, left me, left the children. And that's a big issue. And we want to help them. The best thing that I can do for somebody is to acquaint them with Christ, somebody who knows grief, knows pain, because he is going to walk with them.
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- And so we do that. We will talk to them about their relationship with the Lord, their support group, those kind of things.
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- We give we've given food, we've given drives, we've given gasoline to different people that have stopped for those types of things.
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- Open air preaching, some of the some of the best times we have people that come to our church because they first heard us open air preaching.
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- Austin Keillor is one of our full time evangelists in the church. He supported through Reformation Frontline Missions.
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- And he in our local Shelbyville group, there's like 13000 people in this one
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- Facebook group. So it's where you go for news about about this. Somebody had asked the question, how can what is there a good church for me to go to?
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- And somebody said, you don't need to go to church. You can just go to Kroger at this particular time.
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- You can listen to the ladder man. And so he's known now as the ladder ladder man, because he stands out there.
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- But we get people that come. So right now we have a dear brother, Nathan, who has been coming to the church for about a month and a half.
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- I met him at our courthouse. So on Tuesday mornings, we have a courthouse ministry.
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- And so I was there. We have our prayer station sign and free Bible sign and just giving out tracts and praying with people as they go into the courthouse.
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- And so he had come through and I interacted with him and he says, I've got to go in.
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- Let me come back out. I'd like to talk to you guys. So he comes out. We talk. And this is a believer. He's as I discern,
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- I'm looking for genuine understanding of the gospel, those kind of things. And he knew the gospel.
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- He understood these things. I said, so Nathan, where are you in fellowship? He goes, I'm not. He says,
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- I haven't been for years. They just I live here in Shelbyville and I just don't know where to go. And I said, well, this is what you're going to do.
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- I said, this coming Sunday at 11 o 'clock, you're going to come. I'm preaching. I'm going to be in Second Samuel. I gave him the passage that I was going to be at.
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- And so he shows up. And after the service, I'm speaking to him. He's just he goes, brother, it's hard for me to hold back tears right now to have found a church that just is faithfully preaching the scriptures.
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- And so he brought his daughter the next week and he's he's just been coming faithfully sits in the front row. Yeah, that's the kind of fruit we get.
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- Yeah, well, there's like I said, I think an aversion some have to I mean, you have so many different methods that you're using or styles.
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- I don't know what word to give to that. But, you know, you're fishing for the panfish with the worm.
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- So they come up and you're also doing the bass fishing where you're throwing the lure out and you're making some noise. But some people get nervous when it comes to the latter making the noise and being they feel exposed.
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- They feel out there. They feel like, well, it's not my gift. I mean, I hear this kind of thing a lot. I don't the
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- Lord hasn't equipped me to go just talk to strangers. It's scary. Give me some just practical things for people listening who are afraid of that.
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- What what kind of things can they do to get over their fear? Baby steps, where would you tell them to start?
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- Well, so I understand we're talking about stranger evangelism or public evangelism versus private evangelism, private.
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- If there's a fear to talk to people one on one, you know, like it's you're talking to your mom or talking.
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- That's a different kind of fear set. And if you're struggling there, you're really going to probably struggle in more of the public setting.
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- But in a lot of ways, the public setting is easier than the private setting. It's it's almost easier to speak to a perfect stranger than it is to my neighbor who
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- I'm going to see again tomorrow and the day after and the week after in a month in the year. You know, they're my neighbor and always they're going to be around.
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- But at some point you've got to wrestle with repent of your fear of man. And that doesn't mean get on the box and start preaching.
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- We actually do not allow people to pre open air preach unless they are elder qualified.
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- And so we believe that preaching in the open air is reserved as much for like the pulpit is that so we would not put a young Christian who doesn't know.
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- So for our younger brothers, what we would have them do is stand and just read some scripture out loud.
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- And so they're getting they're getting a sense of those things, but we're not asking them to preach.
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- So we have a rationale and methodology behind behind that. But I would say to get over that fear as a church.
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- So let me just put another spin on this, I really believe that the church.
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- Churches evangelism effort needs to be led by our pastors, if our pastor is just saying, hey, share the gospel and they're saying share the gospel all the time in their sermons and they don't actually share the gospel or model it or create opportunity for the church to do those things in a public setting.
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- I think they're failing their duty when the scriptures are commanded to do the work of an evangelist to elders.
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- So anyways, yeah, go ahead. So have you struggled with that? I just want to make it real for the people listening, because, you know,
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- I think some would think, well, this guy, he's just brave. He just goes out there and he doesn't really care what people think.
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- And he's going to share the truth. But I know you're human. So, I mean, like when you were first being introduced to Way the
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- Master and starting to get into some of this, I mean, did you have that fear of man? Oh, yeah, absolutely.
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- The first time I there was another brother, John Hublin, dear, love him dearly.
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- He was the one who helped me. I had contacted him. I found out through some searching,
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- I'm not sure how to find out, that he was leading a team doing some Way of the Master evangelism here in Louisville.
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- And I remember talking to him, showing up for the first time and then him giving me a stack of tracks. We were walking down Bardstown Road here in Louisville and just, you know, when you encounter somebody, you'd hand them a track.
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- And I remember being terrified to hand a piece of paper to somebody. Right. I mean, just like quivering, like quivering,
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- I couldn't do it type of thing. But once you step out and you do those kind of things, you realize, hey, it's not as bad as I thought it was.
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- Or more importantly, I don't have to know everything. A lot of a lot of people think that I can't evangelize because I don't have all the theology that my pastor has.
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- I don't have it all all figured out. I don't have all the scripture memorized. I've got a lot more preparation.
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- No, we are like the woman at the well. We just go and tell what we just found out, what we know.
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- And and sometimes we don't we don't even need to speak if we just hand a track to somebody.
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- So one of the ways incorporate evangelism that I think is so helpful is just simply a prayer station.
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- I call it that or just a prayer, some some way that you get your body out there to, you know, a couple of couple of brothers and sisters in Christ just sitting around with a sign that says, hey, how can we pray for you?
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- And people stop. What is that hard? Is it hard to pray with people when somebody comes up and they're in tears or they have need or whatever those things are, they've stopped, you quickly overcome your fear.
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- So we have we've seen a path. We've seen people that were fearful come to the prayer station, be encouraged to do that, pray with a few people, and then they step out and they start to do some other things.
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- They may go with us to an event where they hand out tracks and that's all they're doing is they're handing out a track or where they go to the abortion clinic for the first time.
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- And what they do at the abortion clinic is they literally sit there and they pray. They're standing and they pray.
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- They hear the open air preacher. They hear people pleading, people walking with with with young couples going in and pleading with them.
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- But their job is just to pray or to hold a sign. So there's there's many roles that do not require you to to be the guy, be the one that has to know all the answers.
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- But I would say you grow in those kind of things to take inch inch forward just a little bit.
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- So if you if you've never done something like this, just start with a prayer station, start with going someplace to just pray with the rest of the group.
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- And that would be how I overcome that practically. What about the and that's very good, by the way.
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- But what about the the gay pride parades and abortion clinic?
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- Right. These are places where you're going to engage probably a lot of hostility, a lot of people that are going to either ask you questions or try to challenge you in ways that might they're trying to stump you.
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- They're trying to get you on something. I mean, that I think there's a lot of fear there for some
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- Christians that they're going to, like you said, be stumped or it might just not even be safe or moral.
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- Some of the things you're going to see are kind of like very shocking. Yeah. Can you just tell us talk to us a little bit about that?
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- What does that ministry look like? You know, do you have special advice for people who might want to get into something like that where it's it's really light darkness?
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- The contrast can't be any more stark. Yeah, well, I would encourage anybody to go along with somebody who has done this type of ministry to not go cold turkey.
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- More than likely in your area, there's going to be somebody that has doing abortion clinic ministry.
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- Just go with them, talk to them, meet up, go have coffee with them, go one time. Every person who goes to the abortion clinic for the first time is destroyed.
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- You will go home, you will weep, you will be broken. You will you will experience hostility that you did not expect.
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- You will you will encounter demonic activity, just the oppressive feeling, you know, and then you develop a catalyst to that.
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- The more you go back down the boulder, you realize that, hey, actually, I'm on the side of Christ.
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- We win the victory. You know, we you know, we we're in a different place. So but start with going with somebody like that.
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- The first time you just had Joseph Spurgeon, first time I went to a pride event was with Joseph Spurgeon.
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- We confronted a drag queen story hour event that was happening at the public library.
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- Was that the one that made news? Yeah, it did. Yeah, yeah, I saw that. Joseph was awesome.
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- He he he exposed that and got it all shifted around. I mean, it's still there still do it.
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- I was even noticing this morning they're still doing it. They continue to do those kind of activities.
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- But such is the the heart of man. And frankly, our city in our government that we have here in Louisville, Kentucky, is wicked.
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- And so they support this kind of stuff. But the first time I went, I was unprepared.
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- And I was I was subdued. I remember Joseph calling me and we talked.
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- He kind of did a debrief on that. But the next time I was better prepared, we've made some mistakes on the way
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- I as a church, we no longer allow our women to go with us to those pride events just to feel like it's just not appropriate there, especially so we've gone to what we've gone all over to different pride events.
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- And we have seen some wickedness teaching BDM, you know, in in the facilities there.
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- So that that's for that's for men, for our church. Others may see differently there.
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- And I, you know, especially if you've got somebody who's able to engage in that. But I think you build up to those kind of things.
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- Does that make sense? Yeah. Not everybody who goes is doing the same thing. The open air preacher is the tip of the spear in those.
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- But handing out a track and having a conversation with somebody, you build up to that standing and praying, just supporting the effort is is is you can do a lesser event.
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- So common objections that you might get, you know, the Bible supports some kind of patriarchal oppression or the persecution of LGBT slavery.
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- You know, there's all the whole list of very common objections that you might get in a setting like that.
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- How do you handle those when when people bring those up and try to stop the flow of sharing the good news of Jesus Christ?
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- Do you have like your elevator stump speech, like ready to go at this point? Or how does that work?
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- Maybe we we we first we do not derive our evangelism methods from what people are going, how they're going to react to that.
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- That's typically the way modern Christians and the professing church deals with evangelism.
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- If it's upsetting or seemingly causing someone to be upset or angry, then it's a bad evangelism method.
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- And that is not the way scripture presents any of that. We go and we share the gospel and we know that we're going to be an aroma of death and we're going to be an aroma of life.
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- Now, there are what we call Pelagians street screechers. They're not preachers that just go out and their message is, you know,
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- God hates fags. And that's not our message. Well, our message is the law and the gospel and the church, even our own church.
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- We have we have two people in our church right now that are that are former homosexuals.
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- They are. And then and then there's a host of us who are our former have our sexual sin in heterosexual ways that whether it's been pornography or lust or adultery or whatever those things are.
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- So the church is full of these types of people. And so we go with compassion.
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- We go with understanding, but we do not back down from the scriptural, you know, what the scriptures teach on those fronts.
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- Yeah, that's good. It does well. And I have seen even some open air, but more so people who do street evangelism, just going out and trying to talk to people.
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- And that is a I think what you said about forming your strategy based on objections you're going to get.
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- I've certainly seen that I've witnessed people who, you know, they're just they're ready for the apologetic conversation.
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- Right. And and so not losing sight of the real purpose. You're there and not apologizing for the
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- Bible. You know, hey, sorry, it offends you. But, you know, we're here to give you this this good news of Jesus.
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- That's really good, I think, because what are they going to think when you get to hell, when you talk about judgment? I mean, that's about a thousand times more offensive than pretty much anything else that scripture has to teach on social issues or anything like that.
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- So I so I think there's all really helpful stuff. Let's get practical about, you know, pastors listening to this or even just a layman at a church, perhaps.
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- And they are thinking, you know, my church really isn't that involved in evangelism. It sounds to me like one of the things that you were saying was maybe first step would be set up a prayer tent or something that's just not quite as confrontational, easier to to just start breaking the ice by having conversations with people.
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- Is that where you'd start then? Or, you know, how would you? Yeah, absolutely. Spider evangelism is is probably the easiest entry to public and corporate evangelism.
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- And so I would get make a sign that says free Bibles and you can go online.
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- I think it's books by the bulk books or something like that. You can we buy a box of like 50
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- Bibles for like a buck a piece. The whole Bible. And we give those out.
- 28:35
- We've had people stop by and give us we had a I think it was like 30 leather bound
- 28:40
- King James Bibles that that they brought and gave to us. And we've learned they're a large print.
- 28:45
- We still give those out to different people. But just do something, you know, sit on a corner someplace, go to, you know, wherever, even if it's just outside your church on the on the street, just as free
- 28:58
- Bibles and sit there and see what happens. Go with another brother or sister in Christ.
- 29:03
- And what will be amazing is you'll have a you'll have great fellowship with your brothers and sisters as you're there.
- 29:10
- And then someone will stop and your heart will just be, you know, overwhelmed with joy that you prayed with somebody.
- 29:17
- You gave a Bible, you give a track. Now, I would also get good tracks. I would stuff my Bibles with good tracks.
- 29:23
- I always put a track in the Gospel of John. So when I'm having a conversation with them, I said, you know, they're taking the
- 29:29
- Bible for me. I'll say, hey, here, I put a bookmark in here. This is a gospel track. This this goes over what we just spoke about.
- 29:35
- Or if I didn't even get to that, if I was to if all I did was hand them a Bible, I've given them the gospel with that's clear in that gospel track.
- 29:45
- Now, that's what we're trying to do is with Five Solas Press is is create gospel tracks that are just not gimmicky.
- 29:52
- You know, I love Ray Comfort. I love the way of the master. That's the only complaint that I really have had is that things get a little gimmicky sometimes.
- 30:00
- And so I just that's kind of our one of our our hopes is that we can do it without the gimmicks. Well, I'm at five.
- 30:06
- So so Five Solas Press, that's your the books that you're publishing. But it's it's
- 30:11
- Frontline Mission, right? That's the tracks, Reformation Frontline. Actually, no, the Five Solas Press does the tracks.
- 30:17
- Oh, OK. And we customize these for churches. We're about to have two more tracks we're going to put out.
- 30:25
- But our good news, bad news track, you can purchase that and get your church's web address put on that track and just get a thousand of them and go for it.
- 30:33
- We have on the front of the website. So the Reformed Evangelist, right, which is going to make me go there.
- 30:40
- Hold on. Let me go to see what you're talking about. Isn't this your website? Don't you know what's on your. Yeah, it is.
- 30:47
- So, yeah, I've got two things on the front there. We've got the Reformed Evangelist, which is a new book that was released here on January 1st with Al Baker and Ryan Denton.
- 30:58
- Really encourage people to read that book and another book that we did, but we did it for First Love is this book here.
- 31:06
- Even if none by Ryan Denton, this book will um, shake your world because, you know, the common idea is, hey, it was worth doing this evangelism event.
- 31:18
- Even if one person came, it was worth it. No, no, no. Even if none, it's worth doing this because he is worthy of worship.
- 31:25
- He is worthy of our obedience. So that's the idea there. So you'll notice on Five Solace Press, there's we do have the
- 31:33
- Jesus never talked about homosexuality. I was going to ask you, I meant to grab one of those.
- 31:38
- And I think everything was packed up by the time I was leaving the war room. So, yeah, it did catch my eye because I was like, wait a minute.
- 31:46
- Hold on. That's not supposed to be here. I'm like, oh, no, that's that's a track. So that's our that's our
- 31:52
- LGBT camouflage. We wanted that track for people to be able to take it at a pride event.
- 31:58
- And that's why we made it pink. And what we did is we used that most common objection.
- 32:03
- We use that as the title. So you'll hear that Jesus never talked about homosexuality.
- 32:09
- The new push will be probably this year or the next year will be the
- 32:14
- Bible didn't have the word homosexuality in it until 1946. That'll be the new what happened in 1946.
- 32:21
- The the RSV version. So the word homosexual, we haven't.
- 32:27
- It's it's was gaining in popularity, and they were the first one to actually use that word in the
- 32:32
- English Bible. And so the argument is that homosexuality wasn't even talked about before 1946.
- 32:40
- Well, wait a minute. Arsenic, quite days is it's a Greek word that means what this says.
- 32:45
- And so it's anyway, it's a dumb argument. But Jesus never talked about homosexuality. That is goes through the ten most common arguments that the
- 32:54
- LGBT community puts forward to justify their sexual sin. And this leads to a gospel conversation.
- 33:01
- I recommend this track for Christians as well, because it will equip you. We've had people in our church that have a gay nephew or someone who's gay in their family, and this has helped them.
- 33:15
- Well, let me ask you this, because I don't want to put you on the spot. I guess I am kind of. But so people who you mentioned earlier, go find the guy that's already doing this in your community.
- 33:25
- If it's like abortion ministry, abortion clinic ministry or something. And I'll be honest, I know that there are areas of the country.
- 33:32
- I think I'm living in one, actually, where I couldn't tell you the Protestant churches that would be going to the abortion clinic.
- 33:38
- I can tell you probably that there's like a Catholic church, which you, as you know, that kind of activity is generally associated with Catholics.
- 33:47
- But yeah, as far as gospel preaching churches, I it's few and far between in some areas of the country.
- 33:54
- And so is this something that I mean, have you had people come in from other areas who are like, I just want to observe?
- 34:00
- I want to watch. I want to see how you do it so I can go back to my church. Or is that something you encourage at all? Yeah, we do encourage that and have had that happen.
- 34:09
- I would encourage people to also for the abortion clinic to go to end abortion now dot com.
- 34:16
- That's the Ministry of Apology, a church, and they have equipped hundreds of churches. What they do is they'll send you a packet, you know, a sign to hold, you know, different.
- 34:27
- And the one that says, you know, adopt your baby or, you know, those kind of things. And then the best part is that they have videos.
- 34:34
- Once you're in that church, they have videos that will train you how to go to an abortion clinic, how, what to do, what to say.
- 34:41
- And then I just contact me, you know, go to rough church dot com and send an email to our church.
- 34:48
- I'll help you find a church in your area or someone near. And if if there's not, I'll send Austin. We'll make him go all the way out to wherever you're at.
- 34:57
- Yeah. So he's probably going to watch this. And he's not as good as like, hey, I wouldn't sign up for that. Yeah. So I mean, because that could be effective doing like seminars or just going out practically.
- 35:07
- I remember the first time I did any open air was one of those deeper conferences from years ago. And it was actually in Kentucky.
- 35:14
- It was in Covington, I think, right across from Cincinnati. And yeah, it was one of the, you know, the conference happened.
- 35:20
- And then afterwards, like, let's go open air preaching. And I had never seen it. I had never done it.
- 35:27
- And it was like, wow. You know, the police showed up. It got really exciting. A drunk guy tried to push me. It was like I was like, whoa, this is.
- 35:34
- But the thing that stuck out to me was how something you mentioned earlier about the fellowship
- 35:39
- Christians have. I mean, it was in some ways, I wonder how wise it was to go to an
- 35:44
- Oktoberfest is where this started. And, you know, as the evening progresses, people are not quite as rational as they were earlier in the day.
- 35:52
- But the thing I saw was that Christians were very united, very like we're here to battle the kingdom of darkness, to bring people out of that into the light.
- 36:03
- And that kind of fellowship is it's so much richer and tighter. And just people I didn't even know.
- 36:09
- I'm like, that's my brother over there. And immediate like just fellowship.
- 36:16
- So I think that is something I want every Christian to know about experience.
- 36:23
- And I don't remember where I was going with this. But yeah, I guess if people can come and see or if there's ways to bring someone out to show a church, then
- 36:34
- I would love for them to contact you and get that done. I know like in my town right now, there's this
- 36:41
- Saturday, you know, there's St. Patrick's Day parades and stuff. And we have some people from our church going out to that.
- 36:48
- And I normally I think I would, except I have another obligation this particular Saturday, but we just hand out
- 36:53
- St. Patrick's Day tracts. And, you know, that just because that's an inroad right to the gospel of St.
- 36:59
- Patrick. I mean, he's part of Christian history. There's you can easily kind of bridge that.
- 37:05
- And in our area, there's a lot of Catholics, a lot of Irish people. So it makes sense. But every area is different.
- 37:10
- And so I would just encourage people listening to find out what would make the most sense for you to start doing this in your area to evangelize, even if it's
- 37:20
- Bible Belt Central. Right. I thought Louisville was Bible Belt. But from what you're telling me, it sounds like that might have been in the past.
- 37:28
- Yeah, that's that's definitely a past past moniker, I guess. Now, the reason
- 37:33
- I suggested Austin is we actually have done this and do this for other churches. We've actually like done aerial views to say,
- 37:40
- OK, here's a great place to open air preaching your little city. And and so given information like that and then gone, we have two seminars that I'm doing here, one tomorrow night, and then
- 37:51
- I have another one that's set up for me that that I'll go teach. And then the next day we're going to do evangelism together with their local church to to equip them to do that.
- 38:02
- And that's one of the ministries that we're wanting to see grow for Austin to take off and and just go to churches, teach and then and then actually lead in evangelism to show them, hey, here's how you do it.
- 38:16
- So we'll take all of our signage and we've probably equipped close to 20 churches now where we've either printed tracks for them, set them up with their own prayer station, prayer flags, all that kind of stuff.
- 38:27
- And we can set other churches up as well. Well, that's a really useful resource.
- 38:33
- I would encourage people to take advantage of and and message you so people can go to let's see, there's three places,
- 38:41
- Reformation, Frontline .org, you can go to Five Solas Press and then and what's the church website in Shelbyville there?
- 38:49
- RefChurch .com. RefChurch .com. And that's probably the primary place to contact you. Right. And any one of these is going to get to me eventually.
- 38:57
- So somebody who's going to be able to help. Yeah. Info at RefChurch .com. That's the email.
- 39:03
- That'll do it. Awesome. And then you have on the front there for women, there's a conference coming up May 14th,
- 39:09
- Dr. Jim Warwick. So I'd encourage if you're in the area and want to go check out the war room, go ahead and do that.
- 39:16
- And I just appreciate your time, Pastor Doris. Any final thoughts you have for everyone?
- 39:22
- No, just I'm encouraged to do this and I'm excited to see how God will will use this this conversation we're having.
- 39:31
- Our hope, our goal is that more churches are making Jesus unavoidable here in America.
- 39:37
- We need to preach more about Jesus as the as our culture slides, as everything is sliding, this degradation.
- 39:46
- True churches, those that really want to hold to the scriptures, need to be standing up and saying this is what's right in leading people to Christ.
- 39:54
- Amen. No, I couldn't agree more. And I do a final thought for everyone with who listens to me, because I know
- 40:01
- I have a niche, right? The people who are listening to this, you're interested in probably mostly error that's creeping into the church and how to to combat that or where where it's happening, exposing it.
- 40:13
- And that's all important stuff. And obviously I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think that. But at the end of the day, Jesus is the most important thing.
- 40:21
- And it's not about just memorizing apologetic arguments or a certain even core set of doctrines.
- 40:28
- Doctrine is so important, but it really is an allegiance to a person, to Jesus Christ and then in his message.
- 40:34
- And that's who we want to make known. And we want people to be exposed to. It's not not our brilliant minds or, you know, our political positions and how we're going to make sure
- 40:47
- Christianity safe in America or something like that. That's that's not the focus. It's just on on Jesus winning hearts and souls one step at a time.
- 40:55
- And this is how it's done. So anyway, that's that's my final thought. I appreciate it, Pastor Doris, and I'm looking forward to seeing how many people reach out to you and where this goes.