After wrapping up two full days of evangelism training at the Evangelism and Cross Cultural Missions conference in Maracay, we had a worship and prayer event, particularly seeking a fresh infilling of the Holy Spirit for the work of evangelism.

The leadership team discerned together that God wanted to touch upon three themes in particular:

• A fresh confidence
• Removal of guilt from failures
• Creativity to apply what had been taught.

This went well with a leading I had received about a message on nurturing your evangelistic passion.

As I preached that night, I felt a nudge of the Spirit to change direction by adding another point to my message:

• Worthy

Many of these pastors

• felt broken over past evangelistic failures.
• felt unworthy because of personal struggles.
• carried wounds of emotional hurts in their life situation.

A blog post cannot adequately describe how the Lord used that word to open up some power prayer ministry.   But this word of blessing over these pastors unlocked some healing prayer and restoration to many of these pastors.

We moved into an extended time of prayer and personal ministry, with the leadership team doing much of the personal ministry, mostly for reasons of language.   The Lord ministered healing and restoration during this time..

As I listened to testimonies during the debriefing time afterwards, it was clear to me that the Lord had done a truly deep work in the life of many of these men and women as they were preparing to return to their ministry contexts in the next day or two.

“Can you help me with some evangelism strategies?  We are youth pastors who lead a group in Caracas and we want to reach people for Christ.”

After the end of the first session at the Evangelism Training and Cross Cultural missions class in Maracay Venezuela, these two young youth pastors approached me with their question.

They were eager to discuss specifics to their situation.

Further conversations with me revealed a frustration with current methodologies they were using, particularly focused on random contact street evangelism using a gospel script.

Their young adults were not showing up.  Those who did seemed to make a half-hearted effort to reach out to strangers.

After every class, they kept asking me about evangelism strategies.  The class context (with pastors from all over Venezuela) was not the right place to address their particular local concern.

So as classes continued, they kept waiting and asking when I’d address their topic.  I had to keep asking them to wait, so that I could more teaching out there for them to interact with.

Finally, during some free time one afternoon, we sat down and talked.  They had listened to the content and found ways to apply my content to their situation.

Two things in particular caught their attention:

• the persistence of relational evangelism
• the stickyness of relational conversions.

They started brainstorming about ways to encourage their youth group to reach their existing relationships of school peers.

They began brainstorming ways to help their existing group develop those relationship with evangelistic influence in a genuine way.

What excited me the most was to their passion and energy get reignited in the face of the obstacles they faced.  Watching those “a-ha” moments gave me a sense of deep satisfaction that we are living out our calling.

Based on my prior experiences, I know these youth pastors will return and work at implementing some of the ideas they generated.  As a result of some teaching and some evangelistic coaching, they renewed in their vision.