This morning we went to the Rosemont Convention Center for the Evangelistic Outreach Class. There were over 1100 young (mostly) Revivalist eager to learn how to make outreach a lifestyle. We are not about just teaching them what to do on special events or conferences, but the main focus was teaching them to do something that they could take back with them wherever they were from. Speaking of that, there were people from as far away as Viet Nam and China. Scott taught along with two other people, and then by 12:30, we sent them out into the streets of Chicago to love on people.
I take it for granted because in many ways it has become almost second nature to me, but 90% of the people in the class had never gone out into the street to pray for anybody. So what we teach is simple, but it does take risk to see any results. I have learned over the years that you will never fail if you never try. But that is no fun. You will fail if try, but you might succeed too. We told the kids that many of them would be rejected multiple times today, but in order to see God move, we had to be willing to fail. The exciting thing about prophetic evangelism is you don’t have to try and argue or persuade a person to believe. If you give them a word of knowledge, or they are healed, it bypasses their intellect, and goes straight to their heart.
Tonight there were many great testimonies of what God did among them while they were out in the streets. There were over 40 that were good enough to tape and use in the conference. It’s all about His goodness, and what we expect Him to do. We went out also. It was Scott, Lacey, Ryan and myself. Drew came along to film what we did for a documentary. We got caught in a bad traffic jam and didn’t get to go where we wanted to go. So we got off the expressway in this little neighborhood. We first came across this homeless man. He was standing in front of the seven eleven. Scott went up and asked if we could film him, but he said know. We said that was fine, and Scott asked him if he had trouble breathing. He said yes, he had COPD. We asked to pray, but again he said no. Then Scott asked if he was a veteran and he said yes. We asked to pray again to bless him, but he refused. Scott had one more word of knowledge and the guy said yes, but still wouldn’t let us pray for him. Three accurate words of knowledge that should have opened him up for prayer, but his heart was too hard. Well, that was our first failure of the day.
We had a couple of more rejections, but then we saw this guy down the road and went to talk with him. Long story, but when we got there it wasn’t the same guy that we saw but we asked him if we could film him. He was a pastor and agreed to let us. Scott then begin to speak prophetically over him and also used some words of knowledge about his dreams and what he was doing. Then Lacey gave some and so did I. The guy was so happy. He said that everything we were telling him was right on, and that we had to have been sent by God to encourage him. We also had a word of knowledge that he had back pain. He did and we were able to pray for him. After praying a couple of times, his pain was totally gone. We were then able to pray and prophesy over his wife and a friend. It was enough to really make our day.
The key to outreach is being yourself. It is also always about releasing the love of Christ into a person’s life. It’s not about judgment or condemnation; it’s all about love. We loved on Chicago today. No, God loved on Chicago today; He just used us to do it. He is going to love on this city some more. Tomorrow about 17000 radicals invade the city. Hopefully it will never be the same.
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