Thursday, July 24, 2008 - PEPE - For Him and By Him
I have to admit that with all we have had going on in the last few weeks and preparing to leave for a year that I had been more than a little apprehensive that we were planning to host a group of over fifty young people for two weeks of intensive evangelism here in the neighborhood. This entire experience has shown me yet again that the battle is the Lord’s.
The Pepe group is composed of young people from many different Baptist churches in Sao Paulo who have a real commitment to evangelism. They are well trained and well organized and they have brought an infection with them, enthusiasm. There has been so much going on in the last two weeks that it is actually hard to know where to start. Tim Moody has done a great job of cultivating a right attitude in the kids. He constantly asks them “Was Christ glorified in what you did this morning? OK, then that’s all that matters!”
The basic strategy is to team up kids from Pepe with kids from the local churches and send them out in small groups assigned to certain streets in the morning to do door to door evangelism and invite kids to the various events in the afternoons. One group of kids stays behind at the Sports Center and prays for the groups that are out in the street.
The groups going out have found people very receptive to the survey they are conducting.
In the afternoons there are two main events every day. For the younger kids we have a program that we are running in two of our local public schools. The schools were gracious enough to open their doors and give us full use of their facilites, gym space, classrooms, everything.
These meetings have been very well attended by the kids and there is even a separate activity for the mothers and older sisters that come along.
For the older kids we have been running sports events at the Sports Center. The kids start arriving about 2 PM and we have both courts in full use for both boys and girls soccer. All over the Center while kids are waiting to play there are conversations taking place. Young people from both Hope Baptist and Copacabana Baptist, have been teaming up with kids from Pepe to sit in little groups with visiting kids from the neighborhood to share the gospel and develop relationships.
The entire time that the sports activity is taking place there is a group of young people up on the rooftop patio of the Sports Center praying for their friends evangelizing down below. The Pepe group is dedicated to the power of prayer, in fact they do nothing without prayer and it has shown in the results.
I don’t have the statistics for the second week yet but in the first week the teams had made over 250 home visits, over 100 families have requested a follow-up visit and over 60 people had received Christ as Savior. All of this data has been collected and presented to the Copacabana church for follow-up.
There is not a single verse in the New Testament that tells anyone out there in the world to go to church. The Words states emphatically that the Church is to go out into the World with the message of the gospel. The Lord has blessed this effort beyond our wildest expectations. I think Paul said it best, “And for this purpose also I labor, striving according to His power, which mightily works within me.”
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