Status Update

On Saturday, I visited 35 house, shared the Gospel one on one with 13 people, gathered 11 prayer requests and collected 86 food items. This brings the totals to 445, 122 one on one conversations, 80 prayer requests and 347 food items collected. The map below shows the area covered. The push pin in my house. I use the highlighter to track where I have been. Thanks for your continued prayers for this effort.

Are you ready to get started going door to door? I have created a map to keep track of people going door to door in their community. If you would like to be added to the map as a participant, then please contact me.

A good problem

On Saturday, I went out door to door for two hours. I changed my tactics slightly for this day. Instead of collecting food for MetroCrest, I decided earlier in the week to collect the food for "a family in need." You see, my wifes family has decided that this Christmas rather than exchanging gifts with the adults we would adopt a family in the community and give gifts to them! When we looked at the needs, we realized food was a big one. So, I prayerfully decided to designate the food collected on this trip into the neighborhood to give directly to this family. Instead of my normal "MetroCrest" flyer that I put on my clip board, I made a flyer describing a "Bezeugen Ministries food drive to benefit a family in need in the neighborhood." With that, I set out.

As I proceeded down the street, I was overwhelmed with generous food donations. People were giving more than normally. In the past each house that gave would give a couple (maybe three) cans of food. But, on this day, the bags were coming back with five, six, seven and up to ten cans of food in them. As I continued down the street, I had to stop and rearrange the food in the cart. Then as I went to a couple of more houses, the cart was overflowing again. By this time I was a half a mile from home. I did not want to "waste time" walking back home to put the food away and not be able to stop at any houses since I could not carry any more food. So I called my wife to see if she could come and pick up the food. However, she was not nearby so she could not. I continued on anyway and was sharing the Gospel at each house. Finally, I had so much food that it would not stay in the cart. The cart was full and I had two full bags of food in my hand. And I was a full half mile from home as I came back up the other side of the street. I posted a message to facebook thinking maybe one of my friends could come and pick up the food. However, I got no response.

Finally, as I prayed the Lord lead me to an answer. I had just spoken with a believer on the other side of the street. I went back to their house and told them my delimma. I asked if I could ust leave the food on their porch for an hour and a half and then I would come back for it. They agreed. I lightened my load and proceeded on up the street. Eventually my wife was on her way home and she stopped at that house and picked up the food for me.

On a typical door to door outing, food collections are about 1 can per three houses. On this day, the food collection was nearly three cans per house! After visiting 35 houses, I had collected 86 cans of food to donate to this family. I had also shared the Gospel one on one 13 times and gathered 11 prayer requests.

Please pray for all of the people that I shared the Gospel with that they may come to salvation through Jesus Christ.

How to pray for them if they don't give their name

As I have been going door to door, I take down prayer requests. Some people get added to our prayer list, even if they don't mention a prayer request. How is that, you might ask? If in the course of discussion, it is determined that the person is not a Christian, then I add a prayer request for their salvation. In many of these cases, the person had not given me their name. So, we have ended up with a number of prayer cards that say "Name: not given" or "Name: Unknown". Now God knows who the person is living at such and such an address, so when we pray God knows the need. However, I've found a way to make the pray even more personal. Whitepages.com offers a "reverse lookup!" With reverse lookup you can look up a name based on knowing the address or the phone number. It's not 100 percent - probably due to unlisted and such, but it is at least in the 95 percentile based on searches that I have done. So, next time you are praying over that prayer card where you did not get their name, go look it up in the Whitepages Reverse Lookup!

A question

I have a question for those following this blog:

Would you be willing to lead an effort to go door to door to all of the households in your zip code?

please post a comment or contact me with your response.

Fifty Five more houses

I just got in from covering 55 more houses in my neighborhood. You could break up the 55 houses into three groups. The first group, I did by myself. The second group, Pastor Tony was with me. The third group my youngest son was with me. Along the route we talked with several mormons and several hindu's. I also had a very long one on one dialog with an agnostic who had grown up in a Christian household. Pastor Tony and I spoke with a Hindu man who after we shared the Gospel with him, said that he had never heard the Gospel before. Pastor Tony was really amazed that people right here in the neighborhood have never heard about Jesus and the free gift of eternal life. I also had the pleasure of speaking with several born again believers who could clearly articulate how to become a Christian!

Today I visited 55 houses. I collected 62 food items for MetroCrest Social Services. We gathered 12 prayer requests. And I had the opportunity to share the Gospel one on one 16 times!

As Pastor Tony, my wife and I talked, I came up with an analogy that I'd like to share. It is a comparison between a shotgun and a rifle. Shotguns spray their ammunition out over a large area. Some of the spray hits something. Some does not. In comparison, a rifle has a scope and is very precise at hitting a particular target. This is the analogy to show what door to door evangelism is about. Door to door is the rifle, while a witnessing event like handing out tracts at a sporting event or even a mall is the shot gun. I personally participate in both types of witnessing events. However, when God called me to go door to door, it was precisely for this reason. Some people may never come out of their house and go to the mall (or where ever we may happen to be witnessing). So, for those people we need a targeted approached. That is where door to door comes in.

If you have not yet considered or started going door to door, I encourage you to give it a try. Please check the other blog posts here and the door to door section of the Bezeugen web site for more information on door to door Evangelism.

Evangelism Linebacker on Door to Door Evangelism

I find that many people don't get started doing door to door evangelism for the same reason they have not gotten started doing evangelism in the first place. This video addresses this about 50 seconds in you will see two college students going door to door...

The reality is that people are fearful. Fearful of the unknown. Who (or what) is behind that next door. Fear of what to say! What if they ask me a question I don't know the answer too? Fear of humiliation! What if someone I know or work with lives here? 
All of these are natural fears. But, we must over come them. Peoples eternal destinies are at stake. Jesus has commanded us to share the Gospel with others. Our three step plan makes it easy to ask people a few questions and share the Gospel with them. Here is what we do:

1. Ring the door bell
2. Tell them we have three reasons we have come to the door
3. The first is to collect food for a food drive
4. The second is to gather prayer requests for a prayer meeting
5. The third is to do a spiritual inventory of the neighborhood. Then ask, if they believe in God and if they believe in heaven and hell and how to get to heaven.
6. Lead towards the good person test using The Way of the Master Method.

You can do it! You can overcome your fears and go and knock on a few doors. Let me know how it goes. I plan to put together a map showing where people are doing door to door very soon. So please get started and then send me your location so you can be on the map when it is released!

For more information on door to door evangelism, please see the other posts on this blog and the door to door section of the Bezeugen web site. If you would like training in the Way of the Master method of Evangelism to help you get started, then pleased start with our As You Go checklist and then contact me if you need further assistance.

Back to the Neighborhood

Last week I wrote about the seminar and going door to door at Empowerment Christian Center in Farmers Branch. A week after the initial training and neighborhood witnessing, the church invited me back to lead the team into the neighborhood again. They were having a weekend long Harvest Outreach and had slated Saturday morning to reach out to the neighborhood. When I arrived at the church at 9:45AM, there was no one there. We were supposed to start at 10AM and still, no one was there. I tried to reach the pastor and got no response to a text message. I sat in my car waiting and praying. Some of the people had been a little late the week before. So, I was not overly concerned. Finally, I thought, I'll just get started by myself. I'll leave a note on the door to tell them where I am and they can come join me. Just then one of the women from the church arrived. She told me that the pastor was detained because he and his wife had had to take their youngest son to the Emergency Room during the night. So, she and I prayed and then headed out to the neighborhood across the street from the church.

We went to about four houses, gathered a few cans of food and a prayer request. We gave out a couple of tracts. But a couple of the people were not home. As we made our way up the street, the pastor arrived in his van. He needed to run by the church to get something and then said he would come back to join us. We continued up the street. When he came back, he had FIVE others with him! Two were from Kenya. One was a pastor from another church in the area. But, aside from the pastor, they had not been at the training the week before.

So, we had Evangelism training at the side of the road!

I pulled out a WDJD/Craft card and explained the Way of the Master. For those not familiar with this card, you can order them from Living Waters. They are perfectly sized to carry in your wallet. This is wonderful for people that are newly learning Way of the Master so that they can carry them with them, refer to them to refresh their mind about the method and even hold it in their hand as they have a conversation if necessary. For example, while witnessing door to door, one could put the card on the clipboard and easily refer to it inconspicuously while witnessing to someone one to one at their door.

I explained WDJD to the group. Then I turned the card around and explained the Craft side of the card. If you are not familiar with these concepts, then please contact me and we can talk about doing an Evangelism Seminar in your church.

Once I explained the method we use to share the Law and the Gospel, I then spent a few minutes explaining our three fold method of going door to door, asking for food donations, asking for prayer requests and then taking a spiritual inventory with the purpose to share the Gospel using the method we just discussed.

Everyone in the group said they were ready to go. I promoted Pastor Tony and Hilde to team leaders. I lead a third group. Then we split the other five people into our three groups. One group when back down the other side of the street that Hilde and I had covered. The other two groups took each side of the street as we continued up the street.

The three groups continued door to door for about an hour. By then we had two carts full of food, about a dozen prayer requests, had shared the Gospel one on one nearly twenty times and had visited over fifty houses! We went back to the church and prayed over the requests. Pastor and I prayed for the church members to have a burden for the lost and continue this task. Would you please join in that prayer?