Becoming like Jesus (Part Five)

9.    Encouragement of My Gifts and Ministry

What wind is to a fire, encouragement is to effective ministry. While coaching throwing events at a local high school, I seek to find something positive to say about each thrower’s efforts in a sport where frustration can easily reign unopposed.

I grow lettuce in cut-down plastic gallon milk containers. Unless it rains, I water the plants every day. The small amount of soil dries out quickly. Left unwatered for a hot summer week, the plants will die.

Without the watering of encouragement, people’s ministries dry up quickly. I am thankful for those who have encouraged my writing ministry. Encouragement is a key ingredient in discovering our spiritual gifts and ministry.

If our ministries are ever to bear fruit that will remain, regular watering makes all the difference. One responsibility of Christians is to encourage what other Christians do that blesses them. We dare not remain silent when experiencing the fruits of others’ ministry to us. That is how those who bless us discover God’s purpose for their lives.

In 2021, I sent the original manuscript of my book, His Power for Your Weakness: 260 Steps Toward Spiritual Strength, to a man whose opinion I greatly respect, asking him to review it. He could have killed it with a negative evaluation. His very positive, “I LOVE IT,” encouraged me to take the next step so that God could use and bless people through it.

7.    Using Technology to Reach People for Christ

Our spiritual output is no less important than our spiritual input. “When you produce much fruit, you are my true disciples. This brings great glory to my Father” (John 15:8 NLT).

I was a below-the-radar pastor who never directed a large church. The average worship attendance of the rural churches I served never surpassed 100.  I have never preached to more than 170 people, while my dream has been to touch as many people for Christ as possible.

I am not a dynamic speaker. My content usually outshines its presentation, although my wife says I am improving in my old age! Significant influence for Christ seemed forever beyond my grasp. But then technology changed everything.

Technology opened ministry doors that didn’t exist when I began my pastoral ministry. It started when no one volunteered to create a website for the church I served about 13 years ago. I used Weebly to construct it and included many of the discipleship resources I had written. I noticed people from around the world were accessing these resources.

After I retired, I created a Christian Growth Resources website and Facebook page. I began posting two blogs each week. I learned through trial and error, a lot of the latter! Interest in those blogs slowly increased.

I learned that I must pay to boost blogs to reach considerably more people. God brought my twin brother into this ministry as a major supporter. I was initially amazed by how much more interest there was in my blogs in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Liberia than in the United States. I boosted my blogs in those five countries.

I boosted blogs that contained the heart of the Christian message and designated Christians in those five countries as the recipients. One of the blogs was “Why I Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus,” and another was “Jesus Is Lord.” Recently, the “Jesus is Lord” blog I boosted in India, Nigeria, and the Philippines has received 10,000 engagements daily for $4.00 spent. In the U.S., that money would cover only 5 first-class stamps if I mailed out my blog's message.

Since I began the boosts, they have reached more than 70 million people, with more than seven million engaging with them and tens of thousands sharing them with their Facebook friends.

Thanks to my daughter’s technical help, more than 1,900 people click on my websites monthly, including a church website I created 13 years ago.

I organized my first 260 blogs into a book, His Power for Your Weakness: 260 Steps Toward Spiritual Strength, and sent a digital copy to a pastor in Malawi in 2021. He used it to follow up new believers in Jesus.

He began teaching the content of the book in class after class. We have provided him with Chichewa Bibles for those in his classes who don’t have a Bible.

He sends me a picture of class members holding up their new Bibles for every class. Many people in the classes have received Jesus as their Savior and Lord. Many other pastors began to teach my book in Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia.

The vision is to reach 50,000 people in these classes by the end of 2030. We estimate there will be 20,000 new believers by then.

God has used this obscure rural pastor to touch far more people in retirement than during his 35-plus years of pastoral ministry. Technology has made it possible, but God gets the glory, and the rural pastor remains obscure! See additional free spiritual growth resources for Christians. See Becoming like Jesus (Part One). #freediscipleshipresources #freeevangelismresources #freechristianleadershipresources 

See free spiritual growth resources for Christians at https://www.christiangrowthresources.com.

God has empowered me to write His Power for Your Weakness—260 Steps Toward Spiritual Strength. It’s a free, evangelistic, devotional, and discipleship e-book. Pastors have used it in Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia to lead more than 4,151 people to Christ and teach the basics of Christianity to 11,178 people. I invite you to examine it.   https://www.christiangrowthresources.com/his-power-for-your-weakness

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