A Strategy to Evangelize the Entire World 2: Jerusalem & Judea

"And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” Mark 16:15

"But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” Acts 8:1

Christ commanded us to evangelize the entire world when he gave us the Great Commission, and Acts 1:8 breaks down that job into four components. Number 1 is Jerusalem, and number 2 is all Judea. Numbers 3 and 4 are Samaria and the uttermost part of the earth, which I will cover in the next blog post. In this post, I will discuss our church’s strategy for covering the first two components.

1. In Jerusalem

Your Jerusalem is wherever you are, and for Faithful Word Baptist Church, that’s the Phoenix area. FWBC has a plan to systematically knock every door in our county (approximately 4 million people) and attempt to preach the Gospel to every person. We have a map on the wall showing our progress, and we have already highlighted a massive section of it. Some of the more receptive areas including the areas right around our church have been covered as many as seven times.

2. In All Judea

The job of evangelizing the world doesn’t stop with Jerusalem. The next component is reaching Judea, and for us, that’s the rest of Arizona. Our church has a small town soul-winning program, which has the goal of knocking every door in every small town as well as every Indian reservation in the state. We’ve already knocked every door in about 12 of the small towns, and we are planning to hit more of them soon. We have also done some soul winning on 18 of the 21 Indian reservations, and we are serious about our church (not another church) knocking every Native American door in the state. We have a chart and binder tracking the progress of our Indian Reservation ministry:

Soul-winners from FWBC down in Sells, AZ, knocking every door.

With many of the small towns, we were able to knock every door in a day or two. The larger cities in Arizona will take much longer to cover, so they will each need their own church to accomplish the task. I have a goal for there to be like-minded churches in 5 key cities in Arizona, which have been strategically selected based on population and location. We already have our church in Phoenix and Pastor David Berzins is doing a great job of pastoring and soul winning in Prescott Valley, but I am also hoping that over the next nine years we will also start churches in Tucson, Yuma, Flagstaff, and Bullhead City. I realize that there are already soul-winning churches in some of those places, but instead of counting on others, we want to try to do it ourselves.

There are other churches in Arizona and across America that are being used by the Lord, but they may not necessarily share our vision. We praise the Lord for any soul winning done by churches outside of our movement and consider it icing on the cake.

Are You Making an Impact?

Wherever your Jerusalem and Judea are, you ought to be involved in soul winning. Hopefully your church has a plan for reaching areas beyond the town where it is located, but as an individual, you can make an impact by going soul winning wherever your church sends you. Your next step might be taking the opportunity to attend one of our soul-winning marathons when we come to your state or Judea.

To be continued...

Here is the sermon laying out the strategy for reaching the entire world in our lifetime.