One afternoon is set out to start a church. I found my marching orders in Luke chapter 10, and went out to do what it said. I found myself in a well-known coffee shop on a fresh Sunday morning, with a huge look-at-me Bible, that could not be hid, ordering a cup of coffee and settling into a comfy chair. That first day, I stayed there for four hours and nothing happened.
The following Sunday, I repeated the process, Bible in hand, coffee, comfy chair and myself. Again I stayed for a duration of some four hours, just reading my Bible. At this point, I was starting to get the attention of some of the staff who would ask me a few questions, but I kept things light and cordial.
The Sunday afterwards, I went back to the coffee shop, Bible in hand, but there was something different this time. There was a lady with a cast on her hand, ordering her morning brew right in front of me as I ordered my coffee. I managed to strike up a conversation with this lady, and convinced her to allow me to pray for her arm. She agreed, and turned away expecting that I would do so in my private time. I corrected my statement and asked if I could pray for her hand right then and there.
At this point the three ladies behind the counter were getting curious. The nice lady agreed, so I laid my hand on her cast, and commanded healing, in the name of Jesus. Afterwards I asked her to move her hand, and she started speaking loudly about how the pain is gone! The ladies behind the counter started questioning her, what happened, and she said the pain was gone. They then started questioning me about what I did, and I simply explained, Jesus healed her because of his love for her.
At this point, the staff is looking on in amazement, and the folks in the line behind me are asking me for my number. After about twenty minutes of chit-chat, I hustled back to my seat like nothing had happened. A few moments later, one of the girls from behind the counter, came up to my seat and asked me if I could do anything about her back pain. I smiled and agreed, then proceeded to lay my hand on top of her hand where the pain was. She said a heat came over her back, and all the pain left.
What I did not know, was this lady was the store manager, and within a few moments, I was being shuffled through the coffee shop’s backrooms, being asked to pray for various staff members with the manager herself introducing me to the various people. I spent the rest of the three remaining hours, ministering to almost all of the staff and nearly closing down the coffee shop as all of the workers were enjoying the Lord so much, they forgot about work.
The following Sunday was different. I got there at my usual time, and the staff all greeted me. Some came out and sat with me and we talked, and as folks came in the staff would gesture them to find out if they had any pain and direct them to me. At this point I started teaching the staff how to do what I was doing also.
To make a long story short, after a period of a month, I had ten persons meeting me regularly every Sunday in that coffee shop learning about God’s Grace, his healing Power, prophesy and how to reach the lost. Within the next two weeks, they had started bringing their friends and family, and my congregation grew to over twenty people. At the end of the three months, the crowd was somewhat unmanageable, where I had almost forty people coming to fellowship at our little meeting. There were no announcements, no schedules, it was all happening organically by word of mouth from the new believers who came to know the Lord, and learn to heal going out and doing what I taught them out in their own lives.
I was eventually asked to move to another location. I kept in touch with the group online, and most of them are still serving the Lord today. If I probably had a permanent facility I would have kept it up, but I did prove to myself and others the biblical model of evangelism works.
In the book of Luke, chapter 10, Jesus sends out the 70, into a community. He commissions them to find a place of influence and remain. Find a person of influence and demonstrate the kingdom to that person, then let him be your credibility in that community. Heal the sick and preach the gospel and teach others to do it also. This was the principle, known as Luke 10 Evangelism that I employed.
This method was employed by Jesus, Paul and more recently even John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church. Wesley forbid new converts from attending his Sunday services for the first few months of their conversion. Instead, he would send people to the convert’s house, and there they would learn the basics of Christian Faith. When they were mature, and involved in the ministry in their local area, then and only then were they allowed to attend his Sunday services. He did that so he would not have to keep preaching to babes every Sunday, going over basic doctrine, but rather he could focus on equipping the saints.
In a twist of irony, there are only two religious groups that employ Luke 10 Evangelism in the style I have described. They are the Jehovah Witnesses and the Mormons. Both of which have an extremely high turnover of converts who join and soon leave the fellowship, but the one thing they do right, is their evangelism. If believers, equipped with the power of the Holy Spirit, grounded in the foundations of Grace could grab these methods, we would not only take nations but possibly the entire world for Christ in a generation!