EXCLUSIVE: How Chris Mikkelson Went From Drug-Dealing Biker to International Evangelist

The Holy Spirit is moving among this generation in miraculous ways. Charisma reached out to nine “new voices” who are advancing the kingdom of God around the world. Each story is featured in our Charisma January issue, and we’ve posted the transcripts below. This interview has been edited for grammar and clarity. For the full interview, be sure to download the podcast.

Chris Mikkelson is an international evangelist who preaches the gospel in some of the most unreached and dangerous nations on the planet near the Middle East and also at churches across the USA. His sermons are distinctly marked with the presence, power and authority of God, where many are saved, healed and delivered. His gospel crusades near the Middle East are attended by hundreds of thousands, where many in attendance hear the gospel for the first time and receive salvation through Christ alone. Often, incredible miracles of healing and deliverance confirm the gospel message when Chris preaches domestically and abroad.

Tell me about your background. What’s your testimony?

I got saved in 2006. My wife and I were partying and living for the world, and God radically came into our lives. To make a long story short, we just needed Jesus. We really needed Jesus. And we were partying; I was a drug dealer. I was living a very wild lifestyle. I knew all about Jesus growing up. I grew up in the church. I had a mom who was praying for me the whole time I was lost. And then in about 2005 or 2006, my wife’s sister had gotten saved and had been inviting my wife to come to church with her. And I was also part of a huge motorcycle group of guys, anywhere from five to 50 of us, and we would all ride these crotch rockets, the ones that go really fast, and we were just wild. We just didn’t care about life. We went160 miles per hour down the highway, over 100 miles per hour on one tire, just living for the moment, really.

And then one of the guys I was riding with started talking to me about Jesus. And the same time that he started talking to me about Jesus, Amanda, my wife, was asking me if I would go to church with her, because her sister had kept asking her to go to church.

So long story short, we just decided, “Hey, why not go to church on a Sunday morning?” So we went to this huge church in Minneapolis. I’m from Minnesota originally, and we went to a megachurch and experienced a great message, great service. There was an altar call for salvation. Of course, I thought, You know, I was born a Christian. I was sprinkled with water when I was a baby, so I must be saved, right?

So I didn’t respond to the altar call on Sunday morning. But the pastor said something. He said, “Make sure you come back on Wednesday night for our midweek service.” So that’s what I heard.

And what the pastor actually said was, “On Wednesday, we’re having a special service for parents whose teenage children are dealing with drugs and alcohol” and all these things we were currently living in.

But Amanda and I only heard, “Come back on Wednesday night for the midweek service.” So I don’t know. Maybe God was plugging our ears. Maybe there was an angel there covering her ears. But all we heard was, “Come back on Wednesday.”

We hadn’t been to church in years on our own, making our own decision to go. For whatever reason, we decided to go back. I know it was the Holy Spirit. We went back on Wednesday night. And to our horror, we showed up to the wrong service. But God had a plan in all of it.

And so we get there, and we realize, Here’s the pastor, here’s all these parents, and we’re at the wrong service. So we decided to not be rude and just sit way in the back, listen to the service, let the parents sit all the way up in the front of this huge megachurch, and we’ll just sneak out when it’s done. And while the pastor was talking about the sin issues we were dealing with—drugs and alcohol and all of these things that go along with that lifestyle—the Holy Spirit just started touching both of our hearts.

I really felt convicted because I knew God had a better plan for me, and I currently wasn’t living for the Lord. And I looked over, and Amanda was next to me, and she was crying. She couldn’t hold back the tears. There was no altar call for salvation that night, because the service was not really designed that way. So we left. We snuck out, and we went out to the car. We made a decision that night that we were going to start following Jesus. And so that was really the beginning.

And then there was a season for a few months—and I like to share this because I think a lot of Christians can easily wind up in this lifestyle where we’re on fire for God, we love the Lord, we made this commitment to follow Jesus—but we were still halfway in the world and halfway in the church. We were still drinking, but not as much, because now we’re Christians. We were still doing drugs, but we weren’t getting as high as we used to, because we’re Christians now, and we shouldn’t do that. So we were living a lukewarm, halfway lifestyle for a period of a few months.

And then there came a moment where I was sitting at the gas station in my car, about to go in and buy a pack of cigarettes. I was smoking a pack and a half every day. It was just part of my lifestyle.

I was sitting in the car, and I just said, “God, I’m done. I’m done living for me. I’ve tried to live for me for so long. I’m just done. It’s gotten me nowhere. Jesus, I know You. You have a plan for my life. And I’m currently still living for myself. I’m tired of living for me, because it’s gotten me nowhere. I don’t know what You have for me. But I’m willing to just give You everything and just surrender all.” And so I prayed that prayer in the car. That was my real repentance prayer.

My real salvation prayer was just, “God, I’m done. And I don’t want this anymore. I want to follow You 100 percent.” So I turned the car around and never went and got the cigarettes. I went back to our apartment.

I told Amanda, “Listen, I want to follow Jesus with everything, and I’m just done with this lifestyle.”

She said, “OK, I want to do this with you.”

And from that moment forward, everything changed. No more drugs, no more alcohol. God just set us on a whole new course where I became passionate about reading the Word. I would just spend hours every day reading the Bible and praying and just seeking God. This was really the beginning of this new walk with the Lord. So that happened in back in 2005, 2006.

And how old were you then?

So I would have been about 23.

So then how did you go from that point to becoming an international evangelist?

Yeah, so that’s another process. You know, we just love Jesus. And we wanted everyone to know about Him. But we didn’t know how to preach the gospel. I’d never preached before. I didn’t see myself as a public speaker. I tell people all the time that I think I got a C in public speaking in high school. And so I never saw myself as doing that. But God has a funny way of taking the things that are foolish in the world and confounding the wise with them. And so that was really my lifestyle, my life story.Yeah, so that’s another process. You know, we just love Jesus. And we wanted everyone to know about Him. But we didn’t know how to preach the gospel. I’d never preached before. I didn’t see myself as a public speaker. I tell people all the time that I think I got a C in public speaking in high school. And so I never saw myself as doing that. But God has a funny way of taking the things that are foolish in the world and confounding the wise with them. And so that was really my lifestyle, my life story.

So we were just on fire for Jesus. I had a mentor who said, “You really ought to consider going to Bible college,” and I thought, Bible school? I just got saved a year, year and a half ago; I don’t know about all of this.

And he said, “You should really consider and pray about it.” He told us about a Bible school in Dallas, Texas, called Christ for the Nations Institute.

And so we began to pray about it. And it just didn’t make sense in the world’s system to go, but in God’s system, it made perfect sense. We just felt like God said, “Go.” We sold a bunch of our stuff. I sold my motorcycle to pay for school. And we just said, “God, let’s go. Let’s just run after Jesus for a few years, learn as much as we can about Him.”

I never thought I would leave there and be in ministry. I just thought, I just want to go learn about Jesus. And so we ended up in Bible school in Dallas in 2009. And I signed up to be on the evangelism team. I wanted to learn how to share my faith because every time I had tried to share my faith, prior to this, it was a disaster. I had the passion, but I didn’t have the tools and didn’t really know what to do. I signed up for the evangelism team, and we would go out to the streets a couple of times a week.

And my first experience on the streets, I was so nervous, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. And I was paired up with somebody who was really experienced. So I walked around with him and saw that it’s really simple to tell people about Jesus, and to just share your story and how Jesus changed your life. After that first night of evangelizing, I thought, This is so simple.

So then we went out on a second outing, and I was talking to a homeless man, and I was praying for him. And the Holy Spirit spoke to me so clearly about this man. He gave me a prophetic word about him. I began to share that word with this guy, and he just started weeping and weeping and weeping. And he ended up receiving Jesus as Lord and Savior, totally repenting and turning back to the Lord. After that, I said, “God, this is all I want to do. I just want to tell people about Jesus.”

Then a few months later, Reinhard Bonnke came to Dallas, Texas, to do a big conference. And I had never heard of Reinhard, but some of my friends had told me about him. I couldn’t even pronounce his name right at the time. They said, “You’ve got to come to this conference.” So we went to the conference. And we’re sitting there, and I’m watching Reinhard, and I’m watching these videos.

And there’s Daniel Kolenda, who at that time had just become the successor of Reinhard’s ministry. I’m watching Daniel preach, and a friend of mine leans over while Daniel is preaching, this friend who invited me to come with him, he leans over and says, “Chris, one day, you’re going to work for Daniel Kolenda.”

And I thought, That’s crazy. They’re famous. I’m like this kid from a small town in Minnesota. I’m nobody.

And he said, “No, I feel like it’s the Lord.”

So I just kind of tucked that away in my heart. And then after the conference, I was praying, and I said, God, if You call me to do crusades, I’ll go. I’ll do whatever You want me to do. I’ll go wherever You want me to go. Just show me if You’re calling me to do crusades.

Well, 15 minutes after praying that prayer, I went on Facebook, and another friend, who was also at the conference, messaged me and said, “Chris, I had a dream about you last night. You were in a distant land, preaching the gospel to a crowd as far as the eye could see.”

And I said, “Bro, you have no idea. I just prayed 15 minutes ago and said, ‘God, if You’re calling me to do crusades, just show me. Just show me. I’ll do whatever You want me to do.'”

And so that was really the beginning of that evangelistic call, where I knew that I knew God was calling us to evangelism ministry. And then for years, throughout the rest of my Bible school, every time someone would pray for me, they’d start prophesying about Reinhard Bonnke and crusades and Daniel Kolenda and all of these things, and so we knew that we knew that we knew, but we had no connection to them at all.

And the Lord spoke to me in that season and said, “After you graduate Bible school, I’m going to connect you with an evangelist to learn from them before you start your ministry.” And so I had no connections with them. But then right before graduating Bible school, I connected with another evangelist. His name is Bernie Moore. He’s still a great friend of mine to this day. And Bernie told me, “Chris, you’ve got a great call in your life. And I just had a phone call this morning with a friend of mine who’s an evangelist, and he needs a personal assistant. And I just think you’d be great for the job. His name is Daniel Kolenda.”

And so it came full circle back to this prophetic word that I was supposed to work with Daniel, and he connected me with him. I interviewed, and Daniel ended up hiring me to be his personal assistant. He knew at that time that I was called as an evangelist, because we talked about it. And he said, “Listen, I’m willing to train you how to be an evangelist while you work for me.” It was the most amazing opportunity to be able to grow and to be able to learn from the best in the world. So it was awesome. I traveled with them for about three and a half years, working for them.

Then in March 2015, we felt like God was saying, “It’s time to launch out.” With their [Bonnke and Kolenda’s ministry, Christ for All Nations’] blessing: “Take what you’ve learned, and launch out and begin to do your own crusades.”

And so in 2015, we did that. My wife and I started our own nonprofit organization. We started traveling to India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan. We started doing crusades. At the beginning, we would see anywhere from 5,000, 2,000, 3,000 people there, and then it just began to grow. The crusades began to grow. And the impact began to grow. And then in 2017, a big door opened up for us to go to Pakistan and to do huge crusades there. And so the crusades have continuously been growing to where we have seen almost a half-million people come to Jesus Christ and make him their Lord and Savior in Pakistan in 2018.

You said a door opened up for you. Do you mind if I ask what that door was?

I was on a trip to Pakistan. We had a hard time getting visas to go there. It’s kind of difficult to get visas. And so I called a friend who had been there before. And I was telling him, “Listen, we’re having a hard time. Do you know anyone who can maybe help us in any way to get the visas approved?” And he said, “Listen, I’ve got a friend there. His brother pastors the largest church in the country. They know everyone. Maybe he can help you.” So he gave me this contact, and long story short, I ended up getting the visa. I went on that trip, and I met this guy, his name’s Pastor Emron.

Emron became a really good friend of mine. We developed this relationship, and he and I just made this decision: “You know what? Let’s work together to do crusades.”

Emron’s passion is to organize crusades; my passion is to do them, to preach them. And so we decided, “Let’s do this. Let’s work together.” And this door opened up for us. As a result, we’re just seeing an incredible wave of harvest across the country. We’ve found that people are hungry for the gospel because they’ve never even heard the gospel before.

The majority of the people there, they’ve heard about Jesus, maybe, but they’ve never really heard the gospel preached. And so in our crusades, when I’m preaching the gospel, I’ll make the altar call for salvation. And I’ll tell them, “Listen, if you’ve already received Jesus as your Lord and Savior, if you’re already a Christian, praise God. You’re on your way to heaven. But if you’ve never received Jesus before”—and this is after I’ve already preached the gospel—I’ll tell them, “If you’ve never received Jesus before, and you want to tonight, on the count of three, I’m going to ask you to stand if you want to receive Him for the first time.” We make it very plain, very clear if you’ve never done that before, to stand.

When I count to three, we’re seeing anywhere from 70 to 90 percent of the crowd standing up to their feet, making Jesus their Lord and Savior for the very first time. So it’s really amazing what we’re seeing there. We’re going to continue to go back and just continue to reap the harvest. God’s really pouring His Spirit out there. We’re seeing people get saved and healed, and incredible miracles are happening, and mass baptisms of the Holy Spirit are happening at our crusades. And so it’s really special.

That’s really powerful. And we’ll get into more of that. But you said that you’ve been to Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka. Am I missing any?

No, I’ve traveled to Africa with Daniel and Reinhard and with Bernie, but I’ve never done any of my own work in Africa. All of our work has been in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

You were talking about the miracles you’ve seen: healing, deliverance, mass baptism of the Holy Spirit. Do you mind talking a little more about that?

We’re seeing God do incredible miracles. In those places, people have a tendency of making the evangelist or the person that’s praying and performing “the miracle”; they want to make that person almost into a god. And so I tell people, “Listen, I’m not the healer. Jesus is the healer. We just pray.We’re seeing God do incredible miracles. In those places, people have a tendency of making the evangelist or the person that’s praying and performing “the miracle”; they want to make that person almost into a god. And so I tell people, “Listen, I’m not the healer. Jesus is the healer. We just pray.

“I’m just an evangelist who preaches the gospel and prays for the sick, and Jesus does the saving, and He does the healing, and He does the baptism of the Holy Spirit.”

But what I tell people is, “Listen, I believe that this gospel is so true that God is willing to confirm the message that I preach with miracles, signs and wonders, according to Mark 16.”

We see that all the way through the book of Acts. When the disciples preached the gospel, God would confirm it with miracles. So I’ll preach the gospel and make the altar call for salvation, and then begin to pray for the sick, and Jesus is doing incredible miracles.

We’ve seen people who were paralyzed for life. We had a guy who was paralyzed since he was 3 years old. He contracted polio when he was 3. It crippled him. He couldn’t walk. He hadn’t walked in 30 years. Jesus touched him, and he began walking for the very first time with me on stage at our gospel campaign. We’ve seen people who were blind; God opened their eyes.

We’ve seen deaf ears opened. We’ve seen a lot of tumors vanishing in our meetings. And we’ve seen a lot of deliverance, especially when we were in the mountains of Sri Lanka.

For whatever reason, there was just a spiritual stronghold there. And as soon as we started praying, people would just start falling down on the ground manifesting demons, and Jesus would set them free. It’s really amazing. If I could share one story from Sri Lanka—I was preaching the gospel—you know, I believe Romans 1:16 says the gospel is the power of God unto salvation for them that believe.

That word “power” is the word dunamis; it’s the same word that Jesus uses to tell the disciples, “You will receive that power on the day of Pentecost.” It’s a miraculous type of power. And so when we preach the gospel, there is literally a miraculous power that is available for people to be saved out of darkness and into light, for people to be healed of their bondages, disease, addictions, whatever.

I was preaching the gospel. We were up in the mountains of Sri Lanka in the middle of nowhere in a small village of about 2,000 people. We had probably 800 or 900 people from that village at our meeting that night. And while I’m preaching, we have a speaker system on top of the tent that’s blasting the message throughout the mountains. And these people are poor. So they don’t have TV. They don’t have the radio. And so no matter what, they’re listening to the gospel, whether they like it or not.

There was a family there, and they heard me preaching each night and about how Jesus heals, how He delivers from evil spirits, how He can set you free, save you—all these things. Well, one of the nights, while I was preaching the gospel, there was a family sitting on the side of the mountain, and their 16- or 17-year-old daughter fell down on the living room floor and started convulsing and slithering like a snake in their living room floor. And they realized this was a demonic attack against their daughter.

So they grabbed their daughter, and they brought her down to the side of the mountain. They brought her down to the meeting. They tried to put her in a chair on the back of the tent. And she was still convulsing and manifesting, and it wasn’t happening. But my wife was sitting in the back, and she saw this commotion taking place where they were trying to get her in a seat.

My wife was back there taking pictures, and she said to some of the pastors we brought with us, “Hey, take her outside to cast the demon out of her.” So the pastors took her outside, and they began to pray and pray and pray. And I finished preaching the gospel. I prayed for the sick. And I began taking testimonies on stage of people who had been healed.

Well, these pastors brought this woman up on stage, and she still had not been set free from this evil spirit. So as soon as she got on stage, in front of the entire crowd of people, she fell down on stage and continued this manifestation. And all the people were watching.

Now all week, I’d been telling them, “Jesus is the Savior. He’s the one who can set you free from evil spirits.” And now they were watching this woman have this attack on stage, and I was standing there in front of her. It was as though God said, “What are you going to do in this moment?”

It’s a big test.

Yeah, it’s like a big test. And I said, “All right, Jesus, if I ever needed You to show up, it’s right now.” And so I just knelt down and just began to pray for her very gently, “In the name of Jesus, I command you to leave. Be set free.”

It was almost immediate. Within 30 seconds of praying, she was totally set free. She sat up in her right mind; the entire crowd saw; and she asked Jesus to save her. She asked Jesus to fill her with the Holy Spirit. And she got completely set free that night in front of this entire crowd of people. This crowd of people now is seeing the gospel literally happen in front of their eyes.

It made it easy the whole rest of the crusade to make altar calls for salvation after everyone saw that! So Jesus is the healer. He’s doing these miracles, and He’s bringing honor and glory to His name.

A big focus of your ministry is the gospel—just pure gospel evangelism. Although you like the miracles, you like the deliverance and all that, your passion is getting people saved. Sometimes I feel like within the Spirit-filled community, while of course we value salvation, I think sometimes we put a little bit of an emphasis on the experiential aspects of faith, like, “Did I feel God or the Holy Spirit moving?” So can you talk a little bit about why your heart is for the pure gospel?

My heart is to see people get saved because that’s the greatest miracle of all, somebody coming from darkness to light, somebody coming from sin to salvation, someone coming from bondage to freedom. I think a lot of times, we love to see the miracles happen because it’s something you can see happen. A tumor was there, and now it’s not. Somebody who could not walk, and now they can. We rejoice over that. But the Bible says when one person comes to repentance, all of heaven rejoices.

And so I had a revelation one day. I thought, I wonder what heaven sees to make them rejoice when that person makes that decision to repent and start following Jesus because when we see a miracle, we rejoice because we can see it. I wonder if heaven can see that person going from darkness to light, that person going from bondage to freedom in the Spirit. Maybe they see their name all of a sudden being written in the Lamb’s book of life when that happens in heaven. I don’t know.

But it gets me excited to think about that: All of heaven rejoices over just one person. Because someone can get healed and never even repent, never even give their life to Jesus, never even get saved, and go this entire life thinking, Oh, God healed me, so I must be good with Him. But then they never really make that decision to follow Jesus.

I love the miracles because they point to Jesus, but Jesus didn’t come to just perform miracles. He came to save the lost. So that really is the foundation of our ministry: to see people come to Jesus and to see them get saved. I tell people all the time, “It’s not our responsibility to save people. It’s their response to God’s ability.”

But our responsibility is to give them an opportunity, and so our responsibility is to preach the gospel. It’s to share Christ; it’s to share salvation. He does the rest of the work.

You brought up earlier how it was valuable for you to essentially be mentored under Reinhard Bonnke and Daniel Kolenda before launching your own ministry. Can you talk a little bit about the value of mentoring, specifically for the next generation of Christians?

Yeah, it was super valuable for me. I think God puts us all on different paths, but I don’t think we would be where we are if it weren’t for Daniel and Reinhard really pouring into us, believing in us and giving us the opportunity to learn from them.I think a lot of times, we look to mentorship to be, “I want someone to just teach me everything, and then I’m going to do it.” But a lot of times, mentoring, at least for me, was coming alongside Daniel and Reinhard, working with them, being exposed and seeing the inner workings of the ministry.

And that’s why I think it’s so important for young people who feel called into the ministry to get under and serve someone. Just serve their vision, serve their call for a season, for a few years. Make a commitment to them.

When I started working for Daniel, he said, “Listen, would you be willing to commit a certain period of time?”

I said, “Yeah, I’ll commit to at least three years. The next three years to just serve you and to serve your ministry, whatever capacity that is.”

I think it’s important that young evangelists, young pastors—whatever your calling is—get under and serve someone for a season just to learn the ropes. There’s so much to learn that is the non-spiritual.

I think a lot of times we have the spiritual down, right? We pray for the sick; we can preach; we can do all of these things. But there’s so much about ministry that is behind the scenes: administration, organization, promotion, all of these things people don’t really know about unless you actually serve somebody. And so for me, just being able to serve Daniel and Reinhard was an incredible blessing, to be able to learn how a healthy ministry is supposed to look and operate.

I know a lot of our audience for Charisma may be older Christians who have been in the Spirit-filled movement for decades, who are strong men and women of God in terms of their faith. So as someone who was mentored—and I’m sure you’re now starting to shift toward looking to younger people whom you can mentor as well—what was really valuable for you when older believers were mentoring you? What advice would you give them for mentoring younger people? know a lot of our audience for Charisma may be older Christians who have been in the Spirit-filled movement for decades, who are strong men and women of God in terms of their faith. So as someone who was mentored—and I’m sure you’re now starting to shift toward looking to younger people whom you can mentor as well—what was really valuable for you when older believers were mentoring you? What advice would you give them for mentoring younger people?

That’s a really good question. I guess I would say to not just see them as a worker to help you, but to ask yourself, “How can I invest in this person in the long term to really help them?”

Daniel would give me projects, and he would say, “Chris, I want you to do this project. I know you have no idea how to do it. But I want you to do it so that you can learn how to do this, so that you know how to do it for your own ministry.” And that was so incredibly invaluable. He would give me a lot of projects like that, where I had to figure it out.

He would help me along the way, but there was a process of learning how to do this. And in that process, I learned the right way to do it and the wrong way to do it. It helped me so that when we launched our ministry, I already knew how to do so much.

I think that’s probably one of the greatest things, just giving younger people—not just having someone come work for you and to serve you in that way, but to really give them real solid tools and opportunities to grow and learn how to be an evangelist or pastor, whatever the calling is.

And I’m sure there were times when you messed up on something he gave you. But he still kept believing in you and investing in you and giving you responsibility.

Yeah, absolutely—especially at the beginning, because I was not administrative. I’d never had an administrative position before in my whole life. And so when Daniel hired me, it was really difficult for me. His assistant was a female, and she was amazing—Lorraine, she was just like an administrative genius. So I kept thinking, Man, I don’t know how to do all of this.

I worked and worked, and I thought, The only way I’m going to be able to do this is if I work really, really hard at it. And still, after three months, I was doing a terrible job. I felt like there was a moment where I might end up losing my job, just because I wasn’t qualified to do administration.

There literally came a moment where Daniel sat me down, and he said, “Listen, I know you’re trying really hard. I’m not sure. Maybe this isn’t going to work out for you.” That sort of thing.

He said, “If you want to continue doing this, it’s going to be hard, and I’m going to be hard on you because the only way you’re going to be able to do this is if you learn how to do it right. And I’m going to have to be hard on you and correct you a lot.”

He said, “If you want to do that, we can do that. If you don’t, I will help you transition seamlessly into your own ministry and all of that. I’ll try to make that process as seamless as possible. But if you want to continue being my assistant, it might get really difficult.”

And I said, “You know, Daniel, I really feel like God has me here. I’m supposed to serve you.”

And I said, “I don’t care how difficult it is. I’m willing to go through that process.” And it wasn’t long after that that there was literally a shift from where I felt like things were so difficult and I was putting so much focus on “Man, I’m not good at this. I can’t make it. I’m not smart enough. I’m not administrative enough,” and all of these things to the place where God showed me, “Chris, I’ve called you to this ministry. I’ve not called you here to fail. But I’ve called you here to grow and to learn.”

So there was a shift in my mind where I said, “You know what, devil? I’m not going to listen to your lies anymore. I’m not going to listen to these things. I’m going to believe God has called me to this place. And He’s not called me to fail. But He’s called me to succeed.”

From that moment forward, everything shifted. Everything changed. It was supernatural. I just began to grow and to be able to learn and remember all of these things. It grew to a place where Daniel was really happy to have me as his assistant, and I just thank God for the time I had with him. But yes, it was difficult at first.

As one of the next generation of Spirit-filled leaders who’s rising up and taking your position, what are you seeing in your generation? What do you see as the future of the Spirit-filled movement?

Yeah, I believe we’re on the cusp of the greatest harvest this world has ever seen. And I believe God is raising up evangelists. For years, the evangelistic gift has kind of been lost in the church.

I remember when I got saved, and I started doing evangelism in Bible school, I would go online to try to find evangelistic sermons—people who were preaching the pure, simple gospel so I could learn how to preach it on the street corners—and I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t find people at that time online. And so I thought, God, where are the evangelists? Where the people who are really going after soul winning?

I think a lot of us have that title as “evangelist,” and people just assume you’re an itinerant speaker, you have a book deal and you’re just traveling around preaching, but really the evangelistic gift is somebody who’s a soul winner, somebody who’s going after seeing souls saved.

That’s what we see Philip doing in the book of Acts. He was the evangelist. He was going around preaching the gospel; and I feel like God is raising up a whole new generation of Holy Ghost evangelists who are going to go and preach the gospel, who are going to say, “God, I’ll go to the uttermost parts of the world. I’ll go where no one else wants to go and preach the gospel” because Jesus is coming back for a bride.

He’s coming back for a harvest, and it’s not going to be a small harvest. He’s coming back for a big harvest. And I believe God is just now really beginning to birth a new movement of Holy Spirit soul-winning evangelists across the world.

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