Pray for our Jesus Disciple Making church planting process to explode through our seven major evangelism campaigns;
- Our “Person of Peace” campaign.
- Our Neighborhood Festival campaign.
- Our soccer tournament campaign.
- Our English teaching campaign.
- Our Love Letter from God distribution campaign. (Which goes along with our entire printed Gospel campaign.)
- Our Love Like Jesus campaign.
- Our local conference campaign.
The person of peace campaign is the driving force of all we do. In many ways, you could say the purpose of the other six Reachout campaigns is to come by a person of peace. Our vision is to bring them to Christ and plant house churches to duplicate the process. Even though it’s the end goal of all seven campaigns, I listed it separately because it can be done all by itself. Many times, we go to a neighborhood, give out presents and pray for sick people until we find the person of peace. These are people open to getting to know you and open to listening to what you are bringing them – the gospel of Jesus. There are so many ways to find a person of peace from intentional neighborhood walking or just meeting casually at a coffee shop. Everything we do at AIM1040 is to train the trainers on how to do this process and send out missionaries to train more trainers.
While our focus is house-to-house and person-to-person evangelism to make disciples, we recognize in Acts 20:20, the Bible says they preached daily in the temple (publicly) and house to house. So, there is a place for public ministry for those who learn how to preach the gospel and make disciples. We will show you how to do smaller, neighborhood festivals that will lead to finding persons of peace. We discourage super massive, large meetings of 20 plus thousand people or more. It is better to stay with small neighborhood crusades. The goal is to get houses of peace, it is not to get thousands of hands raised. From personal and corporate experience, and the stats bare out, there is almost no lasting fruit that comes from large air meetings.
When Franklin Graham came to Thailand, the gospel was preached to about 30,000 who had never heard the gospel. When local pastors followed up many people could not be found or did not exist. After 3 months of following up the 4,500 confessing to be saved in the meeting, it turned out that most added Jesus to their other idols and moved on. The church did not grow by even ONE PERSON. It cost over a million dollars for this crusade. The way is not money, or mass crowds. The way is like Jesus did; make disciples of all nations and teach them all that I commanded you and baptize them. We have noticed, when a Thai is baptized that is when they generally take their faith very seriously and they stop going back to the temples. That is when they get serious and get more involved.
Sports ministry has long been a world-wide mission favorite way to gain access. There is good reason for this—it works! On the unreached Island of Mindanao, in the Philippines, there are thirteen tribal groups with heavy superstitions we once visited. Imagine, no electricity or running water. Here the locals must still catch their own dinner and boil their water to drink. After a very long trip of hiking up a mountain to reach them, we lived in the woods for many days to share Jesus with them. Having never seen a white person, they would not come near us the first day. Primitive as they were, they had a basketball rim on a tree and a perfectly squared pool table in a barn. Once we started playing basketball, they began to come around. Pretty soon the whole group was watching. Then at night, we competed with their best players. I know missionaries shouldn’t bet, but wagers kept the game interesting to the locals. One of our leaders, who was winning, made them a deal, which was a pretty big thing to them. There was going to be a big neighborhood festival the next evening. If our friend could beat them, he would give them their money back if they promised to come to the festival. But if they won, they could keep their winnings. They thought this was a great deal and brought their best player from another village close by. In a very close match, we won. They couldn’t believe it. They screamed and laughed and fell over each because these weird foreigners had beaten then at their game. True to their word, the entire village showed up at the festival. Many miracles happened and to this day two churches are in that village. It’s mostly Christian and many of their young people have now left and gotten degrees to better their life. To this day, they will find us when they hear we are at some big city to say, “remember me, I was in the poker game?” or remember me, I was there when you helped keep my family from banishing me after I got pregnant out of wedlock. I’m happily married. Here is the 11-year-old son and is doing great. Sports ministry is an attention getter, and it is wonderful.
English studies has long been another favorite of mission organizations. It has been used for centuries, especially since the 1800’s because English, has been the language of business (good or bad) for a long time. People who want higher paying jobs look for those who can speak English. Government schools here pay the bare minimum wage for teaching. Poor schools can’t afford to even offer it, but the richer city schools and the private schools teach it from K through 12th. We have begun an English studies program that will build relationships by offering to provide teachers who are willing to teach English as a second language in poor schools and in adult classes as well. This program has been huge for opening doors.
Our new booklet/gospel tract has been printed and is ready to mail to the 5,000 known pastors in all of Thailand. After sending this out, many pastors will ask us to come teach because they are hungry. Others may investigate us, but there isn’t much they could do. By the grace of God, we operate under a group which falls under the division of Culture. This was a hard won privilege we hope to honor by influencing the culture of Thailand with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Acts of random kindness is at the heart of love like Jesus. We have only been able to do this on two occasions, but the plan is to donate a car to the village where we had our first church planted here for their use. The plan is to use it girls in desperate need of help. It’s a regular thing to see young girls 18 to 40 passed out drunk or on drugs on the side of the road. The Love Life Jesus campaign involves providing a home near one of the church plants. There, their basic needs will be met; food, shelter, protection. A local team member will assess their situation, work with local ministries to help get them what they need, and get them connected with a mentor/discipler. Thailand is the third largest human trafficking countries in the world. We want to get the venerable off the street before the bad people get to them. If they are underage, we will follow local law and stay with them until local authorities arrive to ensure they are not exploited.
Our leadership teams travels across Thailand and other countries teaching the gospel message. One of our primary goals is to train trainers in the methods of our Jesus Discipleship Model. This means they find a person of peace and teach them how to conduct a Discovery Bible Study in hopes of turning it into a house church.. We can train any church or group of churches to become a great commission church by showing them a process to expand into many new house churches. This has proven to be the most effective way to grow and bring larger numbers of people to Christ.
AIM1040 offers three types conferences to churches, groups of churches, denominational leaders or to any Christian group who wants us to come;
Healing Conferences. We invite the sick, Christian or non-Christian, to come and learn what the Bible says about healing for several days. In the evenings we have evangelistic meetings and pray for the sick.
Leadership Conferences. We train your leaders in effective evangelism to do the vision you have laid out. We make adjustments to help make your dreams come true.
Church Planting or Disciple Making Conferences. By far our most popular conference. Here you will learn how to find a person of peace, learn how to disciple them, and grow that into a group of people, unbelievers included, to study the Bible and come to Christ, get baptized,an start a new church, a new house church, or incorporate this back into an existing church.
Please check back as we add more about these seven initiatives.
If you wish to give to one of these important REACHOUT CAMPAIGNS, then please indicate this in your giving. It is better if you do not just pick one of the seven, unless you really feel lead to. For us, at our stage of growth, it’s better to give to the REACHOUT CAMPAIGNS in general and understand that our leadership team needs the freedom to allocate to whichever campaign needs it the most, at the time.