Are Evangelistic Crusades Effective? - Part 4

Personal Stories about the Impact of Mass Evangelism

In the Peruvian jungle city of Iquitos, pastors rode their canoes for three days in order to come to our pastor’s conference. One pastor shared his story with me. He said that seven years before, he had attended a crusade held by one of my friends. He was saved at that crusade and he started a church out in the jungle.  He started another church, and another one.  Seven years after he got saved at a crusade, this man pastored three churches.

Our team was in the city of León, Nicaragua. Fifty thousand people gathered each night on a baseball field.  Our crusade was such a big deal that our team received an invitation to meet with the president of Nicaragua.  The local pastors have never had a chance to minister to him. Why? They were not big enough.  However, our team prayed with him, shared the gospel with him, and thanked him for allowing Jesus into his country.  Why was our evangelistic team able to meet with the president when the local pastors never had a chance to do so?  It was because of the size of the event.

            At our crusade in Ouanaminthe, Haiti eight thousand people showed up the night we put up the light towers.  The crusade had not even begun yet, but thousands came to see what was going on. The first night of the crusade, thirty thousand people came. Our crusade continued for seven nights and each night, the size of the crowd grew. By the final night, over fifty thousand people flooded the crusade grounds. This was in a city with a population of about seventy thousand people. So, at our crusade, fifty thousand out of seventy thousand people heard the gospel.  Jesus was lifted up in the city! There were churches there, but they were weak. The average church in the city contained twenty to fifty members. The local churches were apathetic.  Many of the pastors of the local churches refused to show up for our pastor’s meeting.  Yet the city was hungry for God. The crusade introduced thousands to Jesus who never would have attended one of the local churches.