Video game addiction? Now, he’s a pastor

For Jared Tourse who got saved at 17, substituting the video game Call of Duty for pot-smoking was a smart way to fill his down time and not fall back into sin.

But what started innocuously enough – even appearing to be a healthy hobby – turned sinister a few years later when he got kicked out of college for poor grades in Cal Poly Pomona’s engineering program.

“That was a wakeup call,” Jared says. “I was throwing away the maturity and responsibility part of life. I was a boy. I liked being a boy even though I was in my 20s.”

For Jared, as for many American young men, video-gaming became an addiction, uncannily similar to drugs. He played obsessively from 9:00 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. while his life floated downriver without achieving anything notable. He was still a junkie, a video game junkie.

Today, Jared has kicked the habit. He is married, has four kids and pastors a church in Victorville, California. How he exorcized the bewitchment of video games from his life is a story that starts with a pair of lovely brown eyes.

When Karina walked into the church, Jared was mesmerized. He waited for nine months before asking her on a date. As they got to know each other, it became obvious that Karina was his soulmate.

Jared gave her a promise ring and, after months, started looking for an engagement ring.

Somehow, Karina got wind of it – and she gave him an ultimatum: “I’m not going to marry someone who sits on their butt and plays video games all day,” she told him. “If you’re serious about this, you need to sell your Xbox.”

Her words were piercing, confrontative but also lovingly truthful.

Ever since Call of Duty distracted him from the call to engineering, Jared was binge-playing.

He worked a “bum job” delivering Chinese food from 4:00 to 9:00 p.m. He munched free egg rolls and sipped Chinese tea between deliveries. His tips covered his energy drinks, a bag of Doritos and the Xbox live card for each night’s activity.

“I was content,” he says. “I was saved and serving God in some capacity, but I floated in life. When I got off work, that’s when my day started. I played video games at night every day until I heard my mom wake up and go to work at 5:30 a.m.

“I was respected on Call of Duty,” he adds.

He was close to earning the coveted Golden Dragunov sniper rifle that Call of Duty awards to gamers who achieve 150 kills by shooting the head of enemies.

“When you’re in the video game world, you feel you’re becoming something,” he says. “You feel like… Read the rest: video game addiction

Almost a murderer

His dad was a murderer, convicted and sent to prison from the time Antonio Francis was in the womb. In high school, a voice told him that one day he too would become a killer. 

Antonio was raised in a one-bedroom shack in Belle Glade, FL. “As soon as you came in, you could see the back door,” he says on a Delafe video. His mom didn’t take him to church but prayed with Antonio and his brother every night.

To visit their cousins, they had to go to church. At church, he learned about Jesus, but he never received him into his heart.

Next to their house was an abandoned building where addicts lived and used illegal drugs.

A “friend” of his mom involved in witchcraft cursed their family, blaming Antonio’s mom for a broken cell phone. She cast a spell on her, saying she would lose her car and children all at once.

Strangely, it happened to a certain extent. Rain came through the roof, forcing them to move. The car wouldn’t start. The kids had to stay at another place.

In high school, Antonio fell into selling drugs, stealing and violence.

Once, he robbed someone. Ten months later, three guys robbed him of $1,000. “Sometimes the stuff you do to people comes back to you and you don’t handle it so well,” he says.

Antonio swore revenge, vowing to kill the perpetrators.

But when he made up his mind to avenge his loss, he heard an audible voice, If you do it, you’re going to die or go to prison for the rest of your life.

Most of his buddies carried guns. Some even offered to do the dirty job for him. But Antonio’s manly pride made him think he would do it himself.

Sometime later, he again resolved to commit the triple homicide in retaliation for the robbery. A second time, he heard the voice, If you do it, you’re going to die or go to prison for the rest of your life.

He backed off, unsure of what the voice meant… Read the rest: Antonio Francis almost a murderer

He dreamed of killing Christians and Jews

In his dream, little Kamal Saleem brandished double-edged swords in both hands to behead multitudes of Christians and Jews. When he came before the throne of Allah, he laughed and said, “Only my crazy Kamal could do this.”

“My mother taught me that Muslims had conquered the world and would do it again,” Kamal says in the April 2022 Decision magazine. “I was taught that if we conquered America, we could conquer the world for Islam.”

Born into a Sunni Muslim family, Kamal Saleem was inculcated in the extremist form of Islam – they thought it was the purest form. You earn Heaven by doing good deeds, and martyrdom was the surest path to Paradise.

Taken out of school at age 7 and forced to work for money for the family, Kamal spent all his free time at the mosques learning Muslim zeal. When the radical Muslim Brotherhood showed up, all the members of the mosque joined the crusade.

He was still only 7, but he reported to a war training camp with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. With ropes to swing across pits and walls to scale, the camp seemed a playground to Kamal, but its mission was anything but play.

“You cannot be a warrior unless you know how to use a weapon,” his trainer said, handing him a military rifle. Kamal eagerly fired off 30 rounds into the air from the AK-47.

“I am a warrior!” he boasted, slapping his chest proudly with his hand. “The gun became my friend, and the smell of gunpowder became my addiction.”

After months of training, Kamal was entrusted with a mission to smuggle duffle bags of TNT and munitions through tunnels in the Golan Heights into Israel to be entrusted to shepherds at a designated drop point. Those explosives were to be used by fedayeen (Arab commandos) to kill Jews.

When he returned, his exploits were celebrated by hundreds at the base who shouted “Allahu Akbar” (god is greater). Kamal even got the chance to meet PLO leader Yasser Arafat, who declared, “Children like you will change the future. You are the future.”

Kamal continued executing… Read the rest: Kamal Saleem

Richard Brooks pastored in Romania. He got saved after being busted for drug smuggling

Smuggling drugs into Australia, Richard Brooks didn’t realize the taxicab driver he got from the airport was actually an undercover cop who had been tipped off about him.

Richard was convicted and sentenced to a prison term. In jail, a guard gave him a Bible and a Christian book We Can Take the Land from an incipient church-planting movement called Christian Fellowship Ministries.

Richard got saved and became enthralled with the idea of evangelism, discipleship and church planting, concepts described in the CFM book.

When he was released from prison, Richard was deported to America. It was the days before the Internet, so Richard couldn’t find one of the CFM churches and attended a Calvary Chapel in Palmdale, CA.

He joined a missions trip to Romania, where he locked eyes with Anita in Brasov. They married, and Richard, living in Brasov, started a Bible study prompted by his unbridled enthusiasm for his Christian faith.

It was soon after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Romania had just opened up to the gospel along with all the other nations of the Eastern Bloc.

Taught communistic atheism all their lives but seeing the futility of communism, endless streams of young people were looking for a real hope and wound up attending his Bible studies. Richard used “We Can Take the Land” along with the Bible but missed some of the finer points of church-planting.

“People were getting saved, but Richard didn’t really know what to do with them,” says Greg Mitchell, head pastor for CFM.

In 1991, Richard and his wife came to America to take care of paperwork in America and visited churches seeking help and direction for his burgeoning ministry. Renewing his license at the DMV in Palmdale, Richard spotted a “Potter’s House Church,” one of the names of CFM churches.

He sauntered… Read the rest: Richard Brooks in Romania

Brazilian runaway threatened to kill dad

Ronaldo’s drunken father shoved his face into the mattress so the neighbors would not hear him scream as he beat him savagely.

“When I grow up, I’m going to become a criminal and I’m going to come back here and kill you,” the 5-year-old threatened his father, who beat his mom too.

Of course, Dad only beat him more. So little Ronaldo ran away one night. He ran and ran and ran. He could hear his dad calling after him, but he never turned back.

When he could no longer run, he traversed 12 miles of jungles until he came to the Brazilian city of Bello Horizonte. On the streets, homeless and hungry, Ronaldo got picked up by a police officer who took him to a rehabilitation center for children.

It was supposed to be a safe place for children, but the types of kids who were taken there and the negligence of the staff made it essentially a criminal factory, Ronaldo says.

“They got a lot of money from the government to take care of children,” Ronaldo says on a Manna Testimonies video on Youtube. “That project does not exist anymore because it was a failure. They were just creating new criminals.”

Ronaldo had no choice but to join a gang. Read the rest: Brazilian runaway threatened to kill his dad.

Warlock Richard Lorenzo now a pastor

Never mind that Richard Lorenzo Jr. wallowed in money. He still felt empty. To find fulfillment, he trained to be a warlock.

“I was making a hundred grand a month. I had the traveling, the women. I bought two properties,” Richard says on a Delafe video on YouTube. “But I was depressed. I had all this money, but the money was not answering it either.

“I stopped caring about the money. Now what I cared about was finding out what’s real? The witches were telling me real things. They told me true things about my past. They were telling me I was called to be a warlock.”

Richard’s descent into drug trafficking and witchcraft began with rejection in his childhood. He was raised in Fort Lauderdale to Puerto Rican parents. His mom took him to Catholic masses, but the violence of his neighborhood pulled him down.

“I loved women, I loved partying, I loved drinking and smoking. I loved robbing,” he says. “It wasn’t because I needed the money. It was because I wanted acceptance from my peers. I’m a product of my environment. If you do these things, you’re accepted and they look at you like you’re more of a man.”

While he was flexing worldly impulses, he also did well enough in his studies to get into Broward College and later the University of Central Florida, where he fell into fraternity party life at age 17.

He and his friends were doing crazy things; some even got shot. At his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, he had an experience in his sleep in which he fought off a demon by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. He remembered the prayer from his childhood.

Thinking he needed a “change of scenery,” he moved at age 21 to New York City, becoming a bouncer at clubs in Manhattan. The change of scenery didn’t bring a change of heart.

“I was still robbing, finessing anything – clothing from department stores. I was credit-card-scamming. It was an adrenaline rush,” Richard explains. “I was good at it. I had this strategy. I had demons in me.”

But after the rush came guilt, depression and suicidal broodings.

“I cut off everybody in my life because I was so depressed,” he says. “I had so much paranoia and lived in so much chaos that I just cut everybody off. I thought it was better to die.”

Despondent one day in his apartment, he heard a supernatural voice break through the darkness. “It brought so much life to my spirit,” he says. But Richard didn’t know Jesus yet, so he mistook the voice as belonging to his dead uncle.

Even though he didn’t recognize the voice, it encouraged him. Friends were going to jail and getting killed in New York, so Richard decided to flee the city and join the Navy as an air traffic controller. A lot of his deployment he spent in Greece.

In the military, Richard didn’t reform. As a matter of fact, he began selling marijuana. Reveling in vices again eventually landed him in depression, so one day on a beach in Crete, while his friends were in the club, he went alone to the beach to cry out to whatever Higher Power might be out there.

“I didn’t know anything about the Bible. I was crying profusely, just screaming, ‘Who are you? What’s the purpose of life?” he recalls.

He sought Haitian voodoo. He found God.

He heard a voice, the same voice he heard in New York. “I’m going to show you now.”

He was stunned.

Still, Jesus didn’t immediately show him. Though the supernatural encounter was overwhelming, he was still very lost. Instead of coming to Christ, Richard fell into even greater sin. It got darker before it became lighter.

He diversified his trafficking to cocaine, ecstasy, pill and “lean,” codeine cough syrup mixed with soda. Read the rest: Warlock Richard Lorenzo now a pastor

Healing from abortion for Pastor Dan and Melissa Canonge

At first, Dan had no qualms about paying for his girlfriend’s abortion. Only afterwards did a sense of guilt creep over him.

“Without even thinking about it, without hesitation, I paid for her abortion,” Dan says. “I didn’t even feel guilty about it until a little later. It became one of the things that made me aware of my sinfulness later on. Up until this point, I didn’t have a conscience about what I did. But when I did that, I knew that I had done something wrong. It was a terrible choice.”

He ultimately became aware of his moral responsibility. “Guilt and condemnation are very powerful emotions,” Dan says. “The blood of Jesus is able to cleanse our conscience from dead works so that we can serve the living God. When you cross certain lines in your life, there’s a lot of guilt that is carried with it. It can lead to self-hate. Jesus is that scapegoat that took the blood and cleansed us from the guilt of the past.

“It’s pretty plain and obvious that you’re involved in a murder,” he adds. “But the blood of Jesus is so powerful and is able to cleanse your mind and your conscience of any person who has crossed these lines. You can experience God’s love, knowing that his blood was shed for that purpose.”

Dan saw Melissa at a car dealership and, instantly attracted, started asking her out on a date.

At the time, Melissa had two kids and was going through a divorce.

Melissa grew up in a heroin-running and heroin-abusing family that often moved between Texas and California. Her dad was the black sheep of a Christian family, and at times they attended church.

“When we were in church, my family was ok,” Melissa says. “When we weren’t in church, my family was crazy.”

Because of the fast living at home, Mellssa started hanging out at bars when she was 12. She started drinking and doing drugs at 15. She was pregnant at 16 and married at 17. She got into fist fights with her husband, trying to get him to work. She divorced at 20.

For his part, Dan, the youngest of six, suffered trauma at 8 when his parents separated in Galveston, TX. Dan and his brothers suffered a car accident. One of the brothers flew through the windshield. Dan woke up in a ditch.

When he was finally… Read the rest: How get healed from abortion?

Congressman blasts Biden admin, sides with Torben Sondergaard

A congressman blasted the Biden Administration for “persecuting” Danish Evangelist Torben Sondergaard, who when applying for refugee status suddenly found himself arrested and incarcerated in an ICE prison.

Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana)’s statement, entered officially into the congressional record, is important because he is a member of the Homeland Security commission, the body that oversees ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement).

“Torben Sondergaard is a legal immigrant from Denmark,” Higgins read about a week ago before the Border Security, Facilitation and Operations subcommittee, which he chairs. “He came to our country legally and applied for asylum properly. He has no criminal charges. He was arrested … and has been incarcerated … for over one year.

“He’s been persecuted by this administration and targeted, we believe, because he’s an evangelical minister.”

Congressman Higgins’ incendiary accusation gives powerful support to Sondergaard’s argument that he is a victim of sinister persecution.

The iconoclastic preacher – who emphasizes evangelism, baptism, Holy Spirit power and exorcism – was persecuted in Denmark, which leans heavily to the secular Left. A T.V. crew contrived a hit piece on him that purported to show child abuse in his ranks. Almost immediately, Danish government officials, citing the T.V. report, passed a law specifically prohibiting exorcism.

Sondergaard saw the one-two punch as a devastating blow to his ministry, The Last Reformation. Thinking that he would no longer be able to evangelize freely in his native land, he fled to America and applied for refugee status under the religious persecution protections.

Sondergaard’s team thought the case would be a slam dunk: he was personally decried nationally and threatened with imprisonment for doing what he says all Christian should do, fighting the forces of Satan.

But the U.S. Courts… Read the rest: Torben Sondergaard supported by congressman

Prowling rebels, foreign nations didn’t scare him. Getting married did.

Desmond Bell was not afraid to launch out as a pastor and “pioneer” a church at Wilberforce, Sierra Leone. He had already conquered his worst fear.

He had gotten married.

“I thought marriage wasn’t worth it because I was afraid I would be like my dad,” Desmond recalled. He grew up with a single mother because his dad had been unfaithful.

“But (my pastor) showed me that I could make a difference. He showed me how to love my family. It was actually Pastor who influenced us to get married because I was scared. He showed me I could be loyal to my wife.”

Three pastoral assignments later, Bell, now 41, took over a church in Marseille, France from Charlie Forman who now is an evangelist. It has been an astounding odyssey for a man born into one of the poorest nations of the world.

When Desmond was only two months old, his mom, a telephone operator, separated from his dad. Bell grew up in a middle class home in Sierra Leone’s capital city, Freetown, and integrated in 1992 into the Door Church which was exploding in the middle of a guerrilla war.

At 19 years old, Bell got caught up in the whirlwind of exciting preaching, enthusiastic outreach, commitment and loving pastoral attention that marked that early church. Pastor Alvin Smith became a father figure for Bell.

He met his wife, Matilda, another young person drawn by Holy Spirit fire, and they married only after Pastor Rob Scribner from Santa Monica pushed them forward. “It was obvious that they liked each other,” recalled Rob, whose church had help bankroll revival in Sierra Leone.

Bell, who is four years older than Matilda, pioneered a church in Wilberforce in 1998. He was among the first… Read the rest: He was afraid of getting married.

Gideon test: A prisoner asked God for bird to touch window panes on order

A brainiac in school, he dreamed of becoming another Thurgood Marshall, but when his mother was murdered when he was only 14, he turned to stickups with a gun on the mean streets of College Hill, Tampa Florida.

“”That’s when I changed my concept of life and became a totally different person,” David White says on a Manifestations Worldwide video. “My dreams and aspirations were totally killed. The idea that there was a God in Heaven was over for me. I declared that night that if there is a God in Heaven, then you’d better stop me because I’m going to hurt all these people.”

He went from a gifted program at school to fending for himself on the streets. Filled with rage, David “pimped” himself out to older women to have a place to sleep and food to eat. To get a little extra money for himself, he became a trigger man robbing people at gunpoint.

“I was a little stick-up kid,” he says. “I was a wicked young kid. I was known to be a shooter.”

A local drug dealer took him under his wings. Knowing that brandishing a gun would get the young man killed, the drug dealer taught David to deal drugs instead. It was a safer way to make a buck.

Because he was so dangerous, the cops wanted him off the streets, so they planted drugs on him, accused him falsely and locked him up, David says. He was labeled “a threat to society.”

“I was innocent of the charges I was in prison for, but I wasn’t innocent,” David acknowledges. “I had done a lot of worse things. They did what they had to do get me off the streets.”

A God-hater, David despised “jailhouse religion.” While Christianity turned him off, he like the white-hating religions of the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, or the Hebrew Israelites.

“I was trying to prove that the Bible was full of falsehoods and contradictions and that Christianity was the white man’s religion,” David says. “But then I found that the things I was taught to battle Christianity with was actually a lie. I found that Christianity was established in Ethiopia since the year 84.

“As I was reading the Bible, I was changing,” he adds. “The book changed me.”

Then he stumbled on Gideon, who put tests on God to find out his will and purpose.

It occurred to David to likewise test God – in a “weird way like a child would.”

“If God is real, send a bird to touch this window pane,” he recalls. “It was raining out. When I called on God to touch a window pane, amazingly a bird touched that square. I was an intellectual and it didn’t make sense. I thought it was coincidental. So I… Read the rest: Gideon’s test man in prison

Muslim nurse accepts Christ, ditches hijab

The spread of the gospel is taking place in ways no one would ever expect. Recently a pastor in a Muslim country was surprised by a Muslim nurse who came to him and confessed Christ.

“I’m a sinner and he is my Lord and Savior,” Dana* told the pastor. It was startling because usually Muslims cannot go beyond calling Jesus simply a prophet. Moreover, calling yourself a sinner is shameful in the culture, the native pastor told Christian Aid Mission (CAM).

Dana had traveled 50 miles to find the church. She came to be baptized also.

After executing the mandates of Islam to perfection for years, Dana still had no peace, so she launched into a study of comparative religions, a quest that drew sharp criticisms from her Muslim friends who sternly warned her that leaving Islam was the worst sin.

She remained undaunted.

Dana showed up at the church with her hijab on, the traditional Muslim head covering. She asked the pastor if she could continue wearing it to blend in. The pastor affirmed her request and said that not denying Christ was really the only thing that mattered.

“Just don’t deny Christ Jesus,” he advised her. “Don’t continue your old ways of worship. Go as the spirit leads you, growing strong in your new faith.”

After staying a couple days, the nurse returned home. Two months later, she reported to the pastor that she had ditched the hijab. It is a symbol of extremist Islam and the… Read the rest: Muslim nurse accepts Christ, ditches hijab

The first American missionary was black

The first American Protestant missionary was NOT who is often credited. It may surprise some to learn that George Liele, a former black slave, was the first.

Liele sailed for Jamaica to reach the lost in 1782, 11 years ahead of heralded British missionary William Carey and long before American Adoniram Judson sailed to India in 1812 (and later Burma).

For some encyclopedias and missiology schools, that’s an update. The fact was brought to light by E. A. Holmes, a professor of church history at Stetson University, according to Baptist Press.

Liele was a slave in Georgia who received Jesus into his heart in 1773 under the coaxing of his master, Henry Sharp, at the local Baptist church. Genuinely touched by the Lord, Liele began to propagate the gospel among his fellow slaves.

He was ordained on May 20, 1775, becoming the first officially recognized black preacher in the Colonies. He preached for two years in the slave quarters of plantations around Savannah and even led a congregation at Silver Bluff, South Carolina, according to the Union Review.

Seeing the anointing on Liele’s life, his master freed him from slavery.

Hearing of family members in Jamaica who needed the gospel, Pastor Liele migrated to Jamaica with the help of British colonel Moses Kirkland. Landing at Kingston, Liele and his wife, Hannah, planted a church there by preaching among the slaves of Jamaica.

He served for 10 fruitful years but also faced severe opposition from the slave owners, who cynically viewed his preaching as agitating the slaves, and even was thrown in jail for a time.

Liele baptized hundreds of… Read the rest: First American missionary was black

Brooks Buser and Bible translation for the YembiYembi

After years of learning the language, developing an alphabet, teaching literacy, missionary Brooks Buser and team gave the YembiYembi tribe in Papua New Guinea copies of the Bible five years ago.

“It has been a long time, almost 2,000 years, that we the YembiYembi church have waited for this translation of the Bible into our own language,” says a tribe leader on a Radius International video.

Waving palm-like branches (or feathers) and dancing, about 100 tribe members received the printed and bound Bibles – the labor of nine years delivered by small prop plane – with fanfare, preaching and jubilation.

The YembiYembi live in the Lower-Sepik Swamp of remote Papua New Guinea. With an estimated 5,000 members, the tribe with only three villages is so small that it’s not even in Wikipedia. You can reach it by plane or paddling 270 miles upriver. Their language is Bises.

Once the translation was finished, Radius International missionaries sleft trained local pastors to take charge of the church. From the video, it appears the majority of the tribe accepted Jesus, but a “vocal minority” remains in opposition to abandoning the customs of its elders.

“The Bible is important,” preached Brooks, 37, in Bises, which the video translates into English through subtitles. “But what’s more important is what you do with it as the church, the body of Christ. The Bible is here to help believers grow. I will visit you, but this Bible will guide you now.”

Brooks was a missionary child who grew up in Papua New Guinea evangelizing another remote tribe in the lush jungle. “The seeds of missions were planted in my mind,” says the man who counted San Diego as his American hometown.

As a child, Brooks spent half his time in the mud of the jungle with native friends and half his time at the missionary school, playing basketball and learning a traditional Western education.

“I remember getting on the plane here at 9 o’clock in the morning and flying to school and playing a basketball tournament that night in the gymnasium, looking down at my leg and I still have a little bit of mud on my leg from the tribe,” he remembers. “It wasn’t a normal upbringing. The blending of these two worlds was a unique way to grow up.”

Armed with an accounting degree from San Diego Christian College, he married Nina and pursued a career counting numbers. He became finance manager and even traveled to Paris, “on track for the American Dream,” he says.

But on a visit to his parents in Papua New Guinea, the newly married couple’s hearts were stirred. “She got to see where I grew up,” he explains. “God began to lay on our hearts the nation. We felt an incredible level of comfort leaving the American Dream behind and coming back here as missionaries.”

In 2001 with their newborn Bo, they began training with New Tribes Mission where they learned how to set up solar panels and build airfields. “There’s no power, there’s no stores” in these isolated areas where they reach tribes, Brooks says.

“During the class there was a lot of things that brought us out of our comfort zone,” Lynn says. “There was a class on animal butchering which was not my favorite.”

They learned phonetics and grammar to learn and codify the language. They launched into Third World life in Papua New Guinea in 2003. The Busers began surveying and exploring land to find an ideal unreached tribe to work with. Tribes actually write letters requesting missionaries be sent, probably because they have heard of the benefits of civilization and medicine that missionaries bring.

Because the airstrip was flooded at their first choice on the day of their launching into the mission field, the Busers went to their second choice, the YembiYembi. They flew to the nearest airfield, traveled by canoe and then hiked – a five-hour journey – to arrive.

The tribe was so excited and received the missionaries with a welcoming ceremony. “In 2004, we started building our houses,” he says. They had a team of fellow linguist missionaries. They had batteries for their laptops and a two-way radio to communicate with their base.

They began building an airstrip with the help of 1,000 Yembis, removing stumps with power tools. After days of intense labor, the mission group sent a barge with a tractor to finish clearing the field.

“That gave us our lifeline back to base,” Brooks says.

Simultaneously, they learned about their language and culture, hunting in the jungle late at night.

“The callouses on our feet got a lot thicker,” he says. “We learned how to throw a spear and hunt pigs, basically live like a Yembi in their environment.”

Missionaries are routinely criticized by secular intellectuals for altering native people’s customs and “Westernizing” them. The Yembi were animists.

But Brooks… Read the rest: YembiYembi tribe in Papua New Guinea

New Kempsville church pastor loved heavy metal

His dad was The Lawrence Welk Show classical jazz pianist, his mom a concert pianist, but David Smale (rhymes with snail) wanted to play heavy metal.

“Wouldn’t you just love for your daughter to date the singer of ‘Cranial Abortion’?” Dave jokes on the Virginia Beach Potter’s House podcast. They played backyard parties, prompting cops to come and shut it down, until they debuted at a club along with Incubus.

With rock ‘n’ roll, came drugs and sex. He smoked cigarettes at 13, smoked weed at 14 and dropped acid by 15.

In the Los Angeles Unified School system, Dave attended middle and high school with Latinos and African Americans who were bused into the San Fernando Valley as part of integration policies.

“We got bullied a lot. We were just these little heavy metal-loving white kids,” he says. “One time this guy said he was going to do a drive-by shooting on us the next day. Because of that, I noticed in my house it was ok for me to express racist things. My dad and my brother would say the N-word and other racial slurs.”

Later he joined a punk rock band “Uneducated,” until his party girl got pregnant and he took up delivering fast food and telemarketing as a high school dropout to put food on the table for his baby and the girl whom he married at 18.

“I remember times stumbling around drunk and high, and all of a sudden, the baby starts crying,” says he, and thought: “I don’t know if I can change his diaper right now. I might put it on his head.”

“It was just awful,” he says. “I was partying and my baby was right there. It was not good.”

Five weeks after his first baby was born by C-section, his wife got pregnant, and the nurse at urged her to abort: “You’re going to die,” she said.

Leaving the women’s health care center, Dave and his wife felt an eerie sensation. “Did you feel like we just murdered somebody?” she asked. “Yeah, I do,” he responded.

Unable to make ends meet, he eventually decided to join the Navy with hopes of learning a trade. “That was my only way forward,” he says. “I was going nowhere. I was lost in dead-end stuff.”

At 20, Dave looked for a new beginning in the Navy, but the same old addictions and racism didn’t let him get that new start.

“I could wear a uniform, I could stand up taller, I could march in a straight line,” he says. “But I was still fighting addiction.”

Stationed a Point Mugu, California, Dave and his wife got invited to a Baptist church. She was gung-ho, he was blasé.

Dave went anyhow, and the sermon made sense. So, he accepted Jesus into his heart on April 1, 1999 and was born again.

“When I raised my head, everything was different,” he says. “My entire perspective changed in a moment. There was no going back. The cursing went away immediately, the addictions were all gone, the racism was gone. I didn’t hate all the guys in the Navy from different races and ethnicities. I loved these guys who didn’t look like me, but I saw them as God saw me. It blew my mind.”

His wife was pregnant with twins when he got deployed for six months. He kept pursuing Jesus the whole time, but when he came home, he realized his wife had given up on God and church.

“The laundry was piled to the ceiling. Checks had bounced,” he says. “There was no food in the house.”

He coaxed her to return to church with him, but she persisted in the party life.

For months, he tried to win her over, but she left him when he got orders to Virginia Beach.

Stung by the abandonment, Dave decided to backslide. He went straight to the oceanfront and ogled every girl in a bikini.

“At that point, I was so mad, so bitter, so upset, I completely decided to backslide,” he acknowledges. “I was on the warpath to find me a girl and do something that I would have totally regretted.”

But every time he leered with lust… Read the rest: Church in Kempsville

Darren Munzone, Australian rugby player and pastor

Darren Munzone reacted to his wife’s newfound faith in Jesus and belief in the rapture by sneering: “Oh, you’re still here? The UFOs haven’t gotten you yet?”

He could tolerate the fact that she had gambled away their savings of $10,000. But he couldn’t stand the fact that afterwards she became a born-again Christian. “To me it was like she had become a nun or something. I was just not happy.”

He lashed out at her: “If I would have wanted to marry a Christian, I would have gone to church, But I met you in a pub. This is a rip off.”

Born to an Italian immigrant father, Darren always identified as an Aussie because of discrimination against immigrants, he says on a Virginia Beach Potter’s House podcast. He had basically no background in Christianity.

Admittedly, he was the bully of the classroom and got into scrapes frequently. When his mother divorced and remarried, he took out his frustrations by fighting with the neighborhood boys. His penchant for violence went right along with his dream to be a rugby player.

“I got into lots of trouble because of fights as a teenager,” he says. “I rebelled against my mom and my stepdad.” He didn’t talk much to his stepdad except two to three times a year.

For rugby league, he practiced very hard but wasn’t big enough and wasn’t gifted in the sport. Ultimately, a series of injuries sidelined him when was semi-professional, so instead, he turned to coaching, where he excelled.

“I’ve broken all my fingers,” he recounts. “I literally had my ear ripped off the side of my head and had to have it sewn back on. My AC joint in my shoulder – serious shoulder problems. I’ve had two knee reconstructions.

“I was far more successful as a semi-professional coach.”

The woman who became his wife was a nurse, and together they made enough money to qualify for a home loan. But when the broker informed them the term would be 30 years, Darren and Joanne looked at each other and walked out.

Instead of tying themselves down for 30 years, they decided to travel to England and Europe for two years for a work-cation. “I was running away from the broken dreams of becoming a professional sportsman,” Darren says. He played cricket in England.

After one year of living in England, Joanne had a miscarriage, and the subsequent sadness deprived her of all desire to keep vacationing. “She was devastated by that,” Darren says.

They returned to Australia, where Joanne’s depression deepened and widened even though they finally married.

“She blamed herself that we’d come back from our overseas trip a year earlier than expected,” Darren says. “She thought I was angry that we’d cut our holiday. To escape the depression, she started gambling.”

She played poker machines at the local bars. “This went on for some time until she had gambled all our money away,” Darren says.

The depleted savings was not just bad – she sought Jesus because of it after a co-worker invited her to church.

She broke the news about her secret gambling addiction and subsequent losses to Darren, who despite being hooked on money didn’t get too upset. “I was annoyed but I thought we’ll recover from that.” Read the rest: Darren Munzone rugby coach Australia now pastor

In the Navy, he mocked the Christian. Then…

The thirst for alcohol, the perverted thoughts all left him the instant Mitchell Collins prayed: I don’t want to be the man I am anymore. I’m sorry for the things I’ve done. Jesus if you’ll come into my life and change me, I’ll live out the rest of my days for you.

“When I gave my life to Jesus, there was a dramatic change,” Mitchell told God Reports. “The thoughts that I had towards women changed overnight. Before Jesus I had thoughts all the time about women when they walked by. Afterwards, there was self-control. I no longer wanted to think of women in that manner. I had respect for them.”

As a lead petty officer in the Navy over a group of men, Mitchell had mocked the Christian in his group mercilessly. Now that he had accepted Jesus into his heart, what was he to do? “I didn’t tell anyone that I got saved for two weeks.”

The leadup to salvation was a long history of sin and soullessness. Born in Merkel, Texas, population 2,500, into a family of alcohol and crime, Mitchell didn’t see much future for himself as a cattleman. So he shipped out with the Navy straight out of high school.

He got his porn addiction and promiscuity from his stepdads and his drinking from his grandmother, a back-slidden bartender. He was consumed by dirty thoughts, knew how to get into relationships with women but not how to sustain them.

“I got started into that when I was little,” Mitchells says of being exposed to porn at 10. “I didn’t have an understanding or respect for the value of what it costs to have a woman.”

In the Navy, Mitchell completed one tour in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf and spent the rest of his time in Norfolk Naval Shipyard, assisting with maintenance on the nuclear-powered U.S.S. Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier.

That’s where he met Freddie Valero, who had stopped drinking after accepting Jesus and talked to everybody about salvation. Mitchell, who was in charge of the group, mocked him and incited the others to tell dirty jokes and drink. He also would deny Freddie’s request for Sundays off to attend church.

Pastor Mitchell (right) with Freddie Valero

“I was giving Freddie a very hard time as his supervisor,” Mitchell admits. “I was always telling him he was using his religion as a excuse to get out of his work.”

But then Grandma died. Mitchell had spent the last weeks with her in the hospital and watched how cancer consumed her.

A short time later, the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers happened.

Both events shook him to the core.

“Everything that I thought was firm and stable… Read the rest: Church in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Mack Calvin Christian basketball player, saved from terrors of his drunk dad

When his family left Texas, little 9-year-old Mack Calvin saw poverty and physical and verbal abuse under the drunken terrors of his father. His family was evicted many times, so Mack moved from school to school and his learning suffered. In college, he read at a 7th grade level.

So when the 100 colleges offering him basketball scholarships saw his 1.9 GPA on his transcript, they shut the doors to him. “This boy’s dumb,” Mack imagined they said of him.

“My father was always drunk. It was kind of embarrassing when he came to my baseball or basketball games drunk,” Mack told God Reports. “God said to me, ‘You’re not going to ever drink. I didn’t want to be like my dad. I detested the anger he displayed towards my mother when he was intoxicated.

Ultimately, Jesus had big things for Mack, who eventually became a Hall of Famer in basketball. In August, he’s running free youth basketball camps in Long Beach, aiming to help impart values to underprivileged kids and teach them about Jesus.

Born on a farm in Ft Worth, Texas, Mack’s family was middle class and never lacked food. But his dad was an irascible, foul-mouthed drunk who decided to move the family to Los Angeles. His continuous gambling impoverished the family, and they went from eviction to eviction until they arrived at the Imperial Courts Housing Project in Watts.

Right next door, there was a gym where Mack played and practiced continuously until age 15, before the family moved to Long Beach.

“I knew in my heart that I didn’t want to be like my father,” he says. “I wanted to be great. I wanted to be special. I worked hard.”

Parks & Recreation coaches took the raw material in Mack and formed a high-caliber player. At Long Beach Polytechnic High, Mack led his team to back-to-back CIF championships both years he was on the varsity team. He was all-CIF, the state sports organization for high schools.

Colleges wanted him. But his schools had put him into wood shop class, metal shop and special education; he fell victim to the instability of his home. So off to Long Beach City College he went. Mack led his team to championships.

Coaches Chuck Kane and Bill Barnes turned his academics around. Starting him in easier academic classes and connecting him with tutoring, the coaches transformed the academic underachiever into a Dean’s List student.

After two years in the community college, Mack accepted a scholarship offer at USC, where he broke UCLA’s 41-game winning streak with his tenacious play. What the 6’0” point guard lacked in stature, he made up with sheer grit and determination.

Out of college, Mack played seven stellar seasons for the American Basketball Associating until it merged with the NBA in 1976. He was an ABA all-star five times and was named to the ABA all-time team

“You’re talking to a miracle,” Mack admits. “It was by the grace of God. God has always been at the center of everything in my life, no matter what I accomplished, no matter what accolades, no matter what money I made.”

Joining the NBA, he played for the Lakers, Spurs, Nuggets, Jazz and Cavaliers before retiring after the 1981 season. He did some stints as a coach, including for the Lakers and for the Virginia Squires.

For 44 years, he’s sponsored a basketball camp to give back to the communities where he’s lived. “I want to always aspire to make a difference,” he says. He’s mindful of the hardships of his own upbringing.

He’s always attended church. In college he participated in college sports faith groups. On the road, he’s attended whenever it was Sunday, as long as there wasn’t a game. Today, he attends Bishop Charles Blake’s West Angeles Church of God in Christ.

“I loved the spirit that came from the church,” Mack says. “I’ve always had the… Read the rest: Mack Calvin Christian

A man of God, Torben Sondergaard, in jail for arms smuggling?

Friends are expressing dismay that a Danish man who works tirelessly spreading the gospel around the world has been arrested in America over charges of smuggling arms from Mexico into America.

“Today Torben (Søndergaard) is sitting in jail because somebody made a false accusation against him, something that is not true,” says Jón Bjarnastein on a Facebook post on The Last Reformation page. “It’s because he’s preaching the gospel. This is nothing new under the sun. The Bible says that everyone who wants to live a godly life will experience persecution.”

Torben Søndergaard fled Denmark in 2019 after repeated attacks by the government to discredit his street ministry, which riled secularists by casting out demons in public places. If you don’t believe in the supernatural, much less demons, then one might think Torben is a manipulative charlatan. He applied for asylum in America and now is being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I was invited to a meeting with Homeland Security who wanted to talk about my asylum case – a case where I, in Denmark three years ago, was accused of doing many things I had not done, and where I ended up fleeing to America seeking asylum,” he wrote on Facebook. “But then, they suddenly said that the real reason I was there was because they had been notified that I was smuggling weapons from Mexico to America.

“I was in shock.”

The accusation of arms running is strange because the illegal flow of weapons is generally southward, from America to Mexico. America is a manufacturer of arms, not an importer. What America imports illegally from Mexico is drugs, not weapons. CBN says the Department of Homeland Security had no comment on the case.

Doing ministry in Denmark for 18 years, Søndergaard, 45, founded the Last Reformation street evangelism movement with the purpose of restoring Book of Acts-style ministry. His Jesus Center trained disciples from 30 nations to spread the gospel worldwide, CBN reports.

But authorities in secularist Denmark didn’t like him and, starting in 2016, launched investigations from six separate Danish ministries into everything from food safety to unpaid taxes. They found nothing wrong, CBN reports.

The persecution continued when Søndergaard decided to homeschool his daughter. Seeking an abatement from the persecution, Sondergaard re-enrolled her in public school. But the attacks continued… Read the rest: Torben Sondergaard Danish evangelist.

Shintoist finds God

Shinichi Tanaka believed vaguely that an all-powerful god who created the universe was out there somewhere. But it was not until a near death experience that he found his way to God.

From a young age, Shinichi had a great respect for nature and the “gods” of the Shinto religion. However, when visiting the shrines to pray, he felt that something was missing.

“I went there to feel a sense of purification, also to pray and give thanks,” Shinichi says on a Japan Kingdom Church video. “But it was like praying to a vague God, like the air.”

It was at 40 years old that Shinchi began to take on a different perspective on God. In a moment of introspection, he began to see God not as a group, but as an omnipotent Creator.

“I realized the existence of God, which had immeasurable power,” he continues. “Since then, I would close my eyes and meditate that the universe would send energy like bright and dazzling lights. That was my God.”

Shinichi did not know God yet. This would change when, at 49 years old, he experienced a heart attack that left him hospitalized.

“My life hung in a fifty-fifty balance,” Shinichi says. “But I kept a strong will to survive.”

At one point during his hospitalization, Shinichi underwent a near-death experience that led him closer to finding God.

“One night, while sleeping on the bed in the hospital, a beautiful world spread out before me, and I was drawn outside my body,” Shinichi recounts. “It was actually the entrance to death.”

“Then, suddenly, a voice shouted ‘No! Don’t go!’” Shinichi continues. “When I regained consciousness, I suffered from strong pain, and tried to get out of it.”

Shinichi believed that an invisible being saved him from entering death’s… Read the rest: Shintoist finds God.

Out-of-control spending almost ruined their marriage

When her frustration hit the tipping point, Angie Cabler threw the checkbook across the room at husband Jason.

“I will no longer pay the bills,” she snapped, on a 700 Club video. “You will take care of it.”

From thoughtlessly spending to cutting up 17 credit cards, Angie chartered a course with Jason towards financial freedom, which brought them fewer worries about money, and greater peace and harmony in their marriage.

As a dentist concerned with running his practice, Jason abdicated household financial management to Angie. Debt stressed him out, so Angie balanced the checkbook.

For the first seven years of their marriage, the Christian couple never established a plan or goals for their finances.

As a result, their spending habits became unsustainable.

“I just liked to spend,” Angie admits.

As it always does, financial chaos spawned marital strife.

“When we fought, we fought about money,” she adds. “I think if we would have had open communication in the beginning, our first seven years of marriage would not have been so hard.”

But with the breaking point came a breakthrough. Angie threw the checkbook at Jason and renounced any further bookkeeping. Jason took over the expenditure tallying.

Most importantly, the Cablers enrolled in a financial education class at church where they learned the principles of everything from stewardship to generosity. They committed to tithing, eliminating frivolous spending, and setting aside a percentage of their income for a rainy day.

At the last class, Angie spontaneously offered to cut up their credit cards – all 17 of them.

“A lot of them were department stores, jewelry stores, or American Express, Visa, those kinds” of credit cards, Angie details.

In cutting the cards up, she halted… Read the rest: Out-of-control spending almost ruined their marriage.

Nikki Cannon, building African American wealth in Los Angeles

People told Nikki Cannon’s mom, diagnosed with dyslexia, to be a typist. With bigger ambitions, she, notwithstanding, graduated with a bachelor degree, a master’s and a Phd. She became a university professor and a consultant for the U.S. Congress on social justice.

Triumphing over tough times was always part of Nikki’s life. Today she holds six professional licenses and an MBA and is building a team of financial professionals with World Financial Group. “I definitely did not grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth,” she told The Pace.

While she was in high school in Hawaii, her mother packed one suitcase and she and Nikki fled a physically abusive husband/step-dad. Mom and daughter landed in LAX, got a hostel room for two weeks and ate at soup kitchens until Mom got a job at Burger King.

Yup, a PhD flipping burgers. “She made it work,” Nikki says. “Honestly, I don’t feel like I came from poverty. I had a great childhood. There was never any obstacle that she was not going to overcome.” Eventually, mom landed a job with Children Protective Services and segued back to academia. For her part, Nikki was a stellar student at Los Angeles High School who, ironically, didn’t plan to go to college.

“Have you heard back from any of the colleges you applied to?” a college counselor called after her one day. No, she responded. She wanted to take time off to help out Mom. He looked at her grades and her SAT. It was too late for the UCs and Cal States, but she could still apply for private schools. At his insistence, she applied to four universities and was accepted into all four. Read the rest: Nikki Cannon financial advisor

One woman’s testimony sheds light on why Muslims are getting saved

Raised in England in a Muslim family, Laila Nassali was bewildered by the number of religions and different doctrines.

“It was so confusing for me,” Laila says on her YouTube video channel. “God is not a God of confusion, so why are there so many different religions out there? If he’s the one true God, why are there so many religions saying he’s this or he’s that? It looked like a confusing puzzle that I would never be able to solve.”

Like so many, she gave up on trying to compare, contrast and determine the truth. Instead, she started to live for personal pleasure and be happy-go-lucky like so many fellow university students appeared to be having fun.

“I was literally just living my best life, and that led me to a lot of sin,” she says. “I was trapped in the flesh. I didn’t believe in God, period.”

One day she randomly felt anxiety and depression, because of living in the ways of sin. “I had thoughts of death, and where am I going to go?” she says. “I had all of this torment in my heart. It led me to the point where my spirit was crying out. I couldn’t fathom that I didn’t have a purpose.

“It took me to go into the dark to realize there is a God somewhere.”

Out of her agony, she decided to pray: Who are you God? she asked.

She didn’t pray at a mosque, as her Muslim parents had taught her. She prayed in her bathroom.

In the following days God brought a Christian into her life. She just “happened” to catch a cab with a pastor, who talked the entire time about God, Christianity, and prayer. Next, she ran across two random girls on the street who talked to her about God.

Then it was Instagram. Scrolling through, all she saw was posts with crosses, which was weird because she knew the algorithms based on her previous interaction with Instagram would not lead her to crosses. Read the rest: why are Muslims getting saved in the West?

Nightmarish Christmas turned around

On the plate where little Greg Colon had left cookies and milk for Santa on Christmas Eve were empty syringes on Christmas morning, evidence that his dad had abused drugs — again.

The embittering experience of substance abusing, absentee parents pushed Greg into copying the cool, law-breaking kids in his New York neighborhood. When he dropped out of high school, he opened a barber shop as a front for trafficking drugs.

“I loved the way I was living, I loved what it could do for me. I loved how it made me feel,” Greg says on a CBN video. “It was all about me. It was about money; it was about greed and it was about self-indulgence.”

Greg Colon’s dad, a stone-hearted drug addict, was rarely home. His mom died of alcoholism.

At age 9, Greg moved in with his grandparents, who offered him precious little in terms of material things but gave him and his brother love. But the lack of acceptance from his parents’ neglect left him with a hole in his heart that he tried to fill with worldly possessions.

“What attracted me were the more violent kids, kids who always had the nice sneakers, the nice clothes,” he confesses.

When his grandfather died, Greg, at age 12, lost his own compass in life.

“He was somebody who really got me as a kid and actually cared for me,” Greg remembers. “Then he was gone. I was just empty inside.”

With no positive role models in his life, Greg fell into running the streets and selling drugs. At age 15, he dropped out of high school.

The one bright spot was when he was 15 and his dad, who tried to reform, gave him a professional barber’s clippers. Cutting hair was something Greg enjoyed.

“In my heart it meant the world,” Greg says. “It was like a real good pair like a professional pair of clippers.”

It certainly helped improve their relationship, but it didn’t undo a lifetime of neglect. Read the rest: Christmas nightmare turned around.

Does God still heal today?

At 82, Paul Cadder, was still an avid snowmobile-rider and a gospel musician. But when he started to lose his vision to a cataract it threatened his vigorous lifestyle.

“Lord if I’m going to keep doing this kind of singing and so forth, I’m going to have to have a change in my eyesight,” he says on a 700 Club video. He was worried he would not be able to continue to lead worship at his local church.

Paul had always been an active man. “I had toys for years,” he says. In the 1960s, he put out three gospel albums with a quartet, with whom he traveled across America ministering. He was a natural worship leader at church.

But with the film covering his eye lens, he couldn’t see the music page from which he directed the choir. The encroaching symptoms of old age in 2018 left him dispirited.

“I accepted it as getting old,” he says. “But when I was leading worship in church, i couldn’t see the music real well. I was kind of frustrated and I thought I’d tell our church, ‘I might not be able to keep doing this.’”

On Jan. 4, 2019, while watching Christian TV with his wife, Yvonne, the speaker prophesied: “It’s almost like a thin film that you can’t see through very clearly. God is just removing that right now. Now your vision’s going to be restored to normal.”

Paul was startled. The person described his condition exactly. “That was for me,” he thought. Read the rest: does God still heal today?

Career-ending injury brought Inky Johnson his dream life

The dream from age 7 was coming true. Inky Johnson was in his junior year in college with all the paperwork signed for the NFL draft. He was among the top 30 and was guaranteed to make millions doing what he loved.

All he had to do was play 10 more games and his future would be set, but when he went to make a regular tackle against an Air Force player in 2006 — a tackle “I could make with my eyes closed” — the cornerback ruptured his subclavian artery and could not get up.

“I never thought about a career-ending injury,” Inky says in an Above Inspiration video. “I woke up from that surgery and the thing I placed my identity in was now gone.”

His right arm was paralyzed. Every day he lives with pain. But he rose above the crushed spirit and now delivers motivational speeches, encouraging people to serve Jesus and trust Him with their destiny.

Inquoris Johnson was raised in a 14-member household crammed in a two-bedroom home on Atlanta’s poor and violent side. His mom pulled double shifts to put food on the table, and Inky says he wanted to pull the whole family out of poverty.

Every day was dedicated to training to fulfill the dream. He drilled, worked out and practiced. His family attended church, and he asked God to bless his dream.

When he joined the Volunteers at the University of Tennessee, he became their starting cornerback and was on the trajectory to success; the commitment and effort was paying off.

Then he woke up on the fateful day and followed his usual routine: run two miles to the fire station and two miles back to warm up. Throw the football at the ceiling to practice catches at all angles by surprise. Visualize himself performing to perfection.

“Two minutes left in the game, and I go to make a tackle – that I can make with my eyes closed And I hit this guy and as soon as I hit him, I knew it was a problem, but I didn’t think it would be this type of problem. When I hit him every breath from my body left, my body goes completely limp. I fall to the ground.”

Inky blacked out. His teammates came over to him and told him to get up. “Let’s rock man,” they said. Read the rest: When bad things happen to good people: Inky Johnson’s career-ending injury.

Product of rape wins beauty pageant

When Valerie Gatto’s uncommon beauty allowed her to win the Miss Pennsylvania pageant in 2014, it was impossible to imagine she was a product of rape.

Her mom was only 19 and planning on law school when she was attacked at knifepoint, raped and nearly killed.

The assailant wanted to prevent his victim from going to the cops by silencing her permanently, but an unusual flash of light scared him and he ran from the scene.

How does light emerge from the depths of darkness and despair?

“Mom always told me I was her light,” she told LifeSite News.

Valerie found out about her conception in the third grade when, when she wondered why she didn’t have a father like other kids and asked her mom.

Absorbing this difficult news, she never accepted an attitude of victimhood. Her mother, who had to abandon her plans for law school to take care of her baby, brought her to church and got Valerie involved in social outreach.

She was raised by her mother and grandparents in a stable, loving home.

“I knew God put me here for a purpose, and He’s the reason my mother and I were saved,” she told CBN. Mom “always would tell me I was her light. I am the light to illuminate the darkness for all to see, and I look at it from that moment of conception, there has been that light associated with darkness.”

Valerie got involved in clothing drives, giving gifts to children in hospital care, and Operation Dear Abby, which gives cards to U.S. military members stationed overseas, according to LifeSite.

“I live my life not thinking of it as something negative but looking at how to turn a negative into a positive,” Valerie told CBN Read the rest abortion in case of rape.

John Givez leaves Christian Hip Hop, smokes pot

After singing for Christian Hip Hop for two years, talented musician John Givez stepped away from faith and returned to smoking pot, as seen in his music video “After Hours,” filmed in 2017.

When the rhythms & blues artist from Oceanside joined with Christian rappers Ruslan and Beleaf, it was heralded as a huge catch for Christian music.

But his turning away brought the CHH world great sadness, with many praying for the return of a prodigal.

Growing up, Givez attended church five times a week. His dad was a preacher and his mom worked in the choir. But his church and home were in the rough east side of town, and he was constantly harassed about joining a gang — either Pozole or East Side Crip — inside school and even coming out of church.

Add to that the fact that his dad suffered emotional issues of PTSD as a veteran and schizophrenia, and you have the perfect storm for a trouble-prone youth who had an uneasy relationship with his father.

“The devil really tried to have his way with my family,” he remembers. “It took awhile for him to be diagnosed. That took a toll on me.” He stopped attending church during his teen years.

“I started getting into trouble with the law,” he says. “I caught a case for burglary, and I got caught with some Oxycontin. The burglary was a misdemeanor, but (the drug) took my case to the next level.”

Givez faced a three-year prison term.

His dad bailed him out of county jail in 2014. The gesture of love and compassion from his father paved the way toward reconciliation.

“I remember sitting in the holding tank with these other fools, I remember God speaking to me. That was the first time I heard Him” in a long time, Gives said.

Look around you, God impressed on his heart.

“I look around, and all of us in there hated authority, and I didn’t know why,” he remembers. “That right there was a life-altering moment for me, in my own life, having to learn, just being hard headed, being smacked by the way things go.”

When he was bailed out, his dad urged him to get a job to show the judge he was changing.

At that time, a Christian rapper named “Beleaf” started dating John’s sister. He invited John, then 19, to church and offered him a job.

“That took me off the streets to where I didn’t have so much idle time, you know, to be bored and get into something stupid,” he says. “The Lord really started working on me. I was still smoking and drinking.”

Givez started reading his Bible, which was hard because he didn’t like to read. He wound up reading the Bible for eight hours.

“I gave my life to the Lord right there,” he remembers. “This was real. I would start in Revelations. (I realized) I’m going to Hell, for sure. Then I learned that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. From that moment I was like, ‘I don’t know how my homies are going to feel about this.’”

When he finally emerged from his room, his mom looked at him quizzically and remarked: “It looks like a weight has been lifted off of your shoulders.” Read the rest of: Is John Givez still Christian?

He sought Allah. He found Jesus.

His father brought American-born Hazem Farraj back to Jerusalem to teach him the ways of Islam. But the then-12-year-old stunned his parents by adopting a different path, one that would lead to his family’s rejection.

Farraj committed himself to his father’s plan to rediscover his roots. But the more he prayed and practiced the rituals of Islam, the more his doubts grew.

“If you’re praying to Allah, and you don’t see no response from Allah, then you need to figure out who’s listening or who’s answering that prayer,” he says on a Road to Jesus video. “That’s what I had to do. Praying prayers to heaven it was like heaven was brass. They would fall back to me. I was searching.”

But in his quest to know Allah, he grew frustrated and angry. “It made me mad because here we came as a family halfway around the globe from America to the Middle East,” he says, “and the god I came to follow was not responding.”

It only made him angrier to meet upstairs neighbors in his building that were Christian. Why did they have joy and peace while Farraj had nothing? He describes the one and a half years quest for truth as “an identity crisis.”

“I was getting trained culturally as a Muslim, but the Islam I found shocked me,” he says. “Instead of running into the god of Islam, I found Jesus.”

The upstairs neighbors smiled a lot. They were nice. They showed love.

They projected the image of God in their faces, and it bothered Farraj. So one day he challenged the family’s father, who was legally blind. Why hadn’t Jesus, if He were real, healed him?

The man explained everything Jesus had done for him. They talked for four hours. Farraj was intrigued but not ready to relinquish the faith of his upbringing.

Some weeks later, the family invited him to McDonald’s — with a catch: first they were going to church. Would he come with them?

“I was observing all the happy Christians raising their hands and worshiping God, singing to someone they knew was real. To see these people happy and so alive in Jesus was a shocker,” he says.

But then the grave warnings against abandoning Islam reared their monstrous memory in his mind. He was attracted to the Light but fighting it every step of the way.

Farraj left the church and went down to the first floor, where he knelt to Mecca and prayed his Islamic prayers. It was no good.

“When you taste something so sweet and then you taste something so bitter, the bitter became so bitter. So that’s what happened in this prayer,” Farraj says. “I went from this amazing, glorious presentation of a God who loves His people and the people who loved their God to praying and hearing crickets.

“At that point I was so angry. I finished my prayers on my knees, and I said with tears rolling down my face, ‘Whoever you are, whether you are the god of the Koran, I’m needing you to do something because I’m being lost to this Jesus I sure as heck hope that you see this struggle because I’m losing this one, man. I’m trying to do your job and this is not working out. I’m trying to hold on to Islam by the skin of my teeth, wanting it to be real.”

After pledging his loyalty to Allah and asking for help, he considered the possibility of the legitimacy of the antithesis.

“But if you are Jesus who these people are happy believing, whatever the truth is, I’m going to find it.”

He returned to the service.

“I got up and went to sit back in my pew, and I wasn’t angry anymore and I was appreciating that these people were in a place in their relationship with God that I was desiring for so long.”

The next day, he climbed the stairs to talk with the blind father.

Farraj attempted to say, “I want to become a Christian,” but fear kept him from pronouncing the word “Christian.” For 40 minutes, he tried but could only pronounce the “c” sound. Finally the father told him he had to leave, and if he wanted to complete the sentence, he needed to do so immediately.

Farraj gathered all his strength, focused his energies and ripped the words out: “I want to become a Christian.”

Two days later at the appointed time, Farraj accepted Jesus into his heart and became born-again. It was a feeling like no other.

“I literally wanted to jump, scream, shout,” he says. “I didn’t want the Christians to think I was crazy. I literally had to tame my spirit. I was set free. My countenance changed completely. My life changed.” But his Dad was not happy. Find out what happened by finishing the read: Palestinian converted to Christianity.

Jesus helped addict kick meth, drive away gnarly hairy demons

After his father succumbed to cancer, David Silva Jr. was “eaten up with guilt” because he hadn’t been there for his dad through the chemotherapy and hospitalizations.

So he tried to commit suicide. When his girlfriend left, he tied a noose around his neck, fastened it to the bar in a closet, took a bunch of pills and let himself fall.

But his girlfriend came back in suddenly and rescued him, marking the beginning of David’s turnaround from meth abuser to Christ follower, now 31-years-old. Nearly half his life had been consumed by addiction.

“I never thought it would be so easy for me to quit. It had to have been God. I didn’t have no withdrawals or anything,” says David, who hasn’t been sober for a year yet. “I felt I was on fire for Jesus.”

David first got into trouble because of the kids he was hanging with in Pacoima where he grew up. They took drugs, so he eventually tried them in the 10th grade. Very quickly he transitioned from marijuana to crystal meth.

“I’ve always been upity up. So I liked meth because the feeling you get is you’re alert. It’s a stimulant, but eventually you start losing control of your own mind,” David says. “Because of the lack of sleep you start hallucinating, hearing things and seeing things. When you open your mind up to that much evil, you’re actually seeing things that are actually there.”

David did construction work with his dad, but since the two of them argued constantly on the job site, he eventually left home. He “screwed up” some really good employments because of his drug use.

“Me and my dad had a big blowout,” he says. “We always bumped heads. We had a really bad relationship on the job site. We always wanted to be in control. We had ups and downs. We had a love-hate relationship with me.”

He was sleeping in his truck but eventually found favor with a drug dealer to sleep on his couch. Fixing a car for a friend of his dealer, he met the girl who would become his girlfriend. He fell asleep on the patio at a barbecue at her house and just stayed there.

He would do handyman jobs and install security systems and cameras and home entertainment units. Sometimes, he would be at police officer’s houses installing systems — and he would be high while he was doing it.

By many accounts, methamphetamines are second only to opioids in popularity on the mean streets of America. The drug triggers a jolting release of dopamine, the happy hormone. Users go for days without sleeping or eating as the drug becomes their single focus in life. David stuffed toilet paper in his cheeks for his driver’s license photo so he wouldn’t look so gaunt.

“You can do $300 of meth and it won’t hit you because your body is so exhausted. They call it the burn out,” David says. “No matter what amount of meth you do, it won’t hit you.”

Towards the end, David starting hanging out in underground casinos, “getting involved in some really heavy things, with some really gnarly gang members who were notorious” in the criminal world, he says. “I was involved in all kinds of illegal activities.”

Meanwhile his mom and dad were praying for him. Even when he was high, he would remember God and even talk to other users about God.

“God had purpose for me,” he says. “Smoking with 20 guys I was still talking about God and get into debates about good and evil. I would wonder how I could debate about God while I was high. God never leaves us.”

David’s parents hadn’t heard from him in nine months when his dad was diagnosed with stage four cancer. Mom was afraid to tell her son the complete diagnosis for fear it might make him spin out of control with the drugs, but she sent word that dad was in the hospital through some friends.

David came home and made peace with his father. Eventually he found out he was dying of cancer, and he began to spin out of control.

“I lost it. I started using drugs really really badly, even worse than before,” he says. “I became reckless. I didn’t care.”

When his dad was in the hospital for the last time with liquids oozing out of his mouth and nose, David was there to help.

“I love you,” he told his father, who stared back with eyes of fear, unable to speak himself.

“It was too late,” David says. “It ate me up so bad. I was afraid he didn’t hear me when I told him I love you. We didn’t really make that peace. The guilt was so much. I wasn’t there for my dad like I should’ve been. I was too busy getting high. I got in a really dark place, and I lost sense of everything.”

Two days after his father (a born-again) Christian died, David was overcome with guilt and grief and tried to commit suicide but was interrupted by his girlfriend.

With no sense of closure or peace, David threw himself into rabid drug use with a fury. This time, not even his girlfriend knew where he was, in a tent underneath an overpass bridge. He dropped from 188 to 140 pounds when an acquaintance brought him a message.

“Finally one of my friends came looking for me and said, ‘Dude, your mom is really worried about you she wants you to come home,” he recalls.

He agreed to go with mom to church where he met a fellow former user, Eric, who encouraged him in God. Especially important was that Eric told David his father was proud of him. That made him feel good, but also guilty because he wasn’t living a life to be proud of. So he decided to give it a try.

And then came the radical change in his life: a church camping trip.

It’s funny how the church has advanced to streamed sermons, devotional apps and seeker-friendly sermons, but the old methodology for Christian camping is still one of the most powerful discipleship tools.

David went to the Sequoia National Forest. He had always loved camping, and he made himself useful helping set up tents and doing most of the cooking. He led hikes into the mountains and helped chop wood for the campfires. He fellowshipped with Eric and grew strong in the camaraderie.

But it was the last night that broke his heart and solidified his decision to serve Jesus. At a campfire his younger brother Elijah publicly thanked God for giving him back his older brother.

“I’m sorry for being a screw up all those years,” David responded through tears.

When Moses came down Mount Sinai, his face glowed from the glory of God. Something similar happened to David.

“After the camping trip, I felt I was on fire for Jesus,” he says. “Just having my family back. Just knowing that I was doing something that my dad wanted for me. Just knowing that I was doing something that would make him feel proud of me.”

He kicked meth.

He didn’t suffer the usual physical symptoms of withdrawal. But at night, he saw demons. This was strange to him because he’d never hallucinated while taking meth. It was when he quit meth that he saw the fiendish beings mocking him at night.

“I couldn’t sleep. I’d be afraid to fall asleep because I was afraid I would see more demons. They were imps,” David says. “It was like an out of body experience, like I was watching myself sleeping, and these gnarly hairy creatures, imps with lots of teeth, were moving around harassing my brother as if they were saying, ‘If we can’t have you, we’re going to take your brother.’” Read the rest of the story about meth addict freed by Jesus.

Spanish-speaking black rapper was spit on as a child

Propaganda always felt like he didn’t belong.

Born in south Los Angeles, the Christian hip hop sensation was raised in the West Covina area where Latinos were predominant and violence prevailed. He couldn’t join the gang because of his color.

“I was the one black kid, being teased because of my color, getting chased home, getting banged on when we’re walking home: ‘Where you from man?’” he says on an I am Second video. “I’d recognize (the) homie. And I’d say, ‘Paco, what are you talking about? I live two streets from you.’”

Then Propaganda, whose real name is Jason Petty, moved to the suburbs, where he felt like the poor kid among so many Caucasians.

“We were these weird black people that spoke Spanish,” he says. “They didn’t get us.”

His dad had been a Black Panther in the 60s, energized by fighting police brutality. Mom and Dad eventually got divorced.

Propaganda began attending church. Of all the kids, he felt God the most intensely.

“I was getting convicted,” he says. “I felt like God had split the roof open and was talking to me directly.

Moved by the power of the Word and the Spirit, he was born again.

He was disappointed when his friends didn’t get it. “The guys at my age, I remember them not being affected at all. It tripped me out because I felt like nobody else felt like that. But in my mind, it went back to just the same way I grew up: I’ve been ‘the only’ my whole life. So if I’ve been ‘the only’ there, I’ll be ‘the only’ here.”

He never missed church, and mom forced him to take notes on the sermons. She wanted to make sure he was listening. People saw his sensitivity to God and predicted he’d be a pastor.

But he wondered about where he would fit in best — with the church boys, the college-bound students, or the tagging street thugs. What he really liked was not the typical man things; he liked art.

From the sixth grade until his junior year in high school, Propaganda examined his life and tried to figure it out.

“I always felt like I don’t belong,” he says. “Whether I was born the wrong color, in the wrong neighborhood, in the wrong decade, to the wrong parents. I was not an alpha male. I was an artist. I would draw all the time. I wrote poetry.”

Finally, his father tipped him off to Jeremiah 1:9 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” and to Psalm 139:14 “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” These verses helped Propaganda to accept himself as exceptional and different from everybody else, a unique gift from God to the world.

“It was there that I finally realized my value is not determined by some innate, particular quality that I have,” he says. “No, your value is because God was willing to pay the cost of his Son for you.” Read the rest of the story Propaganda hip hop

Steven Malcolm overcomes adversity to become hip hop sensation

His father was a drug dealer, his mom an alcoholic, and his sister a stripper. So Steven Malcolm started life with a few strikes against him.

He grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and then Tampa, Florida. Malcolm’s dad got busted for dealing drugs and was deported to Jamaica. Mom, who struggled with drinking, moved back to Grand Rapids, Michigan, when he was in the fifth grade. His sister drifted into a life of easy money based on her looks.

“I raised myself. I call it the school of hard knocks,” he says in his video “Watch.”

His two main passions growing up were basketball and chasing girls. He memorized Snoop Dog lyrics and slid by with a 1.7 GPA in high school.

Malcolm wanted to play on the local community college’s basketball team, but the steady stream of partying interfered with his studies and he didn’t earn good enough grades to get on the court. In his first year at college, his mom moved away and he felt like an orphan, abandoned and adrift.

“Going into my freshman year of college, stuff just really hit the fan and life really smacked me across the face,” Steven says on his website. “My family was going through hard times and then I started having an identity crisis where I was looking at life and wondering ‘what am I here for?’ My grades were horrible that year, so I couldn’t play ball. My best friend and I fell out and my mom ended up moving, so I was really lost.”

Then a high school basketball buddy invited him to church. Steven had never ventured into a sanctuary of Christian worship, and the prospect put him off. But he felt so abandoned, and his friend said he would find The Edge Urban Fellowship relevant.

“I’d never stepped foot in a church before. Now I’m thinking I’m going to have to pick up my pants, it’s going to be boring and nobody’s going to speak my language, but then he told me it was a hip-hop church, and since I had nothing to do that night, I thought ‘okay, sure, why not?’” Steven says. “And it was like a breath of fresh air that just smacked me in the face.” Read the rest about Steven Malcolm Christian.

His parents moved him from Christian to public school

Chris Perez fell out of his Christian upbringing in Los Angeles when his parents moved him into the public schools.

Prior to age 13, he attended Christian school, but in the new environment in high school he started to hang out with the “muscle car guys.”

“I liked to hang around the muscle car guys, and they liked to do dope,” Chris says on a Vimeo video produced by his church. “So eventually I got into dope.”

Soon he was having run-ins with the law.

“When I get in trouble, I get in trouble,” he emphasizes. “I got two DUIs in two weeks.”

He started making drugs, running to get stuff for his friends.

“I know I was their guinea pig but I liked the lifestyle,” Chris remembers. “It was fast, it was different, it was something new every night and every day. Running from the cops and things.”

Due to his run-ins with the law, Chris got acquainted with several institutions — from rehabilitation centers to psychiatric wards. He started taking medication for depression and bipolar disorders.

Chris decided to apply within his company for a transfer to Arizona. His geographic location changed, but his heart remained the same. He was in the mines of Arizona — and he was getting into jail again.

“I was in a horrible relationship with alcohol and drugs.”

His struggles persisted for two years until he got fed up. “I was in a bondage and was stuck in this place.” Please keep reading click here: what is the difference between a Christian school and the public school?

He didn’t believe in love, until he saw his pastor’s marriage

At all times, his home was filled with fighting.

“I was an angry person that destroyed everything in my life,” says Juan Pablo Cardo of Buenos Aires. “I never saw a pattern of people loving each other. My dad and my mom stayed together fighting a lot with each other. So I didn’t want to be at home.”

Juan Pablo found an outlet for his rage when he enrolled in a military academy at age 13.

Then he visited a church. For the first time in his life, he saw in the pastor, missionary Kim Pensinger, a model for Christian love. Kim and his wife, Josie, visibly demonstrated their love for one another. It seemed so foreign to him, so other-worldly, that he doubted what he was seeing.

“Their love is not real. This is a fake kind of thing. Maybe they kill each other at home,” he thought at the time.

But then he started to see that they really loved each other. And the people in church take care of each other. “I never saw that before. That started to break my thinking process. I wanted that.”

Juan Pablo quit his well-paid job to work at McDonald’s, just because he would have more opportunity to share the Gospel.

“I started witnessing to everybody. I met Silvina,” he says.. “She was my boss — and still today.” (Because they are now married.)

Silvina was smitten — not with Cupid’s arrows, but with the pulsating love of Christ she saw in young Juan Pablo. Read the rest of love and marriage in Argentina

When his dad died, it wasn’t funny

Funny man Tim Allen had a very unfunny start to his life that made him doubt God’s existence. When he was 11, his father was killed by a drunk driver.

“I wanted answers that minute from God,” he said in 2012. “‘Do you think this is funny? Do you think this is necessary?’ And I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with my Creator ever since.”

He used drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism and then was arrested and convicted of felony possession of 650 grams of cocaine in 1978.

“Don’t ever sell drugs to policemen. They don’t like it, they tend to tell judges, people get you, and then you eat very bad food for a long time,” he wisecracked in an interview with ABC.

After completing his two-year prison sentence, Allen was released and decided to get into comedy, which he says, “saved his life.” Shortly after that, he got a call from Jeffrey Katzenberg of the Walt Disney Studios saying they wanted him to become a part of the Disney family, which he found very ironic considering his felony.

He went on to star in various T.V. shows and films such as The Last Man Standing, The Santa Clause trilogy, Wild Dogs and the Toy Story trilogy (he was the voice of Buzz Lightyear). He was succeeding in the world, but he hadn’t dealt with his demons.

“For years, I just did not like this idea of God, church,” he said. “(I was) still a churchgoer, but constantly a cynic.”

As much as he wrestled with doubts, he couldn’t deny the incredible creation in which he lived. It begged for a logical conclusion.

“Whoever built me, this is too much, too weird that it happened by accident,” Allen said. “It didn’t happen by accident.”

Slowly, Allen began to open his heart to God as he saw His guiding hand throughout his struggles. He reached a point when he dedicated his life to Jesus Christ.

Sometimes Allen refers to God as “the Builder.”

“I always ask… ‘God what did you want me to do?’ But you got to be prepared for the answer,” he said.

Allen has received criticism due to his unflinching stand for faith.

In an episode from Allen’s sitcom Last Man Standing (in which he stars as Mike Baxter), Allen found an opportunity to incorporate Jesus Christ. Read the rest of the story about Tim Allen Christianity.

Prevailing strategies for evangelism turned on their head – Lynn Cory and the Neighborhood Initiative

Despite leading a 500-student college group, Pastor Lynn Cory felt something was very wrong with his ministry at a San Fernando Valley mega church. It was too “churchy.”

So after 10 years of thriving ministry, he quit a paid ministerial position and worked for an advertising firm where he could rub elbows with the unsaved and share his faith.

Today, Lynn has an aversion for what other pastors crave: big crowds, fancy buildings and better programs. God has led him to a different approach, bringing individuals to Christ one at a time through “neighboring.”

He offers some drastic advice: Throw your megaphone in the trash. Ditch the building programs; rid yourself of growth strategies from corporate America; stuff the showmanship of Hollywood. And, above all, dispose of the mantra that bigger size equates with success.

Go and be a neighbor, he advises. Make friends with the people next door. Bake them a pie or invite them to dinner. Shred your packed agenda and share the love of Christ slow-cooker style, by gaining their confidence through months and years.

Lynn calls this approach to evangelism “Neighborhood Initiative,” and has expounded the virtues to turning church paradigms upside down in two books, Neighborhood Initiative and the Love God and The Incarnational Church. This latter book coins the term from what Jesus did: being the face-to-face reference point bringing God to those who don’t know Him.

Lynn sees a movement forming, from Chico, California to Illinois. Even mega church pastors are signing up. They are moving away from the big splash, substituting the unglamorous grind of returning to what the Book of Acts calls “house to house” ministry.

Lynn’s argument is compelling. He cites data from George Barna that found 80% of church growth was membership transfer. Churches are not converting people; they are stealing from churches with fewer resources.

Plus, not every church has the resources to mount a Greg Laurie-style outreach. Because they can’t, many churches have excused themselves entirely. Anyone can visit his neighbor with a pie and show concern for his well-being.

“God moves at the speed of relationship,” one chapter says. Read the rest of Neighborhood Initiative.

Burning Man evangelism of a different kind

It’s not the tie-donning, Bible-toting crowd that heads to the Nevada Desert to evangelize at Burning Man, the art hipster festival that draws more than 50,000 for a blistering week on the dry alkaline lakebed.

No, it even draws Christian iconoclasts who flout church conformity. Styled on the born-again hippies of the Jesus Movement, these guys see beyond the largest pagan cult gathering in America. They see misguided souls thirsting for truth.

Burning Man, for the uninitiated, is religion for the religion-less. From Aug. 27 to Sept 4, “Burners” camp in Black Desert and revel in alcohol, drugs, biking, electronic dance music and unbridled hedonism. The bacchanal culminates when a gigantic wooden centerpiece – or temple – is burned in effigy on Saturday night.

The celebration has elements of religion: ritual, a code of conduct and a sense of community. But there is no clear focus on a deity.

Phil Wyman, aka Gandalf/Indiana Jones

This is where Phil Wyman comes in. A Christian pastor who reaches out with love and acceptance to the witches at the Halloween fest in his native Salem, Massachusetts, Wyman is long-haired preacher who’s been described as a cross between Gandalf and Indiana Jones.

Wyman, like other Burners, erects an interactive art display with a message that seeks to activate a quest for true spirituality. In 2011, his Pillars of the Saints honored Simeon Stylite, the ascetic pole-sitter who sought to connect with the Spirit through a radical disconnect with this world.

Wyman’s messages are suggestive, not authoritative, which is why they resonate with the lost souls at Burning Man but they also raise eyebrows among straight-laced Christians who want a more orthodox message. Wyman employs the Socratic method and gets people thinking by asking questions.

“I wondered why Christianity had not typically embedded itself into these festivals, why we weren’t among the leaders of new cultural developments and wildly creative thought,” Wyman wrote in Christianity Today. “Certainly God is wildly creative—enough to find his way into human hearts in other cultures around the world.”

One church from Ohio became famous for passing out waters, which is pretty handy in the scorching heat and dust of the desert. It was a way of showing the love of Christ in a practical way.

There have been Christians who dress like Jesus and carry the cross.

Burning Man is a ripe harvest field for out-of-the-box evangelism. Read the rest: Christians at Burning Man.

Christianity exploding in Iran despite efforts of government to stamp it out

Chaffing under repressive Islam, young Iranians are secretly turning to Christ in record numbers, and Iranian-born Shahrokh Afshar wanted to be part of the revival. So he filmed 13 programs for young people and offered them to SAT7, which broadcasts Christian programming into Iran via satellite.

“Iran is 25% 14 years or younger. Iran has the largest number of drug addicts per capita in the world. Alcoholism, prostitution. The economy sucks; it’s like 15% unemployment,” Afshar said. “Life is very very hard for the average young Iranian. There wasn’t much being done as far as programs are concerned to reach out to these kids.”

Iran has the fastest-growing evangelical population in the world (estimated at 19.6% by Operation World in 2015), despite an atrocious human rights record against people who abandon Islam, according to Christian Today. In fact, the explosive growth has overloaded the religious police.

A network of underground home churches thrives, and at least six satellite stations broadcast Christian programs continually into Iran. Afshar personally knows of 400 house churches with 5000 members. The number of Muslim converts to Christianity was “a handful” before 1971. Now, it is perhaps 1 million.

Afshar’s program, “Clear Like Glass,” cost him $3,000 per episode. Each program includes a funny skit and a frank interview and discussion of taboos in Islam. What people usually hide, Afshar brings to light. He conducted research about his target audience and found they didn’t want just preaching.

“Clear Like Glass” is being shown over and over again, at least twice a day, Shah said. He is preparing to film another 13 programs.

After the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Afshar joined three Egyptian pastors and one American to drive from Turkey to Baghdad and find pastors whom they could help. The fact-finding mission was fruitful. He connected with pastors from Iran and even gave them training in Turkey.

“My contacts tell me that they walk into a party and tell people they are Christian, and boom, they have an instant audience. People want to hear more about Christ. It’s very very easy for them to share,” Afshar said. “Of course, it’s dangerous. They can end up in prison very easily. But people are read the rest of Revival in Iran.

A water roller coaster

Most people think of camping as something they would never want to experience: Sleeping on the dank ground, eating only unsavory camp food, days without showering and nothing to do. But going on a trip at Lighthouse Christian Academy will change that.

I came to the Lighthouse when I was in seventh grade. They also offer the rafting trip to the students who attend our gradeschool counterpart the Lighthouse Church School, but it wasn’t until my freshman year that I decided to go on the rafting trip. What shocked me was the lack of people that wanted to go. With the urging of Mrs. Lisa Clancy, I decided to go and had a great time.

Now during my sophomore year, the trip rolled around and no one seemed like they wanted to go. Granted some people had other engagements but the group of people that went was small.

Even though the group was small, it was a fun time. The drive to the campsite seemed short because you bonded with the people in the car — or slept. When we arrived at the campsite, all of us from the Santa Monica Christian school were all taken aback by the breathtaking nature around us.

The campsite that the school goes to every year was better than any campsite I had been to before. There was indoor plumbing, a pool, and a small shop if you wanted to buy snacks. This made the camping part of the trip so much easier.

The rafting part of the trip was both frightening and entertaining. We rafted one of the more harder rivers, and though some people had a better time than others, the scared feeling before you rafted is worth it. There is an adrenaline rush you feel when you’re riding a literal water roller coaster. Read the rest of the rafting trip story.

The cure, not the curse

People today reject morality imposed by others. That’s fine.

If you don’t want to follow the Bible, that’s your choice. But you might want the heads up. There are consequences to sin. There is slavery and addiction. Your decisions lead you somewhere. If you flout the manual of the factory, then don’t get mad if things break.

We live a fallen world under a curse. To the extent we escape sin and live in God’s forgiveness, we live in God’s blessing.

Friends

I can’t comprehend why we’re not all friends at church, but some people are more concerned about clambering up — what in their mind — the dogpile. They think they have to step on others.

Not me. I just want to enjoy friendship. And I wish everybody were a friend.

This side of eternity, friendship is the greatest thing. It is one of the loves (marital and family is another). Friendship occurs when you appreciate each other and share meaningful moments (they can be goofiness or enjoying watching a sport together or working together in a common cause).

The king of the dogpile is the ultimate loser for me. He thinks he’s got everybody’s respect. Maybe what he has is everybody’s fear. I’m afraid of him. Perfect love casts out all fear. I’m far from perfect yet.

Amazing grace for Valley Boy Pastor

My two sons performing in the drama.

God’s goodness and unmerited favor is not only for salvation. I’ve been seeing it in the formation of the startup church in Van Nuys, California. The San Fernando Valley Lighthouse Church is running on eight cylinders.

We recently did a drama to bless another, well-established church in Palmdale, about an hour away from L.A.

The church continues to meet at Lake Balboa, when it’s not too cold or rainy. Attendance doubled in December.

I am floored that God would bless me. It’s His amazing grace, usually applied to salvation, but applicable to any and every area of our lives.

What you need in life is God’s favor, which you can’t earn. Jesus earned it for you. The best thing we can do is be grateful.

Marriage and carriage brought McConaughey back to God

Fatherhood brought Matthew McConaughey back to faith.

The Oscar-winning actor, a heart-throb in romantic movies, has been lauded for breaking Hollywood’s high divorce rate by staying married to his supermodel wife, Brazilian Camila Alves, who was raised Catholic.

“As soon as we had children, I was like, ‘You know what? Church was important to my childhood, even if it was just for the ritual of giving an hour and a half on Sunday to yourself, to pray and to think about others, even if you’re tired or whatever,’” McConaughey said. “I noticed how much I missed it and needed it.”

He and his wife have three children: Levi, aged 6; Vida, aged 7; and Livingston, aged 4.

McConaughey was raised in Uvalde, Texas. His mother, Kay was a kindergarten teacher and a published author. His father, James, was a Green Bay Packers football player before becoming a Texas oilman.

His childhood dream of being a pro football player along with his college plan of being a lawyer all got cast aside. He worked in a commercial and then performed minor roles until he was cast as the lead in the John Grishman-based movie A Time to Kill.

The breakthrough roll led to more, and McConaughey found himself soon in romantic roles in such movies The Wedding Planner and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.

In his rising success, the God of his childhood became all but forgotten.

Then, the man accustomed to making women swoon met and swooned over Camila Alves. When they met, he was hiding his identity under a huge hat and a bushy beard at the Hyde Club in Hollywood. As soon as he saw Camila, he was pierced by Cupid’s arrows.

“I said, ‘What is that?’” McConaughey recalled, as quoted in Ever After Guide. “I was like, ‘Woo-ha! Wow!’” Read the rest of the romance.

Kevin Durant finds stardom and Jesus in NBA

Kevin Durant, a two-time Olympics gold medalist in basketball and the 2014 NBA most valuable player, has learned to be more vocal about his Christian faith.

The 28-year-old, 6’11” superstar is now with fellow Christian Steph Curry on the Golden State Warriors, after leading his native Oklahoma City Thunder deep into the playoffs in 2010-13.

“The Bible both pumps me up and balances me to play my best,” Durant told Beyond the Ultimate. “But it also tells me more about the Lord and how I can live for Him and what all He has done for me.”

Durant, one of the NBA’s most popular players, grew up in a Christian home, led by a single mom, but fell out of church attendance in middle and high school. He excelled at basketball and in 2006 he was widely regarded as one of the best prospects for college ball. His freshman game was so overpowering that he decided to enter the NBA draft immediately.

Picked by the then-Seattle SuperSonics, he produced prodigious performances and won the Rookie of the Year acknowledgement.

The team transferred to Oklahoma and renamed itself the Thunder the next year. It was while he played for the Thunder that Durant, mum about his faith, buddied up with teammate Kevin Ollie, who encouraged him to attend chapel services and to be unafraid to voice his faith.

“He got everybody going and wanting to learn more. I was just one of the guys who was trying to follow his lead,” Durant said on Beliefnet. “He was a big teacher in helping me do that and making me feel more comfortable in my faith around other people and being able to pray for other people and pray out loud and things like that; take those baby steps.”

While he lived in Oklahoma City, Durant felt drawn to the easy-going, earnest faith of New York City Hillsong Pastor Carl Lentz and adopted the pastor as his mentor. He was baptized by Lentz in 2013.

“I used to feel like if I did something wrong, I would go to hell,” he said. Now, “I believe God’s love for me, the sacrificial death of Jesus for my sins and His grace, not my good works, are what saves me.” Read the rest of the story.

This article was written by my student Jordan Sheppard in my journalism class at the Lighthouse Christian Academy.

Her dad was killed evangelizing N. Korea. Now she wants to go there.

Her father was, in all likelihood, executed for evangelizing in North Korea, and yet Kung Yu Sung wants to go to that closed communist nation to be a missionary herself.

“God has placed in my heart a great love for North Korea,” the 18-year-old said in a YouTube video. “My father was used there for God’s kingdom. I want to bring the love of Jesus to North Korea.”

Today, Yu Sung is in high school in South Korea, where she was granted asylum. Her father had been a high-ranking government official until he fell out of favor with the totalitarian dictator and had to flee to China with his wife and then-six-year-old daughter.

North Korea is among the most closed nations of the world.

It was in China that he accepted Christ at a Bible study he attended with relatives, Yu Sung said. He was growing in the Lord and the love of God’s work when he was reported to Chinese authorities and arrested for being in China illegally. Then he was deported to North Korea, an ally of China, where he served a prison sentence of three years for leaving his native land illegally.

Meanwhile, Yu Sung’s mother died of leukemia while pregnant with what was to be her second child, and little Yu Sung was left alone in the world. She was adopted by a pastor’s family in China.

“They showed me great love and care,” she said. “Through them, God protected me.”

After her father finished his prison sentence in North Korea, he fled to China. “The time in jail only made my father’s faith stronger,” she said.

After a time of continued study in the Bible, he decided to return to North Korea as a missionary. He was fully aware of the risks, but he wanted “to share Christ’s message of life among the hopeless of his homeland.” He chose not to go to South Korea where he could have enjoyed religious freedom and lived more comfortably.

Instead, he went to North Korea to share the love of God in a dangerous land,” Yu Sung recounted.

“It breaks my heart to tell you that in 2006 he was discovered by the North Korean government and he was again imprisoned,” she said. “I have heard no words from my father ever since. In all probability he has been shot to death in public on charges of treason and espionage.” To read the rest of the story, click here.

There is snow in Los Angles (county mountains)!

It was the blind-leading-the-blind as we drove up the Los Angeles mountains looking for snow. I guess I’m a Biblical pastor because I fulfilled Jesus’ warning against blind leaders.

Thankfully, we actually found more than just a few spots on the roadside. Cindy, our disciple from Guatemala, could see more than just a patch of white. She fell, got wet, got cold and got hit with snowballs. Snow does not exist in the subtropics of Guatemala.

Cindy had fun, and so did the Lighthouse Church from Van Nuys. We are only 6 months old as a church, and already a spirit of family is taking hold. I had proposed a boys-versus-girls snowball fight until I remembered Alex, our worship superstar, was also a superstar pitcher on mixed softball team. Then I suggested we “even out the teams” by putting Alex on the boys’ team.

That’s when my wife stepped in. She reminded me loudly in front of everybody that I was the pastor and should let others pick first. Man that burned so badly that I wasn’t cold anymore and even took my sweater off.

“Lighthouse Van Nuys,” the scratched in the snow.

You could hear Brittany, screaming with glee, all down the slope — but that was not surprising. You can always hear Britt.

Dee made a snow angel. Four-year-old Kailee could not be torn from the snow. I suppose she will sleep well. We found a snowman that someone left, even with a carrot nose. Kailee and Dion decided to decimate the snowman. All I can says is that after they were done, Frosty was iced.

After coming down the mountain, we ate at In-N-Out hamburgers and fellowshipped.

 

Good, now I can wash my other sweatshirt

It’s been a loooooong time.

But I like my Barcelona soccer club sweatshirt so much that I really don’t wash it. I would miss it while it’s in the machines.

But for Christmas, these church members very attentively gave me a wonderful Christmas gift, a different Barca sweatshirt. Now I can finally wash the first one.

Hahaha. Christmas blessings.

Merry Christmas from Van Nuys

I was surprised. These church members, instead of taking time off because of Christmas, came out to service. Christmas is a big family time. But the Van Nuys ch

urch members didn’t miss service.

Who would ever have thought that I could fit 25 seats into our apartment? A space efficiency engineer couldn’t have done better. It worked like a jigsaw puzzle.

All these people have been the best Christmas gift to me. One family had been praying for a Christian Fellowship Ministries church to open in the San Fernando Valley for years. Most of the members of our startup church play an instrument or two. Virtually all of them come to serve, not to be served.

This was the blessing of 2016 for me. I’m looking forward to what God will do in 2017.

God brought this blessing after six lean years of almost no ministry in my parent church. I thank God that the lean years are over and now I can function on all 8 pistons.

When Jesus gives, it is the best gift.

Homeless pill popper delivered by Jesus

For six months, Yvette Castillo was homeless, popping pills and drinking alcohol. She was pregnant and found refuge in abandoned house with crack addicts where she was raped.

“I was trusting the drugs instead of trusted God to make me happy,” Yvette said in a YouTube testimony. “I thought it was an easier solution, but it wasn’t.”

Yvette now lives in Houston with her husband and kids and goes to church. She’s come a long way from the beginning of her downfall at three-years-old, when she was first molested.

Raised by an alcoholic father and a mother who also disappointed her, Yvette became a troubled teen. With hate raging within from deep hurts, she actually invoked the powers of darkness one day while alone in her bedroom.

“I said, ‘Give me the power to hurt everyone, to stop people from messing with me.’” she said. “I didn’t know that I was making a pact with the devil. I knew who I was talking to, but I didn’t know how serious it was.”

She fought everyone at school who looked at her funny and disrespected her teachers. She was cutting and using drugs. Not youth camp, not juvenile hall, not counselors could help her change course.

She gave birth to a child at 14 years old.

“Not even my child stopped me from doing bad things,” she said. “It was a force that had taken over me, and nobody could stop me.”

Kicked out of school and her house, Yvette fell into the clutches of an abusive boyfriend.

“He hit me. He mistreated me. And I felt like I deserved every bit of it.”

In the midst of her ordeal, she had two abortions.

Leaving that boyfriend is how she became homeless. Pregnant and alone, she tried to mask the inner pain with pills and alcohol, which she paid for by stealing.

“I no longer had a heart,” she said. “I couldn’t love my kids. I couldn’t love myself. I was so drained.”

Her next boyfriend got saved and pulled her into church. She was on fire and serving God for a time, but then… Read the rest of the story.

Gutter cleaning

It rarely ever rains in LA, but when it did, I discovered all kinds of flaws in the gutters of the apartment complex I manage. My handyman and I realized they hadn’t been cleaned in approximately 36 jillion years. The dirt was caked into the gutter and blocking drainoff.

Today I got my hands and knees and crawled around the roof. I scraped and vacuumed with the shop vac. Not all of it was dry since there was a low point not draining that was mud. It was a dirty job, and I’m a klutz, so that’s how I splashed water and mud all over me and the stairwell. Now I have more work to clean up the stairwell.

I don’t mind being on the edge of the roof right next to a 60-foot drop. I lost my fear of heights when I rock-climbed as a college student. Specifically, it was rapelling that defeated the fear of heights (you have to lean out backwards over the abyss with only a harness).

Gutters help direct runoff water to where you want it hit the ground. But if they get clogged with leaves and buildup dirt, they sprout leaks and become defective. You need to clean your gutters from time to time just like you need to clean your heart. Keep runoff flowing.

In your heart, forgiveness needs to flow. If it doesn’t, the hurt builds up and makes you into a mean and nasty person. Jesus said we should be like kids. Yeah, kids forgive and forget easily.

Lonely at Christmas?

On the night before Christmas, he was kicked out of his house.

After years of “loose living and immorality,” Elliott Osowitt was driven out by a wife who had run out of patience. Downcast and despondent, he decided to go to a nearby motel and kill himself with a gun.

Osowitt worked as a tour guide for “Heathen Tours,” a touring company that catered to tourists from England seeking sinful pleasures in America. It seems Osowitt indulged in too many of those allurements himself.

After Osowitt check into his room, he found a Gideon’s Bible next to his bed opened to John 14:27: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

The power of God’s Word and the Spirit of the living God moved on his heart. Tearfully, he repented of his sins and asked Jesus to be his Lord and Savior.

And that is how the Prince of Peace, whose birth the reformed Jew had never celebrated, came to Osowitt at Christmas in 1996.

He actually spent three days at the motel reading that Bible. He attended church with his wife, Polly, the following Sunday and quit working for the touring company. Osowitt began a new career with a Christian touring company instead.

On Christmas Eve, the Bible “caused me to stop. It caused me to cry. When I read it was Jesus, I had a hard time with it,” Osowitt told USA Today. “It literally began a process of healing that eventually led to the reconciliation… Read the rest of the story.