Do You Know What Happened on April 29? How One Church Impacted Its Community
Pastor John White
John and Sheila White have been in the ministry since 1978 and were the founding pastors of Decatur Christian Fellowship in 1983. John is a graduate of Rhema Bible Training Center and serves as the regional director of the three state Gulf Coast Region of Rhema Ministerial Association International. John and Sheila have seen multitudes come to a saving knowledge of God’s grace and witnessed the healing power of God working in multitudes around the world.
I had been praying about ways to get the people of our church activated in the growth and development of the church and to stir a fire in them for evangelism. When I presented this to my staff at a weekly staff meeting, we came up with the idea of a Pack The House Sunday we titled, “April 29 are you ready.”
We committed finances to the campaign and bought a couple of billboards and several hundred small political-type signs you see in people’s yards and on the highways right-of-way. We had T-shirts made for all the members of our church announcing the event. In addition to all that, we had invitations to our church printed in business card form with a map to the church on the back and we passed them out in every service in the month of April leading up to the 29th and encouraged our people to use the cards as an easy way to invite people to church.
All of our advertising, the billboards, the T-shirts, and signs all said and looked the same. All they said was “April 29 are you ready” with the address of the web site april29.tv that we purchased just for this occasion, printed underneath it. We had over a thousand hits to our web site.
When people would wear their t-shirt out in public someone would always ask them what was happening on April 29th and our people would respond by giving them an invitation. It was amazing the response that we got. Even the local newspaper’s curiosity prompted them to write an article about it.
The month of April had five Sundays in it so every Sunday I ministered on evangelism and how to witness your faith. I built an excitement in the people to invite their neighbors, friends and relatives. Everything we did that month pointed to evangelism and April 29th.
When April 29th came everyone was so excited. We put our best foot forward. Everything and everybody were at their best. The church was full! Our parking lot couldn’t hold all the cars, we had to park cars on the lawn. I preached a great message on what Jesus had done for humanity, titled “The Good News Is, The Bad News Is Wrong.” 32 people responded to the altar call for salvation.
Since then, our church has become enthused about evangelism. There is a new excitement in the air and the people are taking more ownership of the church. The following Sunday 9 more people gave their life to the Lord and several of our visitors were back.
By far, this has been the best outreach program, producing the best results of anything we have ever initiated.
