Harvest North America partnership propels personal evangelism efforts

This year, during Southwestern Seminary’s annual “Revive This Nation” evangelism program, March 11-14, numerous churches across the country benefitted from a partnership between Southwestern and Harvest North America (HNA). HNA is an evangelistic ministry that partners with local churches, equips them to share their personal testimonies in face-to-face evangelism, and prepares them for revival. Thanks to this partnership, when churches signed up with Southwestern to host a revival, they could select the “Harvest” option and benefit from this unique training for intentional evangelism. Twenty churches did so this year, and God brought a great harvest.

Among the partnership’s many benefits, it allowed for a greater utilization of the preachers deployed from Southwestern, as it established within these 20 churches an intentional means of evangelism. HNA trained “Harvest teams” within these churches to share their testimonies so they could evangelize alongside the RTN preachers, and it provided instruction to church members on making appointments with nonbelievers in which testimonies could be shared.

In short, church members spoke with lost friends, neighbors and coworkers, informing them that they might appreciate hearing the testimony of someone on the Harvest team (including the RTN preacher). This led to the scheduling of an appointment at a home, coffee shop, etc., in which the church member and Harvest team member met with the lost person, shared a testimony, presented the Gospel, and invited a response.

Pastor Jim Gregory, who serves on HNA’s board of directors and utilized the “Harvest” option for his own church—First Southern Baptist Church in Mountain Home, Idaho—says, “God has used this ministry to do marvelous things in bringing people to Christ, in restoring relationships, and in bringing folks back to church who had long since walked away from church. So what I teach the team is, ‘Once you introduce the person [from the Harvest team], step back and trust God for the results.’”

Southwestern Ph.D. student Bryan Bogue served as the RTN preacher for Gregory’s church this year. Collectively, the church had 15 appointments in which testimonies were shared. Bogue personally had four.

“It was more strategic than just simply cold-calling on people,” Bogue says of the church’s making appointments. “It was an intentional strategy to match [the Harvest team members] up with people who had a story similar to theirs.”

For example, one of Bogue’s appointments was with a man named Alex, who had a 3-year-old son and a history of drug use. Bogue was accompanied by Eric, a member of the church who also had a history of drug use.

“Eric was able to speak with Alex about his history of drug use and how the Lord changed his life, which really impacted Alex, who was going through [similar problems at that time],” Bogue says. “My testimony was able to come in because I grew up with Christian parents who taught me about the Lord from a very young age, and I came to Christ at a young age and was spared from a lot of that lifestyle—a lot of the issues that people who didn’t grow up in Christian homes deal with. So what I was able to do is encourage Alex that, if he can trust Christ to deliver him from his current way of life, then he can provide a testimony for his son the way my parents did for me.”

Encouraged by Eric’s story of overcoming drug addiction through Christ, and encouraged by Bogue’s testimony of the need to provide a good example for his son, Alex placed his faith in Christ that day. “Number one, he wanted to be delivered from that type of lifestyle, and Eric’s testimony helped in that,” Bogue explains. “Number two, because he didn’t want his son to go through that, and my testimony encouraged him in that way. So it was really neat how God worked it out.”

In addition to making good use of Bogue’s time during his weeklong stay in Idaho, he says the HNA partnership also effectively mobilized the members of the church. “This was a way to utilize the church members in the evangelism effort as opposed to just me and the pastor,” he says.

“And that, in turn, gave the church members more buy-in for the week, because they had a stake in what was happening. They weren’t just showing up and listening to sermons, but they were actually participating in the Harvest teams, sharing their faith during the week, and then that, in turn, made them more invested in what was going on during the evening services.”

Twenty of the 87 RTN churches utilized the “Harvest” option this year, and more than half of the 90 reported salvations came from these 20 churches. “The Lord is always saving people on these trips,” Gregory says, “which is awesome.”