Recently I’ve been talking and pondering the necessity of the Evangelist. This ministry carries a high profile in the New Testament and should be regarded in importance accordingly. When the evangelist been scorned and ridiculed using expressions like evangelastic and so on I think it grieves the Holy Spirit of God who has anointed the evangelist to be the ministry in the forefront.
In our early days in former Sovjetunion the evangelist always played a crucial role in breaking through preparing the way for the next ministry, teacher or pastor to step in to form and build new believers in their walk with Jesus.
The fivefold ministries are grace given to the church for its equipping and development and they have their place and time for ministry to build the house of God. No ministry carries the fullness but minister according to the grace God has given them, not more or nor less.
The evangelist fires up the church and releases passion and vision for reaching the lost. A church’s highest calling is to reach the lost, in the neighborhood and in the city. The evangelistic fervor and spirit is absolute crucial. When we stop making altar calls inviting people to repent is a sign our priorities have changed and we are slowly leaving the evangelistic for a more cozy church life where we become like a subculture having lost all our natural connections to unbelievers and as result our services become irrelevant filled with church vocabulary hard for unchurched people to grasp. Jesus becomes elitistic and separated from daily life as a result.
We need revival and the evangelist is often equipped for releasing this to the local church. He also carries power and especially the power gifts of healing and miracles to set people free from bondage and sickness which we need to be renewed among us over and over again.

No Other Name than Jesus saves!

Matsjan

Yesterday I visited one of my favourite cities of Sweden, Malmö. I had the great privilige to speak at Malmö International Church where Ingmar and Tina Aronsson is pastoring. Ingmar started the church from scratch quite some years ago and is still keeping up the good work.
It is quite successful church plant in Sweden. During our dinner after the service we touched on the subject church planting. We both agreed about the desperate need of new churches in Sweden. I heard someone say not so long ago that a new started church are between 6-8 time as a effective in reaching out with the gospel than any older church. The enthusiasm and passion in a newly started church is contagious. It rubs off!

I don´t think the one and only answer is megachurch, huge extremely influencial sometimes even draining smaller churches of their members. Of course I believe in megchurches, they have their place.
But also smaller churches, neighbourhood churches should not be despised at all. They can have a tremendous impact in their neighbourhood. We need lots of small neighbourhood churches all over sweden. I believe its time to rethink some of the ways we think church.
A church with 100 members might not have the strength to send tonnes of missionaries overseas, but they can impact their neighbourhood strongly. Faithfully bringning out the message of Jesus to the people around. In our suburbs and small towns we need hundreds of such a churches. With pastors faithfully serving year after year giving testimony about Jesus Christ.
I want to thank and honor all those pastors who year after year faithfully serve in their churches. Maybe no one will ever give them recognition or they might never be bestselling authors and world famous preachers. But that is not the calling either, but it is to make Jesus known to every man and women on the planet which includes our neighbourhood as well.

Matsjan

In the gospels Jesus talks about end time at several occasions. In doing so he mentions in Matthew 24:14 about the gospel being preached in all the world as a witness to all nations, then the end will come.

Witness is someone giving his life for a cause, a person living for a purpose. Here the purpose is talking about Jesus, what he did on the cross, died for our sins and resurrecting in power now having the authority to forgive sins, heal broken hearts and lives. The whole of Old Testament points to one thing and that is the Cross of Christ. He is the center and the star of the bible!

Jesus talks to His disciples in Matthew 24 about the situation when they go on their witness-mission, war, ethnic conflict, false Messiah’s and so forth. The focus is to establish a witness about Jesus so all ethnic groups will hear the true message of the gospel, not a self promoting, ego centered, human worshipping gospel, but Jesus and His sacrificial death on the cross. Jesus is to be the one witnessed about! Jesus!

There is no salvation in any other name!

These witness centers what is it? What is it Jesus talks about? Well, I think He thinks about groups of people living in community in their community witnessing about Jesus. About the Cross! We call this church! A group of believers living together, worshipping together socially open for integrating new members of their ‘family’ of believers, actually their solemn purpose is to grow in numbers.

Today in the world there are spots where there are no such a witnesses, unreached areas. There might be some barely surviving churches but very isolated from the rest of the community. There is a desperate need of new wineskins, actually tens of thousands of new ‘witnesses’.

The Lord spoke to me recently asking me if I wanted to be a part of a movement of church planting which He carries in His heart. It has already begun, it’s not that public due to the persecution and challenges. I said ‘Yes, Lord I want to be a part of that!’. We saw it when the Iron curtain fell down and we run in preaching and proclaiming the gospel in the former soviet union. Today as a result of mine and many others work tens of thousands of churches has been established and now there is a living testimony about the Cross, about Jesus in that part of the world.

Now we must go to other parts not having a testimony established. Recently when visiting Ethiopia and my good friend Per Åkvist, Joshuacampaign, I talked with an Ethiopian man of god, a church planter who had planted hundreds of churches over the years. Now he had left the movement he once started to start all over again to plant churches. I asked him how many churches he could start in 5 years. His answer came fast and very convincingly ‘100 churches in 5 years’. A missionary pastor is send out and he gets 50 Usd/month for 2 years then he must be selfsupporting. I thought to myself for 30,000 Usd I could help this brother start 100 churches in the unreached areas of Ethiopia.

This was a couple of weeks ago and I can’t get it out of my head. I want to channel those 30,000 Usd to this man.

For 50 Usd/month you can support a missionary/pastor to go and start a church. This means it will cost around 1000 Euro to establish one church! Not much.

If you want to help this pastor please write me mjs@matsjan.com and I will get the money over to him. He told me he has 9 ready missionaries he want to send now! Will you send them!

Matsjan

There are lots of controlling forces in the world we live in. All through the history man has been on a surge for freedom. Freedom is first and foremost inner freedom, the ability to live after my own convictions and to follow my consciousness. There is a price to keep this inner freedom alive and healthy all through life. It demand strength to uphold it.

I read a great book by Nathan Sharansky some years ago, Fear no Evil, where he describes his battle against the Soviet regime to keep his inner freedom of thought and faith. It lead him to spend 11 years in prison. During these years he fought tirelessly to maintain his inner freedom. His method was simple. He never obeyed anything contradicting with or limiting his inner freedom. When commanded to sleep, he stayed awake, when commanded to eat he didn’t. When he finally was released and brought to the airport i Berlin to be united with his wife he was told to walk straight to the car from the airplane. He then turned around and walked zigzag backwards towards the waiting car.

Of course this was an extreme situation but extreme situations demand extreme counter measures!

I value my freedom, my freedom of choice, freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of movement enormously much!

Jesus came to set us free, not to bind us within a some religious system. He came to set us free from sin which so easily and hardly snares us bringing us into captivity. The sacrifice of Christ was to set us free, to make us free from sin and death to give us the gift of life, to live for Him and with Him.

Let us use our lives for His Glory and to fulfill everything He has enabled us too!

Matsjan