From Donuts to Disciples: Brian Barcelona's Unique Ministry

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And I remember one of my first meetings I did in Copland High School, very small,

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maybe maybe seven or eight kids when we started.

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I was preaching and during my message, this girl raises her hand.

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She interrupts my message and she says, excuse me, I have a question for you.

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And I said, sure. I didn't know who she was.

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She said, are you coming back next week?

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That was your question.

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I said, yeah, I'll be here.

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She goes, great.

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She goes, maybe if you start coming every week, we'll start listening to you.

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Brian Barcelona, it's great to have you here on Charisma to be able to talk about

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how God has called you to reach Gen Z and be that bridge

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that's gapping the generations.

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And so welcome to Charisma.

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Thank you so much for having me.

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It's a privilege and an honor to be able to connect with you.

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And some of the things that we talked about before we hit record,

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I want to make sure that we talk about those, because you have been

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used instrumentally in in schools,

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which is a place that unfortunately, it seems that God has been

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kicked out of the schools in so many ways.

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But God has used you in a way to transform.

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One particular school is where we're going to talk about this stories.

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But but tell us a little bit about the journey that God has brought you on

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from now you're reaching Gen Z and everything with that.

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Yeah, it's interesting because I started preaching in 2009.

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And I mean, I guess that was kind of a tail end of millennials

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into what we know as Gen Z.

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I didn't know anything about Gen Z.

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I knew briefly about millennials, so there wasn't a realization of

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communicating to Gen Z until honestly, 2020.

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So, you know, over over a decade, I was preaching and then I'm realizing,

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oh, man, I'm preaching to an entirely different generation.

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Which probably made sense to why some of my jokes were phasing out in next gen.

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They didn't get the Gameboy one or the PlayStation one or

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none of those jokes that maybe were relevant to my generation.

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But yeah, I started preaching in 2009, just felt a call of God to go into campuses.

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And never would I thought over a decade later

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it would lead to 46 countries, schools all over the world.

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We've trained people from so many different places now.

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But it really started with just a desire to see

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public schools have the opportunity to hear the gospel.

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And I think our method was that, you know, Bible clubs or what we know as Jesus clubs

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would be evangelistic in nature.

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They would be in gymnasiums, auditoriums.

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They would be larger gatherings that would be not for Christians,

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but they would be for the atheists, for the Buddhists, the Muslims, for the

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agnostics, for the kids that were suicidal, the ones that were gangs,

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the ones that were on drugs.

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That was our main focus of the Jesus clubs.

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How does those how do those kids have the opportunity to hear about him?

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So how did you get into those schools to be an evangelist?

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I mean, because it's it's one thing to have a club where everybody's,

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you know, coming that's already a Christian and they, you know, it's

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it's like, OK, have your little club over there, but don't touch the rest of us.

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How did how were you able to make that shift?

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Well, getting into schools

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was just a matter of me showing up, knocking on doors, meeting people.

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But getting the lost together or getting people that weren't part of the Christian

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faith, it wasn't difficult for for us.

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We had a few methods.

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One of them was we would my goal the first week

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weeks on a campus was to meet as many people as possible.

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And so I did it in a way where I would bring hundreds of donuts

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to a campus.

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I'd get with the campus leaders, you know, the teacher advisors.

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And we would walk the quads or the schools

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with just hundreds of boxes of donuts, these pink boxes.

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And I would just get donuts and I'd say, hey, take a donut from the Jesus clubs.

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It doesn't cost you anything.

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I say, hey, what's your name?

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So I come up to you and I say, hey, you know, hey, how are you?

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What's your name? My name's John.

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Awesome. Hey, it's so good to meet you, man.

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My name is Brian. I'm, you know, working with the Jesus clubs.

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Would you like a donut? Sure.

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You know, you can say yes or no.

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If you'd say no, I'd say, OK, awesome.

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Well, maybe next week, you know, grab one for free.

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The next week, I come back.

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Maybe you'd be a little bit skeptical.

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But the third week, the fourth week, the fifth week,

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all of a sudden, your your walls are dropping and you're like,

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I'll take a donut. Awesome.

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After a month.

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Now, I know a little bit about your life.

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Hey, how's the you know, how's that?

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How's that test? Finally, you took.

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How's your brother before you know it?

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Hey, man, I'm doing a gathering in the gym if you'd like to come.

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Yeah, you know, I'll come check it out.

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And people would come and we would just preach repentance.

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We preach the Bible.

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I would preach on topics relevant to their culture.

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And we would just see transformation happen.

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But our biggest, our biggest

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I don't want to say secret or weapon.

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That sounds funny, but our biggest

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strategy, which all young people strategy strategy and tactic

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was our consistency is we would show up every single week.

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I say this and I would do what their deadbeat dads never did.

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I would show up every single week.

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And so I remember there was a school one year.

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They had two people write articles about the Jesus clubs.

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And so the first article was written in the yearbook by a Christian.

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And the Christian wrote every week we could count on the Jesus clubs happening.

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And they were ecstatic about their faith.

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And the second article was written by an atheist.

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And the atheist said every week, you know, we can count on a few things in our school.

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This, this, this.

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And they said one of them would be at every week,

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the auditorium doors would be open.

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We would hear music playing and every week Jesus comes would gather.

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And although we never forced our faith on anybody,

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you know, the door would be cracked or sometimes open.

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My message would reverberate throughout the quad of that school.

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And that was, that was actually a campus that had about 600 kids a week

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that were gathering voluntarily in that campus during lunch.

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Wow.

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So one of the things that I'm, that I'm hearing here, and of course I have

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questions, but one of those questions being how many donuts have you gone

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through in this, in this evangelism method, because my goodness, that's a lot of

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students to reach out with donuts week after week, but the real thing is

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consistency.

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That's what I want to focus in on here is I think it's really easy to, I mean,

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yes, there's a lot of work that goes into putting on a big event or drawing

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people to, to something like a one-time thing.

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But you said about consistency and showing up whenever their deadbeat dads

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don't, is that the cultural key that we need to really focus in on to

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reach this generation?

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I think that there is more power and consistency than we could ever imagine.

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I think a lot of times we put our efforts into one-time events.

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We put all of our money into making our event the best, the flashiest,

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the games, the whatever.

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I remember I was preaching in Compton, the city of Compton, and there are two

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campuses that I preached there in my years of one voice.

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I preached in Centennial High School, which is off of Piru Street where the

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bloods originated, the bloods on the Crips, the bloods originated off that street.

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I preached there for many years.

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And then I preached in Compton High School.

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And I remember one of my first meetings I did in Compton High School, very small,

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maybe, maybe seven or eight kids, one of the first meetings I did in Compton

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High School, seven or eight kids when we started, I was preaching.

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And during my message, this girl raises her hand.

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She interrupts my message and she says, excuse me, I have a question for you.

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And I said, sure.

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I didn't know who she was.

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She said, are you coming back next week?

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That was your question.

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I said, yeah, I'll be here.

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She goes, great.

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She goes, maybe if you start coming every week, we'll start listening to you.

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And that statement has never left my mind to this day.

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You know, one of the most powerful stories I remember was there was this one

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kid, I think I invited him to the Jesus Club for almost two to three years,

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probably.

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And I think it was actually three years because he came in 2016.

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And the reason why he came, his name was, was Justin.

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He was a homosexual and he was a Jehovah witness.

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Don't ask me how that works.

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But I remember every week inviting him.

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He'd blow me off.

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He wouldn't come.

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And this one Christmas I'd gotten, I'd gotten a bunch of $5 gift cards at

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Starbucks and I would just, I would just give away gift cards to kids.

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You know, Hey, Merry Christmas, bless you, whatever from Jesus.

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And I remember I had this one, I had, I had a gift card left and I went up to

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Justin and I said, Hey man, I said, you know, Merry Christmas.

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I just wanted to give you this gift card.

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And he just started weeping.

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And I said, why are you, why are you crying?

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And he said, well, said I'm Jehovah witness.

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And so we don't celebrate any holidays.

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This is the first gift I've ever received in my entire life.

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Wow.

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And we did an event after school.

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He came, got saved and he came to the Jesus Club after that.

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And, you know, I don't know, everybody has their opinions and methods on

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evangelism, but I think, I think I have seen the power of a longterm evangelism.

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And it's different.

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It's, it doesn't longterm evangelism doesn't thrive on the big gatherings.

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Although that does happen.

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We've seen the big gatherings, but I mean, when you look at Roosevelt at school,

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I was in for four years.

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I mean, I graduated a class, kids that got saved their freshman year were

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Bible club leaders, their senior year.

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Wow.

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And, you know, the impact that we had on their lives.

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I mean, I'll probably never know until I get to eternity, you know,