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With Kevin Elliott
355 Plays1 year ago
Today's guest can relate amazing stories of adventurous missions in remote areas experiencing miracles and dramatic conversions. But even if that is not what most of us experience, we can still take from it practical lessons about prayer, following the Spirit's leading and hospitality in our day-to-day lives at home.
Kevin Elliot is chair of trustees for the Christian charity Mission Macedonia. He makes regular mission trips to North Macedonia, and has also worked alongside churches in East Africa. With 30 years’ experience in Christian youth work and church-based outreach in the UK, Kevin also has an on-line ministry, ‘allaboutjesus.info’, teaching the four gospels through video talks. Kevin’s first book, See Miracles, was published in November 2023.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:10
Speaker
Well hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Andy Bannister from Solas. This time I'm not joined by my usual co-presenter, Christy Mayer. Christy, as regular listeners will know, works at Oak Hill Theological College and she has the wonderful excuse that she is invigilating
00:00:29
Speaker
an exam today. I did try and persuade her to dial in from the examination hall but probably the students were not being impressed. I'm flying solo today recording this first pep talk of the new year and I'm delighted though
Kevin Elliott's Background and Early Inspirations
00:00:41
Speaker
to be joined. We may not have a co-presenter but we have a great guest for you today. I am joined by Kevin Elliott. Kevin has worn various hats
00:00:49
Speaker
over the years just discovered before I press the record button for the show he used to be a nuclear engineer before he did the other kind of things that he's done but we won't talk about that. We are interested though Kevin that you have among other things your chair of trustees for a charity called Mission Macedonia you've done lots of mission and evangelism in Macedonia and elsewhere you've been involved in youth work and church based outreach across the UK you've written a book
00:01:13
Speaker
So much going on. But tell us a bit about yourself, what's been your journey, especially into mission and evangelism and some of the sort of things that you talk about there in that book. Thanks, Andy, and happy new year to everybody. Thank you. So I started off when I was about 10 years old, I had an incident where because I was asthmatic, I
00:01:37
Speaker
got a very ill one evening. My dad had been painting the room, paint fumes came into my lungs, and I couldn't breathe. I woke up, not been able to breathe at all, fell on the floor, banged my fist on the floor, hoping someone would hear me, then passed out. My mum did hear me, praise God, and she ran in, saw me lying unconscious. We had no telephone in those days, so they
00:02:00
Speaker
managed to get hold of a doctor, and then he managed to get hold of an ambulance. Half an hour later, an ambulance turned up. As far as I know, I hadn't been breathing that time, but then suddenly I got this, I suddenly sat up and found myself in bed, breathing perfectly just before people came in with oxygen tanks through the bedroom door. I honestly don't know what happened that night. I've got some serious, I know why I didn't breathe, but I didn't know how it was healed. And I assumed from that day onwards that I'd been miraculously healed.
00:02:28
Speaker
And it made quite an impact on me as a child because I felt, right, I've got a second chance now. God is real. I think he saved me if I need to do something with my life. That was a sort of starting point as most kids sort of misbehave quite a lot. But I always wanted to follow up with Jesus. It ended up at university and it was really there that I got involved with
First Mission Experiences and Engineering Career
00:02:52
Speaker
a group called Horizons who encouraged us to get out and do some mission work. A lady two weeks earlier was a famous missionary of the time called Helen Roosevelt who spoke to us. I don't know if you've heard of her from this mounting that other books like that she'd written. And she was having a right go at us male students in particular.
00:03:11
Speaker
Why are you leaving all the missionary work up to us old ladies? It's basically a lie. Why aren't you young men out on the mission field? And I thought it was a little bit on the harsh side, but I saw a point because she'd been raped and all sorts of terrible things happened to her, but it'd been a wonderful, wonderful witness for Jesus.
00:03:31
Speaker
And I thought, yeah, I'd like to be a wonderful witness for Jesus too, but there's not a missionary organization. I'm just a normal guy, engineering student. I don't know my faith very well. What could I do? But I did say to God, you know, if you want to use me, I'm going to make myself available.
00:03:47
Speaker
But two things here. One is I've got my finals coming up, so I'm not going to go looking. So you've got to get a missionary organization to come to me, really, and one that would accept me and I'll go and do some short term work or whatever. So it was a really unreasonable thing, prayer to make. But what happened was that the following week, a group from a
00:04:05
Speaker
World Horizons, they were called, and they were doing crazy things like taking trucks across the Sahara Desert, and they said, come down to Information Weekend. And I went down, having said that prayer, I thought, well, I better go down now, and signed up for a trip to go to Ojiri. I think 17 of us drove a transit van from London to the Sahara and back again.
00:04:26
Speaker
That was my first experience of mission work. But I think it was that quite important I look back, just saying that prayer, you know, I make myself available to you. I don't think I've got anything to offer, but nevertheless, I don't mind giving it a go and send myself out there. So that was really, so that was the university time. You know, as you mentioned, I became an engineer, did that for 40 years, really.
00:04:55
Speaker
And then during that time got involved with a lot of youth work, particularly.
Engaging Youth in Evangelism
00:05:01
Speaker
So I didn't really put the mission work down because I got involved in music, played in a band, a worship band and a Christian folk rock band. And then just spent really 30 years sharing with teenagers, sharing with children and teenagers, mostly in churches, some of that out on the streets, doing detached work.
00:05:22
Speaker
and just sharing Jesus really. And I think that's what I've ended up really enjoying, reading about Jesus, talking about Jesus, writing about Jesus. And it was interesting, Andy, because I went...
00:05:37
Speaker
once back to my old church, so I moved to one youth group, a Baptist church to send one up at a congregational church. When I went back to the Baptist church, I took on some of the Sunday school work. The first group I went into, they'd had a youth leader there. I said, what have you learned? They said, well, we've been doing this and that. I said, well, what do you know about Jesus as parables? And they couldn't name me a parable. Well, name me a miracle. And they couldn't name me a miracle. I thought, oh, they really don't know anything. And so I think from that, that was quite a,
00:06:05
Speaker
A key point for me is that if they don't know anything about Jesus, really, how are they going to know to love Jesus? How are they going to give their lives to Jesus if they don't know about Jesus?
00:06:16
Speaker
From that point on in my youth work, I was determined to tell them in the best way I could, where they could understand it and identify with it, with Jesus and start to love Jesus and his personality and then lead them to Jesus in that way. So it became a thing about 10 more people.
00:06:38
Speaker
We'll come to the Macedonia bit in a moment, because that, of course, then leads on quite nicely to the book that you've written. But just one question I wanted to ask, Kevin, you told that story of when Helen came and dressed you kind of Christian students at university and sort of gently kind of shook the cage a bit. The issue still goes on, I think, doesn't it? That I think sometimes evangelism sort of ends up getting left to a few who seem to be, you know, the rest of the church go, well, they're gifted at it. I'm not an evangelist. It's not my job.
00:07:08
Speaker
Is there any sort of reflecting back on that time? Are there any ways that maybe the church could be doing things a little bit differently or for those of us who are leaders in terms of trying to encourage perhaps more of a younger generation to get a vision for evangelism? Because I still think there is that tendency still sometimes in the church that it's left to the trailblazers. You know, we're grateful that there's a J. John or we're grateful there's a Helen Roosevelt or whoever out there doing it. So I don't have to. I know that was my, I think I was in that trap as a young Christian. How do we help break that?
00:07:37
Speaker
that cycle, do you think? Yeah, that's a good question.
Practical Evangelism Techniques
00:07:43
Speaker
One thing I would say with young people, it's what are their gifts and talents? It's identifying that. We did a questionnaire once with them that Steve Chalk would come up with, they were called the crumble buster decode or something, some crazy name like that. And it did identify where are young people where they had
00:08:04
Speaker
practical skills where they were perhaps more intellectually skilled and ones that had a real heart for evangelism. It came out in these sort of simple 20 questions. And I think in that way, well, actually, yeah, okay. Well, perhaps we can involve him, get him, encourage him to go on a mission, short mission trip. Perhaps we can get him involved in some practical work, you know, where you go out and
00:08:29
Speaker
help build a school for kids or whatever, because it uses practical skills, but still show the love of God in that way. And I think churches could do that more looking at individuals. How can you show the love of God with what skills you've got and encourage them in that way?
00:08:46
Speaker
Yeah.
Miracles in Macedonia
00:08:47
Speaker
And I think you're right. I think looking back on my, you know, I was in youth ministry for a while, not, not, I don't think quite as long as you, but we're in it for a fair amount of time. And I think, yeah, one thing I learned towards the end was, you know, perhaps in the church, we need to take young people more seriously and rather than feel that we need to protect them and cause it them and just buy, you know, digest everything down into tiny little chunks for them. I should take some risks, get young people out there using their gifts. It may go wrong. That's how you, that's how you learn. We've got that model in scripture, you know, Peter, occasionally things
00:09:16
Speaker
went wrong. But Jesus still trusted the guy. And I think maybe we've we've we've lost a bit of that. But let's let's talk about Macedonia, because in Macedonia, you know, you describe in your in your bio how things are quite exciting, because, you know, as you put it, I think, you know, groups of inexperienced English Christians go out to North Macedonia, start taking great leaps of faith and really falling back on on having to rely on God showing up or stuff isn't going to happen. So so what did you learn in Macedonia? And how did that end up?
00:09:43
Speaker
Some of those stories feeding into the book you've written called, See Miracles. Yes, okay. Thank you, Andy. So, this came out of a prayer time. We were having a close friend of mine. We'd been down to Cumbron quite regularly when they had a revival down in this Welsh town of healing miracles. So we'd been down there and we'd experienced all these healing miracles and we wanted
00:10:11
Speaker
ourselves to get involved in that, we're praying for God for that anointing, we want to go and see people healed. So I suppose it was that was the, that was more of the impetus on us, I think, Andy, than necessarily going out and sharing the gospel was that we don't like seeing people sick. And people don't know the impact counts as on whole families and things like that. So we wanted to be able to pray blessings on people and see people healed of all sorts of things. So we started, we started
00:10:40
Speaker
doing this at the end of our own church services, sort of praying for people, and we saw some people being healed from that. But then this guy moved to another part of town. I went out to his house, so we still have prayer meetings together, and he invited someone else along from his new church who'd already been out to Macedonia. And he
00:10:59
Speaker
taken that verse, you know, where I come out to Macedonia, he went to pause all this man and invited him out there. And he took that quite literally, went out there and he met this man called Jimmy, who's Nigerian, who'd set up a number of churches across the country in the poor villages there.
00:11:16
Speaker
And as he joined our prayer group, we started praying for Macedonia as part of our prayer group. And bit by bit, it became more and more focused each week on Macedonia. And then Jimmy came across for one of the Christian conferences, New Wine, for a day. And then afterwards he said, well, will you come out to Macedonia and put on a conference for us?
00:11:42
Speaker
Now, none of us had any experiences in putting on conferences or speaking overseas or we had no Macedonian, we had no money and we had no team, but we prayed into it and we still felt God saying, yes, say yes to Jimmy, you know, I'll provide all these things.
00:12:00
Speaker
And it was crazy, really. It was six weeks to go. We still had none of those things that we needed to do this conference. But we felt God saying, you know, trust me, because I can do even things you can't imagine through you. And we knew two things were going to happen. One of two things were going to happen, Andy. Either we would fall flat on our face and it would be a complete disaster.
00:12:24
Speaker
or we would see things that we've never seen before, experience God in power that we've never seen before. So it's going to be one of those two things. There was no sort of middle ground. And we took, we said, well, are we prepared to fall flat on our faces and look silly? And we decided we were, you know, to take that risk. So we went out there and we had lots of promises from God through prayer. There's going to be this miracle and that miracle. And these people are going to be healed. And Jimmy was,
00:12:50
Speaker
put in this conference as a day of wonders and miracles. We thought, well, this isn't us at all, but let's go with it and see what happens. So that's how we got out there. So that was 2017. We went out Easter and put on, we hired an indoor football stadium. Wow. A small one. I think it could take 4,000. I think we had about 600, 500, 600 people from all over the country that came on buses.
00:13:20
Speaker
and we fed them because otherwise some of them wouldn't have a meal during the day so we fed them. We did worship, we did teaching and then we had a gospel appeal.
00:13:32
Speaker
on the back of what we'd spoken. Jimmy did that. Again, at that point, we saw him as the evangelist. So we said, you do the gospel appeal, which he did. Many people gave their lives to Jesus. And then he said, well, for the next two hours, 90 minutes to two hours, we'll have ministry time, invite people forward for healing and for ministry. So the group of us,
00:14:00
Speaker
said at the front and he said, what do you want to call out first? Well, this was a question I wasn't expecting. I thought he was in charge. It wasn't to do with me. But I remember that when we'd been praying in our little house, one of the things that had come through in the press was there's someone going to be healed who's completely deaf in their left ear. Someone had a word from God about this. So I said, well, call out ears and head problems and eyes and things like that.
00:14:29
Speaker
And so he did, and about 20 or 30 people came forward. I said to my translator, oh, can I go to the end? Because it's a bit busy around here. Can we go and see the person on the end of the line there? So when we got there,
00:14:45
Speaker
And I said, I asked her what's wrong and he did. And she said, oh, I'm completely deaf in my left ear. So, okay. So now you've someone's had the word from God. And I actually stood there now facing that lady that's deaf in her left ear. So I think this must be of God. So I placed my hand on her left ear, said a few prayers, probably two or three minutes, pray the blood of Jesus on her, the power of Jesus. That's the Holy Spirit, the healer.
00:15:12
Speaker
click my fingers, and all her hearing came back in her left ear. Meanwhile, one of my friends, he'd also been praying for a lady that was deaf in her left ear, and she had one of her bones missing, he found out, in the inner ear. So it would be impossible for her ever to hear again. But whilst he prayed for her, that bone was created, recreated, and she got her full hearing back. And from that point, and then they shared these things over the microphone, then more people came forward.
00:15:40
Speaker
And it got to the point where there are so many people coming forward for prayer. They were pushing in the cues. They were knocking us over almost. They were holding children over people's heads to get to them first. And it was quite extraordinary for people that had never experienced that before.
00:15:57
Speaker
Um, but we saw the holy spirit, you know, go through and heal person after person. It wouldn't, it wasn't everyone of course, perhaps, but we think perhaps 60, 70% of those there, we felt that God had done that. Amazing. Yeah. That's absolutely.
00:16:15
Speaker
I just don't know where to start. I'm just so excited to hear the stories of God at work. But here's the question, Kevin, folks listening to this going, I mean, that was quite dramatic and big and you went out to Macedonia, you hired a small football stadium, a football stadium, hundreds came.
00:16:31
Speaker
The question I guess I have is how do those of us who are not called to hire football stadiums and for the crowd, are there lessons from how you saw God at work there that folks who are, you know, they spent, were going to spend their working weeks, you know, at the school, at the business, in the office, interacting with their non-Christian friends that way. I still think that the Holy Spirit and evangelism could come together in those settings. But what are some of the lessons that perhaps you learned on that bigger scale in Macedonia that we can apply at the smaller scale
00:17:00
Speaker
of everyday evangelism. Yeah. And I think, well, two reasons I wrote the book, See Miracles, was because, first of all, I wanted to get this testimony out there because God was saying to me, this isn't your testimony. You can't just sit on it to share the things you've seen. Because other people will read that and be encouraged by it. But the main reason really was that I wanted to encourage and give the tools to people who
00:17:28
Speaker
want to see more of God in their lives, but just unsure how to do it. So if you've got somebody with a migraines come to visit you, a friend, I want to give you the confidence to say, look, Hey, I'll pray for your migraine. You know, and a few ways I had to do that. And when you see that migraine healed, you might want, you might go and pray for somebody with a
00:17:50
Speaker
a knee that's got pains in their knee and then pains in their shoulder. And then you might have the confidence when you see those healed to go on and pray for somebody with cancer. So it's starting from where you're at, really. Other examples for Macedonia, quite different to the football stage and would be
00:18:06
Speaker
where we go into people's homes. Sometimes we get invited in there or someone perhaps like last time I went out there was a lady that hadn't eaten for several days and she couldn't move from the house. Only quite a young lady. We took food parcels there and then went and prayed with her and then shared the gospel with her in that situation where you're visiting one person. All of us can go and
00:18:31
Speaker
visit someone, we can take flowers round, we can take food round, someone that's in need. In that situation, it can lend itself to conversations, especially if you can get the confidence of praying for somebody, and most people who are desperate won't refuse prayer.
00:18:48
Speaker
You might not see the healing, but you can pray a blessing over them and you can share God's love in that way. And in that way, you're doing evangelism. It doesn't feel like you're an evangelist, but you are because you're going into someone's home. You're sharing food with them and you're blessing them in Jesus' name and showing them the love of Jesus. If you get the opportunity, then you can tell them a bit about Jesus and you can tell them a bit about his love.
00:19:13
Speaker
That doesn't always happen, but you can always share the love of God, even if you don't get to the point where you lead them to Jesus. We saw that in one home we went to. We were driving to a bigger town. I just felt God was telling me to go and revisit some friends I'd seen years ago. So we went to their house.
00:19:34
Speaker
I asked the lady how she was, and she was so, so pleased to see me again. But she said, oh, she's had this arthritis, but she's had it for years. And we said, well, can we pray for it? You know, can we just pray for your arthritis? You know, on that occasion, all the pain went from her legs. Well, it may not have done, but it did. And that leads on to questions about
Long-term Community Presence in Evangelism
00:19:51
Speaker
He said, well, can I pay you because the Orthodox pay people for prayers, pay their priests? No, no, no. The love of Jesus is free. That leads you into a conversation then about how Jesus wants to bless you and how his love and his salvation comes freely. It's learning how to do that in a natural way. And I think that's part of my experience in Macedonia. Yes, we've done the conferences and that is a big thing because a lot of, even though it's
00:20:20
Speaker
really a church conference. We find that half the people that come probably aren't attached to the churches or haven't made a commitment to Jesus. So there's great opportunities in that. But then of course, in putting it on, we're giving some people a day out, which they probably won't ever have from their villages by giving them transport and food, giving them food for the day. So in that, you're sharing love.
00:20:47
Speaker
even without the evangelism bit, you're sharing God's love with you, giving them a day out, giving them food. I give them an experience, for them they might not have been in a stadium like that before, so it's given that night experience. The other thing I like about that as well, Kevin, is the experience and the food and the hospitality piece.
00:21:06
Speaker
I think matter too. One thing we do a lot at Solas, we do a lot of work with churches helping them put on evangelism events and cafes and pubs, restaurants, those kinds of things. And we've found out over the years that if you offer people that experience, it's a nice time. The food is good. The environment is good.
00:21:22
Speaker
People feel welcomed and it's a nice time. That in itself sets the scene, I think, for a gospel conversation too, because people feel valued and so forth. And I'm very struck actually when I read the gospels now, because, you know, I think I'd miss sometimes just how often Jesus' encounters are connected with food. There's often food and meals and sitting down with people. And there's a part of evangelism, you know, that can work in that context too, I think.
00:21:49
Speaker
Yeah. I think we underestimate the power of food. Yeah. With the disciples, when he sent the disciples out, it's really interesting because he says to them when they go out in their twos, you know, accept hospitality, basically go into a place who's going to feed you.
00:22:07
Speaker
and then share the good news of Christ, share the God's kingdom with them and heal and cast out demons. But food is definitely a part of that. In that case, they're receiving food, but you can be the other way. You can go and provide food and do the same thing. And in Macedonia, we do
00:22:30
Speaker
restaurant evangelism, they call it. And it's interesting, some of it is in restaurants, some of it's in cafes, outside cafes. Some of it might just turn up to a village, like a Roma village, and set up a barbecue.
00:22:45
Speaker
and have someone barbecuing because they love grilled meat. So we grill some meat and do some rolls, set up, play the guitar, then share our stories, do a gospel appeal, and then we'll eat with them. And again, for a village to come together openly in a field,
00:23:08
Speaker
you know, share a barbecue together. There's something special about it, really. But I mean, last on my last trip, we were we had a day off, not the Holy Spirit has a day off. I think I'd worked the team seven or eight days in a row. So we took this day off. We were going to try and find this location where the
00:23:26
Speaker
Oscar where the Oscar nominated film Honeylands was filmed. A wonderful documentary about Macedonia. And we felt it anywhere near it because of the roads. But then we felt prompted to stop at this village on the way back.
00:23:40
Speaker
And when we parked the car between two cafes, I thought we'd head for a cafe, but this lady came out and just invited us into her home. She saw me speaking English, her grandchildren spoke English, and then her daughter was there, her husband was there, some of the children were there, and we all had a meal together. And it came at a wonderful time of being able to shag
00:24:03
Speaker
what they believed and the struggles they had with the Orthodox faith and we were able to share Jesus and we played the guitar a bit. But one thing she said was, look, we've shared a meal with you now, you've come into our home, we've shared a meal with you, so you are now friends with us for life. And although that's perhaps overstated in our own culture, it's overstated the way of saying it.
00:24:25
Speaker
There's a genuineness in there. You've been with someone, you've spent time with them, you've shared a meal with them and that counts for something. It gives you a platform to develop that relationship in developing that relationship. You can develop sharing deeper things. Yeah.
00:24:40
Speaker
And it's not all, it's not all hit. I think sometimes we get this impression of an evangelist going in, a hit, sharing the gospel and going away again. But I've been reading this week, a book from a lad, Chris Lane, I used to know, called Ordinary Mirror Cause.
Conclusion and Book Promotion
00:24:58
Speaker
And he's, he's talks about
00:25:00
Speaker
a permanency, you know, of going on to like he moved into the Langworthy estate in Salford. He's been there for many years. And it's over those years he's been able to develop relationships, particularly with hard cases that then allow them to accept Jesus and then have the support they need to grow in their faith.
00:25:19
Speaker
But it's the sort of opposite, really, of perhaps a Billy Gray omission, you know, where you're the people. And I guess some of the listeners here will have a heart to go into communities. There'll be a long term part of that, you know, in a sense, that's as much evangelism is going out, doing a crusade or hiring an indoor stadium, isn't it?
00:25:37
Speaker
Very much so. Well, Kevin, this has been a fascinating conversation and the time has kind of flown by. We've covered so much from overseas missions to power evangelism, to hospitality and all those other pieces. Obviously, we mentioned your book a couple of times, Sea Miracles is a book you have out for people who want to check that out and find out more about you. Where's the best place for people to find out about that book and get hold of a copy, Kevin?
00:26:00
Speaker
Yeah, so you can go on the website to find a bit more about it, which is www.mmpublish.org or it's available for all normal routes for Amazon everywhere else. So yeah, you can order it from any book shop. Fantastic.
00:26:17
Speaker
We'll put a link to the website in the show notes. So if you're listening to this on your favourite podcast app, just pull up the show notes. We'll put a link to Kevin's website where you can find out more about him and the book. But Kevin, thank you once again for joining me. It's been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you very much.
00:26:32
Speaker
And it's all of you listening at home in the car on the run wherever you are catching a podcast Hope you enjoyed this episode join me and hopefully Christie be back with me again in two weeks time for a different guest and a different conversation This has been pep talk from Solas. Thanks for listening. God bless you and goodbye