That None Should Perish: How to Reach Entire Cities for Christ Through Prayer Evangelism

By Ed Silvoso and C. Wagner

Ed Silvoso weaves together the solid biblical basis and practical outworking of how to reach entire cities for Christ. He presents a working model for reaching each city through his own personal battle scars and triumphant victories. Every believer will be challenged and equipped for leading seekers into the kingdom of God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 18, 1995
• ISBN: 9781441268754

Ed Silvoso

Dr. Ed Silvoso (www.edsilvoso.com) is the founder and president of Harvest Evangelism Inc., and also of the Transform Our World Network (www.transformourworld.org), which is composed of thousands of pulpit and marketplace influencers across the globe. He is widely recognized as a visionary strategist and solid Bible teacher who specializes in nation and marketplace transformation. Dr. Silvoso has been trained both in theology and business, and his work experience includes banking, hospital administration, financial services and church ministry. As a strategic thinker with a passion to equip ordinary people to do extraordinary things, he has spent his lifetime mining life-giving biblical principles for transformation and linking them to practical application for Christians so that they will see transformation impact their lives, families, spheres of influence and, ultimately, their cities and nations. Dr. Silvoso's bestselling books on the topic of transformation have become groundbreaking classics. His DVD series Transformation in the Marketplace with Ed Silvoso provides tangible validation of the transformation principles at work by documenting prototypes now being developed on every continent. Dr. Silvoso and his wife, Ruth, have four married daughters and twelve grandchildren. For more details on his life and ministry, see the Wikipedia article "Ed Silvoso" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Silvoso. You can contact him at [e-mail].

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Introduction

WHEN OUR LORD SENT HIS PERSONAL MESSAGES TO THE SEVEN churches in Asia Minor through His servant John, He closed each message with the admonition to hear what the Holy Spirit was saying to the churches. That exhortation is still valid today. Each generation of Christians must tune in to the particular emphasis the Spirit chooses for that specific age of the Church.

Today, at the end of the twentieth century, what is the Spirit saying to the churches? My observation is that the Spirit is delivering a dual emphasis—prayer and evangelism. And He is doing it in such a way that it reads like one message delivered in stereo.

During the past 10 years, prayer has begun to emerge as one of the central parts—if not the central part—of the life of the Church worldwide.

In the United States, God has anointed David Bryant to launch Concerts of Prayer International, an organization that is bringing together thousands of Christians of all denominations throughout the United States and beyond. It seems that every major city in English-speaking North America has had at least one concert of prayer.

Dr. Paul Cedar, president of the Evangelical Free Church of America and dean of the Billy Graham School of Evangelism, has instilled thousands with a sense of awe in God’s presence as they gather in solemn assemblies. He is touching the lives of countless leaders by challenging them, by deed and by word, to a lifestyle of prayer.

Dr. Neil Anderson, president and founder of Freedom in Christ Ministries, has taught thousands how to reclaim, through prevailing prayer, the spiritual identity and freedom entrusted to them. By prevailing prayer, I mean the kind of holy insistence in prayer that characterized the pleas of the widow in the parable of the unjust judge (see Luke 18:1-8). Dr. Anderson has brought, through prayer, a much-needed practical dimension to the ageless truth of God’s Word, especially in light of the increasing level of evil buffeting the Church in the last days.

Dr. Joe Aldrich, president of Multnomah School of the Bible, has been led of God to launch Pastors’ Prayer Summits, a concept so radically new that for most pastors it is necessary to see one in action before they can truly believe it is really possible. Dr. Aldrich and his associates have brought together thousands of pastors all over the United States and Canada for four days of prayer. Nothing else. No special speakers, no talented musicians, no program or agenda. Just prayer. Four days in the presence of Jesus. Thousands of pastors have been transformed in these summits. They in turn have become channels to bring healthy change to entire congregations, many of which are now transforming their communities through the quiet but very real power of prayer.

The same prayer emphasis can be seen overseas. Beginning in Korea, it has expanded all over the world. Dr. David Yonggi Cho, pastor of the Yoido Full Gospel Church of Seoul, Korea, has challenged and taught an entire generation of leaders about the necessity of praying at least three hours a day. Rev. Omar Cabrera, leader of an emerging indigenous cluster of congregations numbering more than 80,000 members in Argentina, pioneered the concept of all-night vigils of prayer in a context of spiritual warfare. I remember participating in one of those vigils attended by more than 12,000 people. We met in an open field on a winter night to pray. And pray we did! A similar prayer/spiritual warfare emphasis has begun to spread to churches all over Argentina, creating a spiritual awakening never experienced before. The spiritual breakthrough sweeping that nation today has spilled over to many Latin American countries and beyond, but the main thrust remains the same: prayer.

All of this has been elevated to a higher level of intensity by the resurgence of militant intercession at the beginning of this decade. For instance, Cindy Jacobs, a godly and uniquely gifted woman, has been called by God to launch Generals of Intercession. Cindy and her associates have identified and marshaled generals of intercession in key parts of the world, which, in turn, has created a worldwide network of militant intercessors who, day and night, watch over the nations in prayer. This has added a divine militancy to the prayer movement. Learning how to pray with God-given authority has set thousands of people free.

Dr. C. Peter Wagner, professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary, has brought together one of the most dynamic prayer-ministry coalitions ever assembled, under the umbrella of the Prayer and Spiritual Warfare Track, of which he is the international coordinator. When one reads the names of all the organizations that have joined hands to mobilize the Church to pray, it looks like the Who’s Who of modern Christendom. Combining his zeal for missions with a sharp mind and an extraordinary ability for networking, Dr. Wagner is being used by God to motivate, train and mobilize the largest army of praying Christians ever mustered to storm the gates of hell in order to set captives free. There can be no doubt that prayer, prevailing prayer and prayer in a context of spiritual warfare, is a central part of the message the Spirit is giving to the churches today. The rediscovery of spiritual warfare as the context for prevailing prayer has resulted in effectively positioning the Church for the other part of the Spirit’s message to churches today.

The other part of the message is evangelism. There is an equally intense, God-given, Holy Spirit-inspired sense of urgency to fulfill the Great Commission by the year 2000. This is so much so that a worldwide movement embodying the largest network of Christian ministries ever assembled in the history of Christianity has emerged—the AD 2000 and Beyond Movement.

This movement, through its diverse ministry tracks, has created avenues for the majority of today’s Christian ministries to work together. This coming together has already reached the stage of critical mass. When it comes to the evangelization of the world in our generation, it seems that the issue is no longer if but how soon.

All over the world there is a compelling sense of urgency to take the gospel to every person on the face of the earth now. But unlike the old days, the emphasis is not on the method, nor on the messenger, but on prayer. And this is where these two parts come together in a unified message bearing the title prayer evangelism.

For instance, at a recent meeting of the U.S. Lausanne Committee, of which I am honored to be a member, it was unanimously decided to call the Church to prayer, repentance and reconciliation so that the Church will be able to fulfill its God-given mandate to pray for every American (more than 240 million people) to come to the saving knowledge of the truth. In this statement, we see prayer and evangelism combined in an attempt to emulate the Early Church and how it went about fulfilling the Great Commission in its generation. The Holy Spirit declares through His servant Luke in Acts 19:10, All who lived in Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks. This statement represents the most extraordinary accomplishment in Christendom: A group of frightened, perplexed, monocultural Jews had succeeded in taking the words of their Master to everyone in myriad multicultural cities scattered all over Asia. A tremendous feat!

In this book, I have tried to recapture the biblical principles and the historic perspective that allowed the Early Church to take the gospel from the Upper Room to every living room in Asia Minor in a very short period of time.

I will share how God has led me and my ministry team, along with many of the pastors in Resistencia, Argentina (population 400,000), to the rediscovery of prayer evangelism, although at the time the name was not known to us. This, in turn, has resulted in the evangelization of an entire city and the growth of the Church there, far beyond what any other approach had produced before.

Today, those same principles are being implemented in scores of cities in several continents. The strategies and models are still very much in progress, but the results so far are most encouraging. By no means am I saying that what happened in Resistencia is without flaws or shortcomings. In fact, the Resistencia prototype, when first developed, was very primitive and in great need of refinement. However, the prototype worked and made it possible for a large modern city to hear the gospel in the truest biblical sense. Because of that development, the Church-at-large is beginning to see that the actual evangelization of our cities today is not just a possibility but a clear probability and, as such, a definite must. This is Plan Resistencia’s greatest contribution to the Church-at-large.

Furthermore, the model presented in this book is not new. The Early Church discovered and used it with a high degree of success. Unfortunately, it was lost during the Dark Ages. Later on, when the Reformation pointed the way back to the Scriptures and there was hope of a rediscovery, it was neutralized again by the Enlightenment through its elimination of the supernatural from our worldview. It was not until the Spirit began to bring back the current emphasis on prayer that much of what was then lost has begun to be recovered.

But what is new to many is the implementation of those principles in an exclusive context of prevailing prayer. Again, prayer and evangelism come together, and thus form prayer evangelism.

In this book, I present prayer as the main vehicle to take the gospel to every creature. I discuss the heavenly places as the battleground where the Church must face and defeat the forces of evil. I present a biblical and practical overview of spiritual strongholds—Satan’s secret weapon—and how to pull them down so that the Church can fulfill its worldwide mission. I also challenge the Church to exercise the spiritual authority it has been given in the area of prayer and intercession. All of this is presented against the backdrop of Plan Resistencia and subsequent plans currently under implementation.

I trust that as you read this book, the two-part message of prayer and evangelism being spoken by the Spirit to the Church today will become even more clear to you as you begin to see it in a tangible context.

I also pray that as you put these principles into practice, you will perfect them further so that you, and those who will eventually learn from you, will obtain even greater results.

Ed Silvoso

Harvest Evangelism

San Jose, California

Section I

The Principles

1

Can We Reach a

City for Christ?

PRINCIPLE: Cities are central to God’s redemptive

strategy. The Great Commission begins with a city—

Jerusalem—and culminates when another city—the new

Jerusalem—becomes God’s eternal dwelling with His

people. In order to fulfill the Great Commission, we

must reach every city on earth with the gospel.

IS IT POSSIBLE TO REACH AN ENTIRE CITY FOR CHRIST? THIS WAS one of the first and most persistent questions I asked myself as a new believer. Acknowledging that God wishes that none should perish and that Christ gave Himself in ransom for all (see 1 Tim. 2:4,5; 2 Pet. 3:9), I constantly wondered what it would take for the Church in a given city to take the good news to everyone there.

I received the Lord when I was 13 and living in my native Argentina. The best decision I made as a new Christian was to have a weekly appointment with God. Every Thursday, at 7:00 P.M. sharp, I rode my bicycle to the western shore of the Parana River in my hometown of San Nicolas. During that precious hour, I poured out my heart to God, trying to understand the loneliness I felt as a born-again Christian high schooler in a spiritually skeptical town of almost 100,000 souls. Week after week, I attempted to reconcile the overwhelming joy of my salvation with the pain caused by the lack of response to the gospel among my friends and relatives. If Jesus was indeed the only way, why was it that no one else wanted to find Him?

In preparation for my weekly time with God, I regularly read books on revival. My heart swelled and my spirit rose within me as I learned, in the infancy of my faith, about God’s mighty work in England, Wales, Bavaria and the United States. Yet that high tide of joy was inevitably followed by an equally powerful undertow of disappointment as the bleakness of Argentina’s spiritual situation relentlessly hounded me.

Why is it, I asked God, that all the revivals I read about happened north of the equator? Is Argentina God’s ugly duckling?

Week after week, as I watched the sun set on the Argentine pampas (vast, flat grasslands), I begged God to send us a touch of revival, and as part of that, to allow Christians to reach an entire city for Christ. Only the extraordinary fervency of my newly found faith was capable of carrying me through the wilderness of disappointment that lay between those weekly meetings. Nevertheless, I was determined to find the way to see a city reached for Christ.

At the time of my conversion my pastor was Carlos Naranjo, who, years earlier, was an elder in a very separatist Plymouth Brethren assembly in Buenos Aires. His wife was healed of a terminal illness at a Pentecostal crusade, where Carlos had taken her out of desperation. Consequently, he was rejected by his local assembly and was labeled a heretic by many of his Christian friends.

Soon after that, Carlos came to San Nicolas to supervise the building of a small factory. As he witnessed to friends, employees and neighbors, many came to Christ, and a local church was born. My parents, my sister and I were prayed into the Kingdom by this enthusiastic cluster of new believers. True to his Brethren tradition, Carlos Naranjo began to train other laypeople for the ministry. I was picked to be a youth evangelist. I was only 14 when this happened, but it did not stop me from canvassing the streets of San Nicolas weekend after weekend. However, at the end of each year, I could count my converts on the fingers of one hand. The disappointment I felt became part of the central focus of my weekly conversations with God.

When I was 17, I formed my first evangelistic team. It happened as a result of my daily time of prayer with Ruth, who at the time was my girlfriend and now is my wife. She lived in Cordoba, 500 kilometers away from San Nicolas, and we only saw each other twice a year. To mitigate the pain of our separation, we agreed to have a daily time of prayer and fellowship in the Spirit, as we called it. At 10:00 sharp every night, she knelt down in the hills of Cordoba and I knelt down in the pampas of San Nicolas. This was a very sacred time for me. I faithfully kept that appointment. Short of the Second Coming, nothing could keep me from it. Even if Saint Paul had come calling on me, I would have made him wait until I was done. It was the closest thing Ruth and I had to personal contact every day.

In the summer of 1963, our church held meetings every day of the week. Each night after church, the youth gathered at my parents’ house for fellowship. Every night at 10:00 I sneaked out to have my time with Ruth and the Lord. I was able to do it undetected for a few days, but eventually my friends noticed my absence. They asked where I went every night at 10:00. When I told them I went to pray with Ruth, they insisted on joining me. Because my meeting with Ruth was in the Spirit and not in person, I did not mind. So they joined me, but instead of praying just 15 minutes, our meetings extended into the wee hours of the night. We prayed, we sang, we praised God, we quoted Scripture, we ministered to each other. After a few weeks of this, we were truly charged up spiritually, eager to do something for God.

THE DREAM OF SEEING AN ENTIRE CITY

REACHED FOR CHRIST WAS VERY FRESH IN

MY MIND AS WE TACKLED THOSE TINY

HAMLETS. IN MY MIND I WAS BILLY

GRAHAM, AND WE WERE GOING TO REACH

EVERYBODY THERE WITH THE GOSPEL.

We met with our pastor, and he pointed out four nearby hamlets that had no strong Christian witness. He asked us to kneel down, and he prayed for us. Go, he said, and the Lord will be with you.

I remember in my youthful naïveté thinking, Maybe we will find the way to reach an entire city for Christ. This is how my first evangelistic team came into being. I, the evangelist, was 17 years old. My associate preacher was 15. The music director, my sister, was 14, and the director of follow-up was 13. Working under him was the youth of the group. Only one person was older than me—Jose Lobos, who was 19 years old. We called him Grandpa.

None of us had a vehicle, so we carried everything by hand—the bulky P.A. system, the car battery to power the equipment, the boxes of Bibles and gospel tracts, the musical instruments. Everything! As often as we could, we tried to get a ride on a bus. But what bus driver in his right mind would let us board his bus? We had to be very creative in order to lure him to stop for us. To that effect, I positioned the two nicest looking girls in our group on one side of the street while the rest of us stood on the opposite side, pretending to wait for the bus headed in the other direction. As soon as the unsuspecting bus driver stopped, a stampede took place and all of us crossed in front of the bus. We must have looked like a caravan of U-Haul trucks—minus the trucks! By then I had collected the bus fare from all of my team members. As they boarded, each one told the driver, The last guy has my fare. I was the last guy, and that was my way of making sure the bus did not leave without me.

The dream of seeing an entire city reached for Christ was very fresh in my mind as we tackled those tiny hamlets. To me they looked like New York or Los Angeles. In my mind I was Billy Graham, and we were going to reach everybody there with the gospel.

And indeed we did! We made sure that everyone heard the gospel. We even led a satanist to Christ. I remember wondering how many crowns a converted warlock would fetch at the Judgment Seat of Christ. In spite of these victories, we did not see mass conversions.

Again, my question was, Why not, Lord? Why not here in Argentina?

When I turned 20, I was drafted into the army. I dreamed of leading the entire battalion, 900 strong, to the Lord. During the time of my enlistment, I saw a small stream of converts. When discharge day came, I asked permission to give the farewell speech, hoping to see a mass movement of conversions. I witnessed a trickle of responses, but the rushing river I hoped for never materialized.

Pursuing the Dream

Eventually, I took a job as a hospital administrator in a newly built facility in San Nicolas. I enjoyed the hustle and bustle of working with doctors, nurses and patients as we watched our hospital grow. During my second year in this job, Ruth and I got married and settled in a house that I had built especially for her. As much as I liked my job as a hospital administrator, the real joy came after hours when I would rush home, eat a quick dinner and drive with Ruth in my newly acquired 1947 Chrysler to evangelistic meetings. The main reason I chose this mammoth vehicle as my first car was because of its payload. It could hold all of my evangelistic paraphernalia: 16 collapsible chairs, a small pulpit, Ruth’s guitar and accordion, two boxes of Bibles and gospel tracts, and a variable number of ministry associates. The car was constantly overbooked, which resulted in some of my associates riding on the laps of their fellow ministers.

One of those crusades took us to a small town nearby, where the local brethren invited us to hold an open-air campaign. Amazingly, we saw 92 decisions of faith made in that campaign! Afterward, I was asked to be the preacher for this emerging congregation. In my desire to reach everybody with the gospel, we held church meetings four times a week and two evangelistic meetings on Sundays. Even though we saw some growth, and the entire village heard the gospel, we did not see a book-of-Acts kind of evangelistic explosion. I remember wondering if maybe the long hours spent at my hospital job were a contributing negative factor.

A year later, Ruth and I—already enjoying the presence of our first daughter, Karina—decided that I should quit my hospital administration job to answer the call of a full-time pastorate in the beautiful city of Mar del Plata, Argentina’s French Riviera. Having no secular job to take up my time, we worked hard and saw our church grow. The dream to see a city reached was always in the forefront of my thoughts and prayers. I bought a map of Mar del Plata and marked on it the location of every church. I prayed for those churches regularly. I networked as much as possible with their pastors. We saw some results but nothing spectacular. After about a year, Luis Palau, Ruth’s brother, invited us to join his newly formed evangelistic team, and we moved to Mexico City.

Luis’s enthusiasm for evangelism was incendiary. He loved cities, he loved sinners and he loved preaching to the multitudes. Quite often, he and I would talk into the wee hours of the night about reaching entire cities for Christ. Ruth and I felt very privileged to be a part of Luis’s emerging team. His team formed part of Overseas Crusades, a mission that had a solid reputation for discipleship and a healthy disposition to mass evangelism. Dr. Dick Hillis, Overseas Crusades’ founder, had worked very closely with Billy Graham, first in Asia and later on in Latin America. Along with godly men such as Keith Benson and Dr. Ed Murphy, Dr. Hillis and Overseas Crusades provided a solid environment for Luis’s aggressive, and many times innovative, evangelistic thrusts. We enjoyed setting up crusades for Luis, producing TV and radio programs, arranging presidential prayer breakfasts. In the process, we saw significant numbers come to the Lord. But still, no city was fully reached.

In the early 1970s, Ruth and I took some time off from the Palau team to take the graduate course at Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland, Oregon. Afterward, we went on to attend the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California.

My time at Multnomah was the closest I have ever come to a-road-to-Emmaus kind of experience. The intensive course work required in-depth study of the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. We went through the Bible book by book, chapter by chapter and verse by verse under the guidance of gifted Bible teachers. We even wrote our own commentary as we went along. The school was indeed true to its motto: If you want Bible, then you want Multnomah.

I could not believe I had every waking hour of the day to read and study the Bible! This was a real treat for someone like me, who, since conversion days, had always been forced to create time for Bible study at the end of a busy day of other responsibilities. Every day I looked forward to delving into the Scriptures with overwhelming joy burning inside of me. Often at night I had trouble checking out as my heart insisted on chewing a little bit longer on the biblical truths found during the day.

Later, at the School of World Mission in Pasadena, I had the privilege of sitting under the teaching of godly and brilliant missiologists such as Donald McGavran, Ralph Winter, Arthur Glasser, Alan Tippet and