A Sweeping Global Evangelism Strategy by Every Home for Christ
2019 is a critical year for the Every Home for Christ ministry, as it marks the beginning of the OIKOS Initiative. Since 1946, Every Home for Christ has labored to serve the Church to reach every home on the earth with the Gospel and in that time we have seen over four billion presentations of the gospel in nearly every nation on the planet, with many millions turning to the Lord for salvation. Now, with the OIKOS Initiative, we are putting a stake in the ground and asking a bold question – Is it possible to present the gospel to every home on the planet within one generation? We think it is possible and as a result are mobilizing all the resources of the ministry to this grand objective – the evangelization of the world in our generation.
FROM HIDING TO THE HARVEST!
Because we know how their stories ended, it can be hard for us to comprehend just how overwhelming the Great Commission was for the Early Church. Jesus commissioned His disciples to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to all creation. Yet they were only 12 young men, mostly poor and uneducated. And only days earlier, they had been hiding behind locked doors, fearful and discouraged. Suddenly they go from hiding to the harvest! Their assignment - “All nations” and “every creature!”
Indeed, when the Holy Spirit empowered these men to boldly proclaim the Gospel, they turned the Roman world upside down. Since those days, the Great Commission has passed from generation to generation. As Keith Green reminds us, “This generation of Christians is responsible for this generation of souls on the earth.” Of course, task gets more difficult with each passing day. When Every Home for Christ began in 1946, there were only about 2.5 billion people alive. Today, there are 7.4 billion! That’s 7.4 billion names and faces and stories, 7.4 billion people loved by God and created in His image, 7.4 billion souls He died to save - and you and I (and other Christ-followers of this generation) are responsible for reaching them.
That’s why Every Home for Christ (EHC) is launching the Oikos Initiative, a strategic plan to reach every family on earth with the Gospel by 2038. This task may seem overwhelming, but the same Holy Spirit who empowered the early Church disciples is also empowering us.
WHAT IS OIKOS?
One might appropriately ask, what is the significance of using the Greek word oikos as the focus of this initiative? Oikos is a Greek word that’s been around for many centuries and in the last several years even has become the trademark name for a popular brand of yogurt. Of course, to us at EHC the word is significant because it is used in ancient Greek texts to signify a house, household, family or even dwelling. Luke, the physician-historian recorded in Acts chapter five this statement of the early disciples: “And daily in the temple, and in every house [oikos], they did not cease teaching and preaching Jesus as the Christ” (Acts 5:42, NKJV).
Those Early Church disciples conducted the first Every Home Campaign! Acts 5:42 reminds us that everyone lives someplace, and the best way to measurably reach everyone with the gospel is to go directly to where they live — whether a conventional home like we generally envision, or a cardboard makeshift dwelling in a Mexican garbage dump, or even the sewer in a third-world city under some street where unwanted children sleep nightly. In the rainforests of Africa, our indigenous Central African evangelism team launched what they termed the "Every Tree Crusade” to reach the Pigmies whose homes were, quite literally, in the trees! They even modified our motto “We will not stop until we reach the last home on earth with the gospel” to “We will not stop until we reach the last tree on earth with the gospel!”
Also interesting, is a Greek expression used in another of the frequently quoted passages associated with the return of Christ and the Great Commission—Matthew 24:14. We read: “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come.” The Greek expression translated “all the world” (oikoumene) in this passage has its roots in the word oikos. The word oikoumene literally means “every inhabited place in the world.” Frank Kaleb Jansen, a former Norwegian ship captain and past leader of Adopt-A-People Clearing House said of Christ’s use of the word oikoumene in Matthew 24:14…“I believe Jesus is actually saying the gospel of the kingdom shall be proclaimed to every home.”
LEAVING NO ONE BEHIND
Through the Oikos Initiative EHC is embracing this “all the world” and “every creature” mentality of the Early Church. We have made a commitment to leave no one behind in this twenty year period – and that means tirelessly laboring to work systematically and ensure that every person has a chance to hear the Gospel explained in a way that they can understand.
All across the world for the last twelve months, our field leadership has been praying and strategizing about how we are going to complete the OIKOS Initiative region by region and country by country – a goal we have always had, but now with added urgency due to the timeline of “one generation”. This means reaching every home in the approximately 150 nations that we are currently present and starting work in the approximately 50 where we are not present – it means planning for a presentation of the gospel for over 8.5 billion people.
The ministry of EHC involves a lot of small things – but when added together they are a symphony to heaven. The very nature of our ministry lends itself to statistics. EHC Missionaries (8,000 supported staff and an average of 60,000 or more monthly volunteers) are every day going home to home with the good news of Jesus and as a result, we hear back on a continual basis from the over 150 nations where we are active that we are presenting the gospel daily to some 350,000 homes. The challenge with statistics is that they don’t communicate what this actually looks like…
…What it actually looks like is 240 conversations happening every minute of every hour in multiple languages around the world – can you just imagine the cacophony of voices right now. It looks like a repeatable gospel message (often two—one for adults and one for children) being left as a clear message of salvation only through Jesus Christ in a home.
What it actually looks like is followers of Jesus talking to people who do not know him. It looks like some people violently rejecting the conversation and some people thinking deeply about the truth that has been shared, with many responding (indeed more than 16 million just last year) to know more about Jesus. It looks like individual lives being redeemed by a loving savior; it looks like whole families or even whole villages coming to a knowledge of the truth.
It looks like men and women being faithful to step out, share their story and distribute gospel resources, even if nobody sees because they long for others to find healing, salvation and a purpose-filled life. Statistics are sometimes hard to grasp – but grasping the individual story of a life now saved is something we can perhaps relate to a little easier. And the Oikos Initiative doesn’t stop with just the proclamation of the gospel in millions of homes annually. In villages and towns where few or no churches exist, the fruit of the local harvests results in new believer fellowships called Christ Groups being planted. This past year represented the ninth consecutive year of the EHC’s church planting arm seeing more than 20,000 new Christ Group fellowships planted in each of those nine years. This, too, is the Oikos Initiative.
NO “ALL” WITHOUT “EVERY!”
Of course, the bottom line of this global launching in 2019 is the embarking on a serious journey to see the “every” in the name of our ministry become a very literal reality over the next two decades. It is to see “this generation of believers” set out to reach “this generation on non-believers” quite literally—right where they live—with the gospel of Jesus Christ. All of this is not to change who we are but to refine what we do with a God glorifying, Christ honoring, and Holy Spirit-saturated motivation.
It is to hone in on the vision God has entrusted to us for 72 years with a laser-sharp focus that, as already stated, leaves no one behind. It is to take the words “all” and “every” of the Great Commission very seriously—and quite literally (Matt. 28:19-20 and Mark 16:15). In this process it’s good to remember there cannot be the “all” without the “every!” The dictionary definition of the word every reads: “Each taken individually and separately and including all.” Interestingly, “all” is part of the definition of “every.” The definition for every continues: “The fullest possible extent; all that there possibly could be.”
STAYING ON POINT
A critical part of the global “every” in EHC’s Oikos Initiative involves reaching at least 130 million households (oikos encounters) in 2019. That’s an achievable goal, as 125 million were reached in 2018. That means visiting at least 350,000 homes each day. Reaching that number will keep us on point for the two-decade goal of the initiative. At EHC we recognize there are many other God-honoring and worthy mission endeavors. We applaud them all. We rejoice in that each of these has a unique purpose in carrying out the Lord’s commission to “go, disciple the nations.”
We likewise recognize that Every Home for Christ has its unique calling. In some ways it is uniquely unique. It is also uniquely challenging. It is to go to the tough places. As Paul Vincent Donovan suggests: “Evangelism is a process of bringing the gospel where they [the lost] are, not where we would like them to be. When the gospel reaches a people where they are, their response to the gospel is the church in a new place.” Thus, our goal for 2019: to take the gospel directly to where lost people are—their homes—some 2.5 million every week; 130,000,000 by year’s end. And where a person responds, and experiences the transforming grace of our Lord, a new seed of the church has been planted in that place! We’re preparing for as many as 19 million such responses in 2019, and 27,000 new Christ Groups. That is the Oikos Initiative.
We are calling far and wide for others to link arms and join us on the journey. If you’re a ministry, a church, an evangelist, even a denominational leader or simply a believer with a heart to reach everyone on earth right where they live with the gospel, we’d love to hear from you.
We need people to pray for this initiative, we need people to support it financially and we need volunteers to join the Oikos initiative in spreading the Good News globally.
Please pray with EHC and their staff that they with the help of many other partners will be able to reach every family on earth with the Gospel by 2038.
Go to www.oikos.global to enlist. More about Every Home for Christ: www.ehc.org
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