When you offer to pray for someone, very few people are offended. They accept that as an expression of genuine concern, don’t they?
Oh, absolutely. When people begin to see that you care about their condition and their status in life, it opens up a whole new world.
When I became the pastor, we were a church disconnected from the community. We didn’t do a lot of evangelism, so as my first duty as a pastor I put on a black uniform with a white collar—I looked like a priest—because there were a lot of Catholics in my community. And I went out knocking on doors with one of our church members. I would say, “My name is Pastor Wilfredo De Jesús and I just want to know, is there anything you want us to pray about?” And they would open up their hearts. “My husband, he’s sick.” “My son is in prison.” And we were taking notes about their son in prison, the husband in the hospital, and we would send people to go visit them.
They were letting me into their life. But at the end of the day, the evangelism “technique” was simple: I knock on the door, they open up. And we would send deacons to pray for somebody at the hospital, visit somebody in prison. And they were like, Hey, that church around the corner came and visited me, and we would get a letter, Thank you so much for visiting my son or my daughter. So that was the form. I just knew we had to do that.
In addition to straightforward door-to-door visitation, you’ve been involved in many other things too.
Yes. We have outreach for prostitutes on Friday nights; we have women in our church that go out in a van and pass out roses to women who are in human trafficking, it’s called Roses of Sharon. Then Tuesdays and Sunday nights we have another group of people who go out and feed the homeless—it’s called Bridge to Life. Then we have what’s called the Dream Center and the Teen Center. We’ve got two shelters for homeless women and children and another shelter for homeless men that we run. And this is just in this campus. We’ve got our other campuses doing the same thing that continues to grow.
Are the other campuses video venues or independent?
Independent.
So a big part of what you’ve been doing is leadership development.
Oh, absolutely. We’ve been discipling. None of our venues are linked in. First of all, Hispanics don’t like that anyway. Hispanics are like, Hey, I don’t want to watch TV. I want to hear my pastor. I want to hug my pastor. But also I believe in developing leaders—the importance of not becoming personality-driven, but being leadership-driven, for the longevity of the gospel.
And so we’ve done women’s training, youth training, men’s training. We have a school of ministry that is a two-year program here in our church. We have a discipleship program for young people called Master’s Commission, which is a nine-month program. So there are all sorts of avenues where people are being discipled and trained for what God has for this ministry years down the road.
How do you go about identifying gifted people that you feel have the promise of leadership?
The first part is identifying people through projects. For instance, some outreach projects will last a weekend but you have to mobilize thousands of people. We observe how they intermingle with the community, the politicians, the volunteer base that we have. We watch how do they manage the budget? So that’s definitely one way.
Another way is the school of ministry for adults. That’s like our Triple-A team, where we see people out of there and when we’re looking for teachers for men’s retreat or women’s retreat that’s where we pick up our farm system.
