okay but tonight we got something really cool before the sermon I've asked
brother Kevin Rowe to come at this time and I've got your microphone Kevin if
that's what you're looking for I'm just gonna wire you up with this but brother
Kevin Rowe has come up with this idea it's such a cool idea I thought it was
cool when I first heard about it he successfully executed it with several
other church members and so he's going to teach us about this thing of cruise
ship soul-winning okay it's gonna be good here we go
just go ahead and stick that in your pocket
all right so I want to just talk briefly about a Caribbean cruise mission trip
that I led last month I think they handed out an insert that basically
shows the itinerary and some of the pictures from that but basically this
idea came to me because I have a desire to get someone to save as many countries
as I can and cruises are a cost-effective way to do that and right
now there are cruises that you know there's thousands of cruise itineraries
that are available and they go to all seven continents including every country
at this year's conference excluding Armenia and they even have cruises that
loop around the entire world you know if you had so much time to do that but
basically for the North American cruises there's basically four options and I
want to kind of show you on the map here but basically there's you know
because you have a hub where the cruise sends out from basically there's one
option where you can start from California side and basically do you
know Baja California Mexico somewhat of Central America within a week but since
that speaks Spanish and I don't speak Spanish I didn't do that one the other
option is basically Texas or Louisiana a lot of those cruises go to Mexico
Belize a little bit of Central America again I didn't choose that one the other
option is pretty much Florida which mostly will do these upper islands you
know Bahamas Jamaica and some of the ones you can go a little farther down
with those cruises but then you wind up having at least one day of just on the
sea travel on the sea back so within one week you would probably only see maybe
three islands and so we went with option four where if you actually fly in to
Puerto Rico which is very good because it's a American territory you can fly
there cheaply for about three hundred dollars and now you're surrounded by all
these countries and all these islands and you can basically do a many many
islands in one week with very little downtime of course if you had the time
to do two-week mission trips you can do a lot of other cool things for instance
you can actually go from California all the way to Florida through the Panama
Canal and do these really elaborate things but we were just trying to do a
one-week cruise and we were trying to do it you know as many countries as
possible for as cheap as possible so you know with my pretty much I didn't ideal
itinerary found which is the one that I chose here's how it went down so you
know the first day we flew into San Juan Puerto Rico we got there about two
o'clock and we Ubered from the airport to the cruise terminal and what's nice
is that Puerto Rico is pretty much the only you know Caribbean country that
even has uber access so it's real cheap real easy to do that we boarded the boat
pretty much like going through the TSA a second time we put our bags in the room
and then we basically had one of our first buffets and so a big part about
the cruise is really the food right so how the buffet works is basically
there's a buffet area on the boat that's open from sunrise to sunset and they
have distinct menus for like breakfast lunch dinner and then kind of snack
times in between and they're a bunch of different stations for different types
of food right there's like a Mexican Indian Italian British you know it's
massive everything you could want is there and then they also have like you
know a salad bar ice cream you know shop bread place drink thing and everything's
free right all you can eat at all times today everything's free except for like
cans and bottles you have to pay extra for that and also every day everything
is new right there's never the same thing twice so after we ate we left the
boat because this was like our first day we went to a local mall called Plaza
Las Americas which happens to be the largest mall in all the Caribbean it's
the second largest mall in the Latin American speaking world we figured that'd
be a good place to find some Spanish speak or some English-speaking people
just because it was a big mall right it still wasn't that easy though we but we
did get one person saved in English and one person saved in Spanish we only had
a couple hours till the boat had to leave so we went back to the boat
hadn't had our first dinner and there's a separate outside of the buffet system
there's a separate kind of fancy dinner system where you know once per night you
can sign up to this fancy have reservations and basically you know
you're given a menu that has like starters entrees desserts and you can
order as much as you want because again everything's free and you know some of
the things we ate were steak lobster prime ribs salmon beef wellington and we
all pretty much ate an absurd amount of ice cream but I have no regrets so the
basic the basic itinerary for the boat the boats basically at each island from
8 a.m. to 6 p.m. which leaves about 9 hours per day during the day and then
overnight is when the boats were going to the next one so pretty much you wake
up every morning and you're in a new country so the itinerary that I said was
pretty much from 8 to 9 we'd eat breakfast while it's arriving at port
and then we'd walk or taxi to town 9 to 12 we'd go soloing for about three
hours 12 to 2 we'd go back to the boat we cool off we'd eat lunch then we go
back out 2 to 4 we go out so on it for another two hours and then you know if
I four to five would go back to boat leaving a little time you know you want
to leave a little buffer in there and then normally from there you know we'd
pretty much shower we'd eat at the dinner buffet then we'd relax or do
maybe a recreation then we'd go to the fancy dinner like a second dinner right
then you eat like your dessert at the at the fancy place then you go back to the
buffet for the post dessert dessert and yeah so we ate a lot it was it was great
but because we split the day in half like that we were able to you know as
needed kind of take a half a day off like oh I'm not feeling good I'm gonna
sleep you know I'm gonna sleep in and I'm gonna start so winning after lunch
or this or that and so we kind of alternated that so we didn't go ultra
hardcore in this thing we probably did about three or four hours of so winning
per day you definitely could do more like I said you have over nine hours on
the island every day but the thing is right the boat everything's free so at
any point you can just go back and you don't really have to spend money in a
country you can just go get it all free at the boat which is nice so the next
thing I want to describe is pretty much how a port city works there's always
going to be like a tourist area which is going to be like a few blocks or streets
that are just you know where everyone's trying to sell you stuff so it's not a
very good idea to preach there just because all they want to do is sell you
things but outside of that you're pretty much gonna have a business area for all
the locals where they shop and then outside of that it's probably gonna be
the residential area and either of those be great for soul winning and now
the ship can dock either directly in the tourist area or in like an industrial
area where you'll have to either like walk for a half hour or take a taxi and
taxi is definitely a better option but once you're in that tourist area you
pretty much just have to walk a few blocks in any direction and you'll find
great people to preach to and obviously if you're organizing the map you should
plan all that on on Google my maps right so the second day was our first port was
Phillipsburg st. Martin and since it was our first day we made a couple mistakes
you know we tried to stay out all day we didn't kind of use that free lunch
system so we learned right and the second thing is we did walk we did the
far walk we got blisters and didn't enjoy it so but that's how running a
mission trip is right you have to kind of be adaptable and learn on the fly
and the other downside though is that because this was a Sunday pretty much
everything was closed and I was really looking forward to st. Martin too because
like right a couple blocks from the boardwalk is their main University but
it was all closed we actually went and talked to like a security guard but
we're unable to really preach to anybody but we did some so any of the business
residential areas and we got 16 people saved there and you know even I think we
do much better on a weekday I think this this country still has a great great
opportunity there so I definitely want to come back and we wound up hanging out
just on the boardwalk and the beach you know tourist area and they're both very
nice day three went to st. John's and Tigua and unlike st. Martin here you
know once you're off the boat you're right in the action and so in the
morning we went soul winning in a residential area but it was pretty much
raining the whole time so we were walking around with umbrellas we got a
few salvations in English few in Spanish but we had to really work for it but
after lunch though we went soul winning you know just like right off the boat
just a couple blocks away and they were just surrounded by it was apparently is
when all the school kids got off their book you know off their school so
everyone's just the streets were packed with students and kind of like what
Caleb said you know preaching the students is really like a cheat code
for missions right it's just like you're gonna get a bunch of salvations so
because of that you know most of us thought this was the best island on the
trip right bar the mark said it felt like he was back in Fiji so we had a
total of 26 salvations most of which were in the afternoon so in day four we
went to castrate st. Lucia now this is another one where you want a taxi to the
city is pretty far we started off in the morning the same spot the previous
faithful word trip went to was Derek Walcott square and a little background
you know I had my honeymoon this year in st. Lucia and while I thought the
country was beautiful you know I personally thought the soul winning was
kind of awful while we were there you know we had a lot of people get really
confrontational about us and yell at us about eternal security so I was kind of
curious to see like is it gonna be better this second time around and
unfortunately really wasn't we had the same issues at this square and you know
this square had like two different Jehovah's Witness stands set up you know
it had a lot of like 70 Adventists we met and just a lot of like Rasa's I
kept running into that I was sure demon possessed and my opinion the Rasa's the
worst of the three but despite all that we were still able to get a couple
people saved including a bus driver who gave us a free ride back to our ship and
then after that you know we tried a different tactics again you got it if
it's not working you got to change right so try different tactic we went to him
like a covered market where people are just like selling produce and we were
pretty much just selling to the stall people because there wasn't that many
people buying stuff and so we had really good success there you know there
weren't really I guess heretics buying produce so so we got a lot of
salvations are taking our total up to 21 but you know despite kind of a good
number of salvations most of us kind of ranked it pretty low because we all had
pretty bad experience at some point or another just people being mean to us but
the next day though we're in Bridgetown Barbados you know and here we took the
just $2 shuttle into the city and you know there's large parks a lot of people
around and unlike st. Lucia you know everyone's super friendly and we had
some really easy salvations and we also walked a few blocks to just like a
public beach and it was really like a lot of us said was one of the best
beaches we've ever been to you know water was really clear the same is
really fine it's really warm but because we did that you know kind of on the fly
we kind of stayed out long so we you know had a late lunch we went back and
then afterward you know it's kind of too late to go back out to the city with the
bus so then we just tried we were in the industrial area we're like let's just
try you know going around to these businesses and just preaching the
industrial area and we had a couple of salvations there too so even that worked
out well so I think I'd rank Barbados as the second best island we didn't run
into all the schools you know kids in Antigua this would probably be the best
island certainly it was you know as the prettiest as well so day six you know
it's kind of our last country was Rosie you Dominica I don't know how to
this place you know it's pretty rough in general I think also we were you know
with all these days in a row pretty long days we were pretty worn out so we
didn't really stray super far to this day either and we stayed pretty much on
the main street which is just like packed full of people but because of
that everyone's really busy no one really wanted to listen to you and you
know I had a lot of people that were like heckling me from across the street
had like a lot of like Ross's would come up and like break up conversations and
kind of ruin ruin it but we went up the street we visited this botanical garden
and saw some nature as our recreation but because it was like you know not
very receptive and also was like incredibly hot we didn't stay off the
boat for very long as well the one of the few days we actually went to the
boat like three times who just was just so hot we needed the AC so most of us
would pretty much rank or Dominica as our worst island but we still had six
salvations in our last salvation a day was kind of a real really sweet woman
who was just like crying the whole time and so it's definitely worth it to us
you know we still we still enjoyed it day seven was basically the one day that
we had that was at sea so we didn't we weren't on a country at all but we try
to do you know some of the things on the boat the boat has like tons of stuff to
do and we didn't utilize you know even fraction of it but we try to find some
of it you know so we watched a few live shows we played pickleball we did axe
throwing we had an archery competition and obviously there's like ungodly
things to do on the boat you know there's like a casino and but the boats
laid out in such a way that you know you could pretty much spend the whole week
and never even see that stuff you know and like we didn't even go near the pool
or the ball bars and stuff so we didn't see like you know really anything that
we shouldn't and honestly like you're gonna see more bad stuff just on the
Caribbean island than you are on the boat just because the Caribbean is known
for just kind of pot smoking and drunkenness and everything else so
guess you have to take it out how you will one of the things that I enjoyed on
the boat though is that all the workers had name tags and the name tags said
obviously their name but it said like what country they're from and pretty
much the main countries they're from or India Indonesia Philippines Zimbabwe
Kenya and South Africa so pretty all receptive countries we didn't really do
any preaching on them on the boat because they're all working but at the
last day we did hand about us hand out a bunch of YouTube cards but one of the
things I was trying to do on the boat was pretty much be able to greet
everyone in their own language I would just try to see their name tag and try
to greet them and I you know I have a whole list on them but the funniest I
thought was Indonesian you know to say what's up you say up a kebab and the
answer is bike bike anyway day eight was our last day we got back on the San Juan
Puerto Rico this time we had to actually have all of our bags so we just went to
the same same mall again and we pretty much just like sat down at a table with
all of our bags around which try to kind of new strategy you know I can only
speak three sentences in Spanish but I would pretty much go up use those three
sentences with somebody if they kind of answered them right I'd kind of point
them over and they basically sit down at a table with us you know Lolo preached
to him and then they'd get saved so we actually had two salvations in entirely
in Spanish like that so it's a good system we got a few more salvations
there so just as an overview you know you could see some of the country we
visited were great some you know not so much but what's great about this format
is that you kind of get a little sample of each island right and if it's not
receptive well you know the next day everything resets you know have to you
know go there again and of course obviously if you find a hidden gem then
a church can transition and be like hey let's do a full you know week-long
mission trip there and I believe you know cruise is a great first-time
mission trip either as a participant or as an organizer because you know one of
the key metrics that we look for is just enjoy ability you know we don't want
people to come get work to the ground and then never come again right we want
people to become lifelong lovers of missions and you know this was easily
like one of our most enjoyable and kind of luxurious mission trips you know
we're we all definitely want to go on a cruise again and a little bit you know
just kind of the background like finances right you know this is really
a very cost-effective way for the cruise itself you know I paid $1,300 for my wife
and I our flights were $300 each and paid about $100 extra in like Ubers and
taxis so pretty much was at thousand dollars per person Johnson family also
paid the same and you know I should note obviously it's like it's a little
more expensive you try to have a single cabin they'll charge you more so you
pretty much need to book with at least two people but that's really as many
people as you need and as brother Segura alluded to earlier you know a lot of
people don't really realize how expensive some of these trips can be
especially in the Caribbean cream is a very expensive place especially with
like food but here you know best food that you can get it's all free and you
can easily spend you know fifteen hundred two thousand dollars if you had
to pay for everything yourself but you know here you know and even if you pay
that fifteen hundred dollars you're probably in an Airbnb and you're
probably eating you know ham sandwiches you're not eating you know steak lobster
and ice cream so but you know obviously we're blessed to have such a generous
church who won a lot of these trips as paid a lot of those expenses but without
their help you know some of those trips wouldn't be financially viable just as
I go a solo person or two people right so maybe you go to a church that can't
do all that supporting or maybe you just want to run a trip on your own you know
cruise is a great you know alternate for that because it's all paid for just for
one flat fee so even you know whether it's two people or 20 people you know
it's all the same price and pretty much the same way to organize it and not to
mention you know I I think we all personally paid for our ticket just with
the food that we ate so the final thing is basically you know I think the best
thing about the cruise is that it's like it's very scalable you know I talked a
lot with Raymond over the years about just the running trips and how this
works and you know if I was running a cruise trip and a hundred people sign
up like I'd hardly have to plan but if a hundred people signed up for a
traditional trip you know it's kind of a logistical nightmare right there's like
things like lodging you know like yeah there's hotels or airbnbs and while
airbnbs are cheaper you know Raymond's found out that if you just booked too
many at once they just ban you for life you like it you know so it's kind of
dangerous in that regard and then also for instance rental cars you know
normally with with the trip like this you you know if you're all driving
around you need to have one out of five people more or less sign up to be a
driver and you know that sometimes they might have to put the credit card on the
line their insurance policy on the line and and then the driving an unfamiliar
and maybe stressful environment and you know and I've done that in the past I've
enjoyed it like I enjoy driving you know left-hand stick shift and Nagaland you
know on the left side of the road and up you know that's all fun but now
obviously not everyone you know may enjoy that and many people really don't
want to be pressured in driving so you know a trip with no cars is great and
what's nice is that you know they drive you for you right on the boat and you
know finally you know obviously food's a big thing you know I know you know
Raymond for instance want you know on a couple trips is kind of smell like a
whole trip just buying food and transporting it to all the different
airbnbs and hotels and stuff and never really had a good chance to go
soul-winning and you know I think that's that's my idea I like just leaving all
the logistics to the to the cruise line and just enjoying kind of a stress-free
but fruitful mission trip and obviously it's not going to replace traditional
missions but I think it's a it's a good way especially if you're just starting
out or you just want to try something and have very stress-free you know and
not have to deal with all the kind of admin work that sometimes running a
mission trip does because there's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes
that you don't really see so kind of in closing right I think that you know I
just hope you guys would consider you know this kind of new style of mission
trip you know obviously I'm gonna keep doing them probably the Johnson's are
gonna keep doing them so hopefully you guys will come with us so otherwise
thanks God bless right yeah I think it's such a great idea you know it just it
just it's it's tailor-made for our philosophy around here of common sense
missions and just the way the way it works out and I mean the price I mean a
thousand bucks a person it's pretty hard to plan a mission strip for less
than a thousand bucks I mean and so that's incredible and I mean do the math
they got like what 80 some people saved right five people go out there for a
week get 80 some people say that's incredible results and I like the idea
of kind of sampling all the different mission fields and then later you could
send a big group to the good ones and whatever and and I really love what he
said about how you know people that are in say an old IFP Church where you know
you got you're buying tracts to hand out even locally they're selling you the
tracts you know nothing's free and with the old IFP you know you got if there's
ice cream after the service you're paying for it you know and so the thing
is you know if you're going to that type of a church where let's say you're going
to an old IP church you could literally just get together with a buddy you and
just a couple of dudes could just be like hey let's get a week off from work
we both got a thousand bucks you could do this and it's like no excuse not to
do a DIY mission strip I think it's great and and you could get four people
two people six people it's scalable like he said you're not gonna be like whoa
there's too many people coming and I've been to these ports I've never been on a
cruise you know full disclosure so I don't know what that's like sounds great
though but I've never done it but I have definitely been to these port cities
because I've been on so many trips where the where the ship is right there and I
see the people kind of getting off the ship and getting on the ship and so I
know exactly how these cities work and like he said you literally walk like 10
minutes and you're out of the tourist area and you are in that country and you
are deep into that country after walking for 10-15 minutes and it's like two
different worlds where everybody's poor it's all the locals and whatever you
just get out of that tourist zone but 99% of people on the cruise they're
staying in that tourist zone I've always found that getting out of the tourist
areas is a more authentic experience anyway like whenever I travel to other
countries I'm actually more interested in kind of getting the real life than
just seeing a bunch of like I want to say Zeyensverdichkeiten I never can
think of a good word for that in English on so you know the sights I guess you
could say and so I always want to you know see the real stuff I for me it's so
much more fun to go sit in someone's living room in a foreign country and
kind of experience their house and their life and their family and eat a home
cooked meal is way cooler than just hey let's go look at you know Mount Rushmore
or you know the pyramids or whatever and so I love this idea I hope that people
online are listening to this I hope that you guys are listening to this and
realizing how this is something you could probably successfully execute with
a week off work and you know thousand bucks maybe 1,500 bucks and you could
really have a lot of fun and probably get a bunch of people saved and do
valuable recon that you can then tell us about and tell other soul winning
churches about and tell us which islands are good which ones are dead that
information is gold so thank you very much brother row really appreciate that