Oh, you know what, I'm sorry, I totally forgot, we have something else important to do before
we get into the sermon, so let's do this before the scripture reading.
Brother Alex Larson is going to come at this time, and he's for some reason taking the
offering right now, so we've got to get somebody else to take that plate out of his hand.
Brother Alex Larson is going to come at this time, and he's going to talk about something
that he's been doing over the last few months, and I know that other guys in the church have
also gotten on this, and so he's going to explain to you some of the ways that he has
used technology and video chat stuff in order to reach people with the gospel, a lot of
Americans but also even people in other countries, and so at this time Alex will come and explain
that.
Alright, so I want to talk about something that's called Omi TV, it's a website, it's
also an app, it's basically, as you said, it's like a video chat thing where you can
talk with, it's basically just randomized people who use the app, they're on there for
various different reasons, sometimes people, they're just bored so they just want to find
somebody to talk to or something like that, but we found that it's a really effective
way to go soul winning, so basically just to give you some stats about Omi TV, it's,
like I said, it's an app you can download on your phone, it's also a website, it's
OME.TV is how you spell it, so if you're looking to do it, but on the app store it
says that there's over 100 million downloads, so a lot of people have this, and then just
from a quick Google search there's at least 10 million accounts that people have made,
and then at any given time you're on there it gives you a number of how many people are
active, it's 150,000 to 300,000 people that are on there at any time, and like Pastor
Anderson said, it's not just people locally, but it's people from all over the world, and
so it's a really good way to reach people just from here in Arizona without even going
there, right, and so I just want to talk about a few things about how to use it and just
encourage you to use it, so basically if you have an iPhone you can sign in, you can make
an account, or I think you can sign in as a guest on an iPhone, but then if you have
it on Android you can, as an app you can connect it with your Facebook account, and then I
think it's the same thing online as well, but basically what you do is you just go on
and you just, either on your phone you just start swiping and it just connects you with
a random person, just somebody else who's on the app, and you can just go and say, "Hey,
are you a Christian? Do you go to church anywhere?" Just however you start your intro, and you
can use this as a way to give people the gospel, and it's very fast-paced, it's very fast-paced
because a lot of times people are skipping you, a lot of people don't want to talk to
you, a lot of people don't want to hear the gospel, they don't like it when you bring
up the Bible and things like that, but that's good because you're not wasting your time
with people who don't want to hear, right, you're going to people who actually want to
hear the gospel, and so because of that it's very fruitful, because of the fast-paced nature
of it, and then another thing is that a lot of younger people use it, a lot of teenagers,
college age, and that demographic tends to be more receptive, so that's one reason that
you can also get a lot of people saved on there. So a lot of people at our church have
been using it over the last year and a half or so, I started about last year in July using
this app, and I know that there's actually one guy who was here at this conference, I
don't know if anybody knows Christian Grossman, he already left, but he's from First Works,
but he actually said that he got reached through this app, not Omi TV in particular, but one
before that was called Omegle that got shut down, but he said a few years ago there was
a guy from Canada named John who preached the gospel to him over there, and he didn't
get saved at the time, but it allowed him to, or it kind of planted a good seed that
helped him to look into the Bible way to heaven more, and he found the video on YouTube and
he got saved, and he's a zealous soul winner, he goes to First Works Baptist Church, he
was here at this conference, and so he wouldn't even be here right now if this guy John from
Canada didn't preach in the gospel through that app, and there's even been people from
other, there's the guy that came to our church just about a week ago who actually lived in
Arizona who I got saved on there, and I ran into him and he recognized me because I had
talked to him before but he didn't get saved the first time, the second time he got saved,
and he told me he lived in Arizona, so I invited him to church and he actually came just last
Sunday, so praise God for that.
So basically the way that you use it, like I said, you just, if you're on your phone
you just swipe to the next person, you know if somebody doesn't want to listen, on the
computer there's just like a green and a red button, you just hit the button, it starts,
it just goes to the next person, and you can literally go as long as you want, right, because,
and any time of day too, because people are always active, so that's the advantage of
doing it that you can do it anywhere at any amount of time that you want, so you don't
even have to like cut out a large part of your schedule, you can just go for 20 minutes,
right, you can get somebody to say it, there have been many times where it's like the first
person you talk to wants to hear the gospel, and so for that reason you can, you know,
you can kind of fit it into your schedule, if you want to do extra soul winning, right,
let's say throughout the week you don't have much time to go door to door, let's say you
just go on Sunday or on Saturday or something like that, but you want to get some extra
soul winning in, you know, this is a good way to do that, right, to do it throughout
the week, like maybe on, I don't know, a Tuesday afternoon or something, you know, you get
off work, you don't want to drive all the way over here, let's say you get off late
or something like that, you can just pop on there, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, you can get
somebody saved, maybe a little bit longer, depends on how much time you have, but you
can use your free time to reach people with the gospel.
Now, one disclaimer I want to make about this is that there's a lot of people on there
that are very rude, there's a lot of people that say a lot of, you know, very offensive
and perverted things, and so I don't recommend it for younger people, I don't recommend
it for kids, teenagers, probably not any ladies either, and then obviously, you know, you
have to keep a straight face, you have to keep, you know, be able to bear a lot of insult,
a lot of reviling and stuff like that, because people think they can just say whatever they
want because they're behind a computer screen, right?
And so you just have to brace yourself for that, but then besides those people, everybody
else you talk to, you know, or not everybody, but you know what I mean, like a lot of people
you talk to will want to hear the gospel.
So just tying in with the missions conference that, like I said, there's a lot of people
you can reach from all over the world, right, you can reach people from the United States,
all over the United States, I would say most people that I talk to who actually want to
hear the gospel are from the south or from like the New York area, but then there's been
people who have been saved from all kinds of different countries in the world, and so
I talked to another brother here who goes soul winning on there quite a bit, there's
a man here who goes to our church who is retired, and he spends like four or five hours a day
pretty much going and using this app for soul winning, and he gets a lot of people saved,
and he gave me a list of some countries of people he's gotten saved from, so I just want
to read that list.
So obviously U.S., Canada, Suriname, Costa Rica, Dominica, Australia, Ireland, the United
Kingdom, Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, and the guy that I personally got saved from
France, he was actually from Cameroon, but he was living in France, Denmark, Poland,
Norway, Croatia, Italy, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania,
Russia, South Africa, Botswana, Philippines, South Korea, New Zealand, Dominican Republic,
Montenegro, Malta, Greece, Lebanon, Switzerland, Nigeria, and probably some other places that
I'm missing as well.
So you can talk to people from all over the world, right?
And I've also preached to people from other countries that didn't get saved, from places
like Gambia and Spain and Chile and Japan and Germany and Israel and Indonesia and Micronesia
and Azerbaijan and Argentina and Bolivia.
So you can talk to people, like I said, from literally all over the world, right?
All kinds of different backgrounds.
And for that reason, obviously in some of these other foreign countries, people are
more receptive.
But then like I said, even in the U.S., because they're often young people, they're receptive
anyway.
And so it's a very good way, like I said, if you just have extra time to fit in your
schedule to reach more people with the gospel.
And so I strongly encourage you to use it, like I said, as a disclaimer, you know, if
you're young, you know, if you're a teenager or whatever, I recommend not using it.
But if you're like a mature adult, you can handle, you know, people saying weird stuff
or whatever, then obviously you can skip them and you can block them and stuff like that.
You can report them even and they can get banned.
But I recommend using it as an extra way to preach the gospel.
So yeah, thank you.
Yeah this is a really cool thing that's been going on for a long time, a lot of people
being saved.
I mean, it's incredible, you know, just the numbers that have been saved and just all
over the world.
I mean, it's great.
And obviously you can see a lot of problems with it as far as just, you know, going online,
talking to strangers, the weirdos, and it's easy to criticize something like this or pick
it apart.
But at the end of the day, you know, physically going out, you're going to run into weirdos
too.
And you can see some wild things out there and deal with things.
You know, it's just kind of called going out into the world and preaching the gospel.
And you know, as we're here in the 21st century, obviously technology is changing and the world
is changing and we got to jump on these type of opportunities just to do whatever we can
to win as many people to Christ as we can.
And there's absolutely nothing sinful about it.
And so why not just go for it and use every possible means.
But again, you know, as Brother Larson was saying, this isn't for everybody.
We're not saying, hey, everybody go out and do this.
But you know what?
For some people, this is really working for them and they're using it effectively.
They're having success.
It's a fruitful thing for them.
I'm not saying for you to do it necessarily, but maybe this is something that you could
think about doing because, you know, we definitely don't want kids and teenagers on there and
stuff like that and probably not even ladies unless you just have hair on your teeth, ladies.
But the bottom line is that, you know, whatever we can do to preach the gospel to as many
people being creative and using technology, we don't want to be these Luddites who are
just like against technology for no reason and we don't really even know why.
Obviously, this is never going to totally replace soul winning in person, just like
listening to preaching online is never going to replace physically showing up to church.
But it's a wonderful supplement, you know, all kinds of soul winning, right?
Opening doors, going to the parks, the city centers, the college campuses, online.
You know, it's just another hook in the water.
I think it's wonderful and I'm super happy to hear about the results.
It's exciting to hear about people getting saved all over the world through this app.
And then, you know, for those who are skeptical, it's like Bro literally had a visitor in church
from this app.
I mean, that's incredible, right?
I mean, that just goes to show you that you're talking to people all over the world and boom,
one of them lives right here, actually shows up.
So for the skeptics who feel like it isn't real or that there's nothing happening well,
I mean, you can't really get better evidence than that when you got people even showing
up physically from this thing and you're running into people even that got saved years ago.
I just heard that story now for the first time that, you know, a dedicated member of
a church got reached through this thing a few years ago.
So that's super cool.
Really appreciate Alex sharing that with us.
And so at this time, let's go ahead and read the scripture.