(Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and may contain mistakes.)

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