Reviving Evangelism: Insights from Southern Evangelical Seminary

SPEAKER 01 : 0:00

This is Liz Franzell with Crawford Media Group, and today our guest is Judge Phil Ginn, president of Southern Evangelical Seminary. Today we’ll be talking about this being the perfect opportunity to share the gospel. Welcome to our program, Judge Phil.

SPEAKER 03 : 0:14

Judge Phil Ginn It’s so great to be with you. I’m a mountain boy myself from North Carolina. We’re not as high as the mountains in Colorado, but we’ve got some snow here already.

SPEAKER 01 : 0:26

I don’t know what your definition of snow is, but we’ll go with that.

SPEAKER 03 : 0:30

We’ve got about seven or eight inches.

SPEAKER 01 : 0:33

Tell us about Southern Evangelical Seminary before we get into our discussion.

SPEAKER 03 : 0:39

Well, Liz would be happy to. Southern Evangelical Seminary, we commonly call it SES for short, was founded by Dr. Norm Geisler and Dr. Ross Rhodes about 32 years ago. And it’s really based in the evangelism through the use of What I will call philosophy, that may be a bad word, but also apologetics. But it’s really trying to help people. I tell folks we’ve been a friend of the skeptics since we were formed, because we believe that Christianity makes sense, that it’s the most logical belief system, and certainly… We’re not trying to downplay the role of the Holy Spirit, but we’re trying to answer the tough questions that some people have in regard to their faith.

SPEAKER 01 : 1:31

So is that on an online platform that you basically?

SPEAKER 03 : 1:34

It is. Yes, ma’am. We have several students who currently are enrolled from Colorado in that area. We have them from seven different countries right now, I think, from Alaska, from Hawaii. And our online platform is a little bit different. We don’t do so many of the old canned lectures. We’ve got a lot of access to our professors. We’ve got full-time professors who have been teaching for years and years and years and who are just solid, good teachers and live out the gospel themselves.

SPEAKER 01 : 2:14

That sounds like a really good ministry. So today, we are talking about this being the perfect opportunity to share the gospel. What are you seeing statistically, and why do you think this might be a good time to pluck the low-lying fruit, so to speak?

SPEAKER 03 : 2:29

Well, I don’t know that it’s even low-lying fruit, Liz. Anecdotally, we’re seeing glimpses of the Holy Spirit at work all over the country. Just for instance… I don’t know if you or any of your listeners watched the NCAA National Football Championships between Indiana and Ohio State. Jesus was mentioned more times in that football contest on the airing of it, sometimes more than he’s spoken in a lot of pulpits in America. And player after player named the name of Jesus. the broadcasters were named in the name of Jesus. The coaches were named in the name of Jesus. In fact, if you go back to the beginning of the year, the Ohio State football team actually led a revival on the Ohio State campus where hundreds of students were baptized at the really lead of the Ohio State football team. You go over Clemson, close to us. Appalachian State University is close to us. All over the country, particularly with young people, we’re hearing of sporadic, perhaps, revivals, but revivals nonetheless that are breaking out that people are coming to know the Lord. Franklin Graham is a good friend of mine. We talk about it, that people are yearning in America. They don’t know all the time what they’re seeking, but they are seeking. for something more than what they have. And I think it’s very important because we’ve got what they’re seeking, and it’s time for us to tell the story. If you go back to statistics, George Barna and some of his work out there in your state of Colorado shows us that actually purchases of Bibles are up 21%. where the rest of books’ sales are down 1%. So people are buying their Bibles. We’re also hearing and seeing that particularly young people, Generation Z, I guess. I get all the alphabets mixed up. But I think it’s Generation Z, the ones that would be in college now, I guess, of that age. They’re actually reading their Bibles. They’re picking up their Bibles, and they’re reading them. And it’s a lot like Philippois with Ethiopian eunuch. They may not understand what they’re reading, and they need help in knowing what they’re reading.

SPEAKER 01 : 5:06

Yeah, that’s good. You know, we are now under a new administration, and President Trump spoke about bringing God back into the forefront. Do you think that will have an impact on society?

SPEAKER 03 : 5:20

Let me tell you what impact it does have, I think. It gives us the opportunity. at least for two years, maybe four years. Those two years of the midterm election. And this could all fall apart in two years. But at least for the time being, we have free reign to proclaim the gospel. Unlike anything we’ve seen in the last four years, maybe anything unlike what we’ve seen in the last 20 years or more in America. I just see the spirit moving. I see the opportunities arising for us to do something about that. Liz, I’ll have to share with you my only concern about this is I don’t know if the church in America is in a position to really lead out in the revival.

SPEAKER 01 : 6:10

Yeah, you know, I was thinking, people are not always comfortable or even know how to share the gospel. You know, they might think when they hear that, you’ve got to go stand on a street corner holding a sign up, you know, John 3, 16, and, you know, just track people down. What practical ways can they do that?

SPEAKER 03 : 6:38

Well, let me tell you, I think this is where SES comes in. I’m going to be self-serving here for just a minute, because we have been long looking and yearning for this opportunity. And it seems like that history, the spirit, everything is coming together at a time just when SES is preparing to lead out. And we are. We want to be the champion of the church. When I say the church is not ready… What’s happened in America is the American church has tried to replenish itself. We don’t bring people in to make them better Christians. We bring them in to make them church members and to assimilate them into a group. And we’re not doing what the Great Commission tells us to do. I’ve argued with the folks at my church a lot. We’re really good at getting people wet. We’re not very good at drying them off.

SPEAKER 01 : 7:36

Well, you know, what comes to mind is the woman at the well, how she had however long minute conversation with Jesus and immediately ran back home and was an instant disciple.

SPEAKER 03 : 7:48

Well, you know, you’re exactly right, Liz, and that’s the point. The Great Commission does not say go out and evangelize. I’m not trying to downplay that because I think that needs to be done. But what it does say is go out and make disciples. And that requires a personal relationship. It’s not a kamikaze type approach that a lot of people take. I don’t want to downplay that because there are people who come to the Lord that way, and so that’s great. But what I’m talking about and what we’re planning at SES is to have people being involved in the lives of folks that they are discipling. And in turn, those disciples will go out and disciple more people. You’re exactly right, Liz, the woman at the well did. And so we’ve decided to come outside of our walls. We’re not going to build it and hope people come to it. We’re going to go outside of our walls because we have the ability to do that with our online presence. And so we’ve got a new program that we have developed under our Truth That Matters banner. that basically will train people how to disciple using apologetics and using reason and using the Spirit to reach out to 10, 12 people, and hopefully that’s going to have the multiplication effect. And we’re going to take that into a church. Look, Barna’s own research will show that less than 5% of the churches in America have an effective discipleship program. Less than 5%. What if we can seed every true Christian church in America with disciple makers? What difference that would make? So that’s what we’re doing. We’re now looking at 80 churches who are beginning to join hands with us in this, and we will have the first training programs out by the end of February. It will be fully up and running in April. We’re building a community of disciple-makers that I hope will be much like Facebook and all the rest of that. In addition to that, Liz, we’re going to have helps for people so that if you are… talking to your child and what better person to disciple than your child or a sibling or something like that. But if you run in and they ask you a tough question and you should say, well, I don’t know the answer, but let’s look at that together. And so we’re going to have in this paradigm that we’re creating, we’re going to have answers to those questions. We’re going to go from everything like, what about UFOs? You know, I’m going to deal with the UFOs, and we already got that out there. Practical things like how to study your Bible.

SPEAKER 01 : 10:52

You know, it doesn’t necessarily have to be students, right, that go out.

SPEAKER 03 : 10:57

This is for lay people.

SPEAKER 01 : 10:59

Yeah, it could be your neighbor. It could be the person at the grocery store that you go to their line every time.

SPEAKER 03 : 11:10

This is going to be really a help. There’s other things out there. I don’t think anybody’s doing it quite like we are because we’re going back through the churches. We’re going into the churches and asking the churches to allow us to help them in developing their discipleship program within their church. And we’re going to go in there with true apologetic reasoning to help folks make sense i i came to this position late in life i actually am the first graduate of ses to serve as a president and i came to ses to take one course to better understand my face and ended up graduating with a doctor of ministry program because i got suckered into it um I just loved it so much. And the reason that I loved it, I’m one of these people that I wanted my brain to wrap around what my heart wanted to believe. And that’s what we’re offering through SES.

SPEAKER 01 : 12:15

We’re visiting with Judge Phil Ginn, president of Southern Evangelical Seminary, and we’ve been talking about why this might be the best time to share the gospel with those around you. Judge Phil, where can our listeners go to learn more about your online platforms, one of them being Truth That Matters and the other one, Virtual Faith Link?

SPEAKER 03 : 12:35

SES.edu will take you to the whole program. I’ve got weekly op-eds that I usually write as well as we’ve got podcasts developing. Our professors are doing podcasts. So we can tie you in to everything that’s coming down the pike. SES.edu.

SPEAKER 01 : 12:59

Well, it sounds like you make it pretty easy for somebody just to jump online and learn a little bit, even if it’s just to, you know, go out and say hello and God bless you to somebody.

SPEAKER 03 : 13:09

Eight hours, Liz, eight hours when we get this program fully functioning, which will be in March or early April. Eight hours will give you the basic training that you need to do, need to utilize for discipleship. Eight hours. That’s not bad. All done in your home. in your pajamas, whatever. You don’t have to get out and go through the snow to get anywhere. You can do this at home and be ready to engage your neighbors. And we actually have two more levels that you can go through for a total of a 24-hour program. And that’s literal hours. It’s not semester hours or anything else. It’s literally 24 hours. can prepare you to be a super disciple maker for the Lord.

SPEAKER 01 : 14:04

Judge Phil, thank you so much for sharing about SES today and thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER 03 : 14:10

It’s my pleasure, Liz. Let’s do it again.