Jim Van Gelderen: I want to challenge you about something here today. And I want you girls, when you hear the subject matter, don’t tune out, because one day you may be married to one of these. I was just having a conversation this evening with Pastor Steve Frost here at Shawnee Baptist, and we were talking about the giftings of the evangelist and the giftings of the pastor.

He clearly is a pastor, and he talked about early in his ministry as an assistant pastor. God put a great desire in his heart, even around thirty years old, that one day he would be a pastor.

And now he’s in his late thirties here. I trust God will give him many, many years of pastoring, and I certainly have appreciated his pastoral heart.

We talked about the difference between an evangelist and a pastor. I don’t want to get too technical. There’s a lot we could say about spiritual gifts.

I’m still just formulating in my mind different things I hear, just working through the spiritual gifts. But there are clearly two prominent ones in the book of Ephesians, chapter number four, verse eleven: “And he gave some apostles, and some prophets, and here it is, and some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers.”

Why? Here it is: “For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” No doubt God has given to the church the gift of the evangelist and the gift of the pastor-teacher, and some of you out there listening to me have one of those gifts.

Now it’s kind of fun traveling. Not every young man who travels with me has one of those two gifts, but many do. Often I can find out within a few weeks what gifting they lean toward.

Many times a young man will come to me on Friday—you can just see he’s torn up, sometimes even to tears, because he has to leave. He’s developed a bond with the young people. He desires to stay and continue to disciple and mentor them, and in some cases, long distance, they are able to do that in some fashion through texting and encouraging the young person in his walk with God.

Certainly that is a part of the pastoral gift. I call it process. The pastoral gift is very burdened about process.

That’s the day-to-day mentoring and discipling, and it’s a very important gifting. God, of course, gives young men and older men as pastors to lead a flock, a local church.

With that pastoral gift, now the evangelist—the very word evangelist has embedded into it the word evangel, which, if you don’t know, is the word for gospel or good news. An evangelist is consumed with the good news that Jesus saves from sin. He certainly loves to see people saved and loves to preach the gospel.

Although men are sinners deserving of hell, Jesus loved us, died on the cross, shed His blood, rose again the third day. You trust Him, and He’ll save you. Great, wonderful privilege to preach the good news.

Preach the good news that Jesus saves from sin and hell. But there’s also the gospel of the saint: although Christians can get discouraged, defeated, and be overcome with self and sin, the same Jesus that died to keep you out of hell is the same Jesus that died and rose again to keep you out of sin. And it’s the identification truths.

As you understand and learn that Jesus Christ is the power to deliver you from sin through His enabling, and through the fact we’re identified with His death, burial, and resurrection—Romans chapter six—that’s the gospel to the saint. And I love to preach both. I believe I’m a pastor and an evangelist.

Now, let me just say this about the evangelist. Just like a pastor is burdened about the process, the evangelist is the crisis man. He loves the crisis.

I love the crisis. And when there’s a Christian school that’s resistant, that’s needy, my burden is for God to come in and break that thing wide open.

My very first pilot of War of Special Forces—and I’ve given testimony of this—the pastor, when I called him, said, “Brother Van Gelderen, I’m not bringing you here to reach kids in our community, although I trust that happens. I’m burdened about our Christian school. We’re in trouble, and we need to see God intervene.”

I came in that week. I knew it was a crisis.

Honestly, I’ve done this now for over twenty-five years, and that was one of the worst Christian schools I’ve ever been in. It was a crisis, and yet God broke through in a remarkable way.

I had a podcast just a few months ago with Donnie Thomas, an assistant pastor at the very church he got saved in. Now he’s a pastor not too far from there in Lancaster.

We saw that was a crisis, and we saw God break through. There literally are young people who are still serving the Lord or have a heart for God who were touched in that crisis.

As a crisis evangelist, I want to see the kids go on and process, but that’s not my burden to do it. My burden is to fight another crisis. Let’s go somewhere else where kids need to get saved, kids need to get right with God, and let’s go there.

Young men that travel with me who have the evangelist gift often just love the crisis and love the challenge. When God breaks through, they’re thrilled, but they’re ready to go to another place.

They’re certainly burdened that those young people get people to disciple and encourage them. They don’t want them to go by the wayside, but that’s not their burden. Their burden is to find another crisis.

So the evangelist gift is the crisis gift. The pastoral gift is the process gift.

And they need each other. Process needs crisis; crisis needs process.

Just like a pastor or a youth pastor can get in a situation where they know there are needs and problems, but somehow they’ve kind of gotten into a rut, the evangelist gifting is the crisis gift. And just like an evangelist has a crisis and kids get right, he needs the process gift to come along and mentor and disciple those young people.

So that’s how I see the evangelist and the pastor working together. There are other aspects, but that’s a big one. And it certainly came to me today as I was talking with this pastor about this.

God gives these gifts. Some of you young men who are listening to me, God has given you one of these gifts.

Now I can understand the evangelist gift more because that’s what I am. I remember as a young man in high school literally beating the dashboard of my car as I preached in that car, burdened about certain things. An evangelist is burdened.

In fact, the only man in the Bible who is literally called an evangelist is Philip the Evangelist in Acts 8.

He has two crises: one in a city in Samaria. He goes down there and preaches, and people get saved. Revival breaks out; it was wonderful.

And then God leads him into the wilderness for a crisis with just one man, the Ethiopian eunuch. He got saved and went down there to Ethiopia.

Several years ago, I was talking to a Christian Ethiopian, and I said, “If you were to trace your spiritual roots, what would they go back to?” He said, “The Ethiopian eunuch.”

I laughed. I thought he was joking. He said, “No, I’m telling you the truth.”

I thought to myself, how wonderful. There was a crisis that day with a man. Philip led him to Jesus, and his witness is still felt today, with people getting saved as a result of his giving the gospel in Ethiopia.

So the evangelist is a crisis gift, which means that many times they do go from place to place, burdened that people deal with whatever the crisis might be. Sometimes it’s Christians who need to get ahold of victory and need to deal with sin in their life. Sometimes it’s unsaved people who need Jesus, need to get saved.

In our ministry, both of those are in view and in focus.

I know as an evangelist, when I can sense a great need and I’m sensing resistance, I’m just burdened.

There’s got to be a breakthrough. Something has to happen. God’s name has to be vindicated.

I remember several years ago—now it would probably be almost a quarter of a century—I was in a Christian school, and I sensed that burden. We had even come to our testimony service.

It was okay; some good things had happened. But I knew deep in my heart that there was more that needed to happen.

We were singing a quartet, and I was supposed to preach. I think I had twenty or thirty minutes to preach, maybe even more, and the meeting would be over.

As I was singing, I was thinking to myself or praying, “Lord, what am I supposed to preach?” I don’t know how to explain this, but God very clearly put it on my heart: “I don’t want you to preach.”

That was unusual, but God uses preaching. That day, God didn’t want me to preach; He had another plan.

After we finished that quartet, I walked to the microphone and said, “You know, this is odd. It’s never happened to me quite this way, but for some reason God does not want me to preach, and somebody out here knows why.”

There was a girl sitting on the bleachers. We were outside, and she began to weep. She ran off the bleachers.

I found out later she ran to a faculty staff member and got saved, was led to Jesus. People began to line up to give testimonies who had not given testimonies. Some of them hadn’t yet gotten right with God, but they were going to give a testimony about, “I’ve got to get right with God.”

I didn’t have to preach that night because the young people did. That thing broke wide open, and there was a move of God at that Christian school. I remember the principal came to me afterwards, and I loved what he said: “Brother Van Gelderen, that is the greatest message you’ve never preached.”

That night God sent down, and of course all week long we had been preaching and testifying. It was at a crisis point, and God broke through.

As an evangelist, that’s our burden and our passion. Once it’s broken through, we certainly want those kids to go on for God, but our burden is to find another challenge, another place that God wants us to work.

I hope this encourages some of you who are called of God, gifted of God, to be a pastor-teacher or an evangelist. Be encouraged that God has gifted you to do what He wants you to do.

You’ve heard me say it; I say it often: God does not call the gifted, but He does gift the called. If you’re called, God will gift you supernaturally, and you will see miraculous things happen in your ministry, because that’s what happens through the gifts that God gives.

Be encouraged, young person. I pray you’ll surrender whatever God has for your life. Find out what that is and do it.

Then depend upon His grace to live out what He has called you to do.