Hey friends,
This week, rather than posting a typical blog, I am going to fill you in on whats been happening here in Honolulu and what the near future is looking like.
I just completed the lecture phase of the School of Missions and Evangelism, and the outreach phase has begun. The outreach for the school was originally supposed to be in Indonesia and New Guinea, but considering the crisis happening in Greece, we switched the outreach location to Lesbos Island in Greece, where literally an average of 6,000+ refugees are arriving daily. The rest of the students are already there, but I won’t be heading over until January.
Because I am a married father of 5, they have been very flexible with me not having to be gone the entire time, so I am fulfilling much of my outreach here in Honolulu, which isn’t too hard of a place to find unsaved people to talk to! However, I have a pretty tight schedule planned out over the next 3 months. Next week I will be in Kona, which is the largest YWAM base. Then I’ll be home for Christmas with the family. Our church is flying Berth and I back to WA for the week following Christmas to do some teaching on evangelism, and also to be the speakers at a retreat for young adults on that weekend.
We will get back to Hawaii on Jan 4, then continue to do a lot of local ministry, but I will be heading to Greece for at least two weeks of January. Then I’ll come home for a couple of weeks, and head out again in February to spend a couple of weeks in India and Sri Lanka. I was supposed to go to Armenia in February also, but that has been postponed for a few months.
Beth and I have been keeping the Kyllonen Family Mission Facebook page updated, but honestly we have been so busy every day with new and exciting things. If you haven’t been there and ‘Liked’ the page, you are missing out on those updates. The page doesn’t tell the half of everything going on. We spend a lot of time doing street evangelism, in all kinds of forms. From simply passing out tracts to people, to engaging in conversations, to full blown open air preaching, we cover a lot of ground. I would give you a bunch of cool stories, but this would get pretty extensive. So I’ll share just two:
Last tuesday night we went out to Chinatown with a bunch of DTS students. I had a couple of girls with me, and we walked around, approaching people, handing out tracts to break the ice and get conversations started. We had a lot of great encounters with people who were open to hear the word of God. WE also got to pray with a lot of hurting people. On one occasion, we were beginning to pray with a couple of guys who had just heard the entire gospel and said they wanted to follow Christ, when a drunk man came up and joined our prayer circle. As we prayed, I looked up, and to my horror, he was vigorously rubbing one of the girls on the back while looking at her with a big dirty smile and trying to hit on her. She was trying to shove him away but he was too strong for her. He happened to be directly across from me, so I leaned forward and literally kicked him, and shouted, “Hey! Watch it, or I’ll break that arm!” Suddenly, he bowed his head with his hands behind his back as we finished the prayer. I laughed so hard because I’ve never had to do anything like that during evangelism before!
A couple of days before that incident, a group of about 5 of us was on a corner of Waikiki trying to get a crowd gathered for open air preaching. I was really trying hard to get people to listen, but this area has so many people handing out advertisements and brochures, they weren’t responding to any of our tracts or to me, even as I tried to give away money! I had a fake human heart in my hand, and I was asking trivia questions about the heart, when a demon possessed man walked straight up to my ladder and stood an inch for my face and yelled that he was going to kill me if I didnt shut up. I was delighted! Finally, some action. “This ought to draw a crowd,” I thought. So I asked him, “What’s your name, buddy?” “Don’t call me buddy, you blankety blank blank!” This was even better than I thought. So I asked him what was in my hand, to which he replied, “I’m gonna rip your heart out of your chest, hold it in front of you, and make you put it back in!” I laughed. But as I looked around, nobody was paying any attention. As soon as I stopped speaking to my new friend, he lost interest and disappeared. I don’t know why, but even on that busy street corner, with literally hundreds of people passing by every few minutes, I couldn’t get anything going. I tried and tried, but I just could not muster a even a small crowd. Sometimes we have an evangelistic failure. No biggie. There are too many successes to focus in on those what don’t work out.
Thanks for praying for us on this journey of faith. Just about every day I still have moments where I am blown away by what the Lord has done this past year. We have some pretty major decisions to be making in the next few months about where to make a long term commitment to settle in and begin leading a School of Evangelism of our own. Its becoming more and more clear to us where we should be, but God can do whatever He wants. We are open to His leading and are ready to take on the tasks He gives us.
God bless you and thank you for your support. And don’t forget, if you haven’t been following our Facebook mission page, go there and get on board. You’ll receive a lot more updates, even with pictures!