A Decade of Harvest

Luis Bush

Assemblies of God in Brazil

Assemblies of God has a project called Decade of Harvest. It is global in scope. However, every nation has their own direction and administration of this vision. The purpose is the same as the purpose of AD2000, resulting in a close linkage between the organizations.

For Brazil, we have 5 objectives:

• To raise up an army of 3,000,000 intercessors, by sending folders to churches, where they are handed out among the believers, who respond if they are interested. We return to them a calendar giving 3 specific areas to pray for every day.
• To win to Jesus Christ 50,000,000 people by AD2000. Our membership today is 13,000,000.
• To prepare 100,000 workers to serve the other two objectives
• To establish 50,000 new churches
• To send the number of missionaries that we are able to the missionary field.

When these goals were established, it was somewhat of a shock. They were established in relation to the reality of present growth rates among the Assemblies of God Church, prior to the 1960s. The 50,000,000 target represents a church growth rate of 23%. According to a thesis done in 1963 at Fuller, church growth up to that time was 23%. Then it dropped to 5%. As a result of the Decade of Harvest, church growth has increased from 5% to 8%.

What are we doing to mobilize the church? We are having conferences on the regional, state, and local levels. We are also mobilizing through Sunday School, where one trimester per year is dedicated to the project. There are 600,000 of these throughout Brazil, with the first one this year. Also, we are mobilizing through the Assem-blies of God newspaper and magazine. Another way is through evaluation congresses, such as the one this next February. We want to get back to what we had before 1963: a strong emphasis on lay evangelism, where every person was involved in leading people to Christ. Radio and other means of communication cannot replace personal evangelism, one on one.

As a result of this, we are finding a greater unity in the body of Christ. Ten years ago, the Assemblies of God couldn't relate to any other denominations, but today we do.

During Celebrating Planet Earth, the environmental summit held in 1992, over 1,000,000 believers met simultaneously in Rio de Jainero. Last October, the largest missions conference in Brazil was held, in cooperation with AD2000. December 17 we are inviting all the evangelicals in Rio to have a day of prayer (no preaching) against the violence occurring in that city.

Geremias Do Couto, Brazil
Executive Secretary, Casa Publicadora Das Asambleas De Deus do Brasil