NASHVILLE, Tennessee | Nick Hall, an evangelist from Minneapolis, said he is desperately trying to evacuate his coworkers in Ukraine out of the war zone.
Mr. Hall’s Pulse.org evangelistic group was based in Kyiv.
“Or at least it was until a few weeks ago,” he told The Washington Times. “The last two, three weeks, we’ve been trying to evacuate and help people get out that want to get out.”
He said half of the office’s eight employees have left, and he’s trying to arrange transport for the remaining workers and their families. Some didn’t want to leave without bringing parents or other family members to safety, he said.
“This one group [of workers] wouldn’t leave until all of the people connected to them could come. So we had to get 48 people across the border right with them,” he said.
More than 2 million refugees have fled Ukraine since Russia invaded the country on Feb. 24.
Mr. Hall said before the Russian invasion, the Pulse office had sponsored between 150 and 200 evangelistic events in the region.
“We had one gathering of 400,000 young people and we’ve done 20 events of 10,000 or more people, and all across the cities that are being bombed, [including] Nikolayev,” he said.
Mr. Hall claimed that “more than 100,000 people” had made a faith commitment to Jesus through these events.
The evangelist, who trained with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the team of the late evangelist Luis Palau, spoke with The Times at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville. The Times is a sponsor of the event.
Outreach events are at the heart of Pulse’s ministry, said Mr. Hall.
An event at the Cotton Bowl stadium in Dallas on June 24-25 will return an evangelistic meeting to the site where the late Mr. Graham led the “Explo ‘72” revival featuring an advertising slogan, “I Found It!,” with the “it” being the Christian faith.
Mr. Hall said the objective is “to see a new generation be trained and equipped to share the gospel, to equip these kids to love Jesus, to share him with their friends. We have people who come in registered from 49 states so far, and different countries around the world, right. And the goal is to fill the Cotton Bowl and see a generation equipped and sent home ready to reach their generation with the gospel.”
He said there are cultural similarities in today’s climate and that which faced Mr. Graham’s team in 1972: “There was division around race, there was division around politics. In some ways, you could describe it and think you were talking about today. There also was similarly a generation kind of leaving institutional Christianity.”
He added, “I’ve never seen people more open and more hungry to the Gospel, never seen young people more willing and excited to live this out and share it. [It’s] like they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. They want to be a part of a cause they don’t want another event or concert, they want a movement.”
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.