By Emily and Nick Brennt - Circuit Riders
Carry The Love is a campaign to inspire our generation to love like Jesus. We firmly believe this generation is desperate for the Gospel message and everywhere we go, we find Matthew 9:37 to be true “The harvest is plentiful.”
This generation is hungry for Jesus. This year we had the largest University outreach tour in our history. Students at 550 universities across America, Europe, and Kenya worked with our teams to gather their campuses, share the gospel, and activate believers! All of our teams are people in their young 20s and are support raised gritty missionary volunteers who are deeply committed to reaching their generation.
In addition to our college outreaches, this past April God opened the door for an International city-wide Evangelistic campaign in East Africa. We worked together with students, churches, and the youth of this nation to put together a campaign consisting of training and equipping believers, door-to-door evangelism/ ministry, and a three-day music festival, with the presentation of the Gospel as the culmination. This is Carry The Love Burundi. Burundi is located in East Africa, bordering Rwanda and Tanzania. It is the poorest nation in the world with 1/3 of the country unemployed. It is in this environment that we saw God do what we thought was impossible.
The youth of Burundi wanted to be trained to share the Gospel. We started there. We held a few evangelistic training sessions in Churches and immediately activated into the streets to share the Gospel. There was such boldness in the youth of Burundi as they translated for our teams and also preached themselves. Even after the “outreach” time was over we had multiple reports of young people going into remote villages to share the gospel. On my first day there, my husband Nick and I were with our team in a remote village. We split up into teams of 2-3 and began to share the Gospel and pray for people. Collectively as a team, within 3 hours we had seen 500 documented decisions for Christ.
Documented decisions, not “hand-raising” but filling out a response form to connect to a local church. Our teams split up all across the Capital of Burundi, Bujumbura, and were seeing the same type of fruit. During the outreach days, we saw over 1,000 documented salvations each day. It was stunning! In just seven short days we saw 5,000 documented decisions for Christ, 3,000 of them from one on one evangelism in the streets.
The music festival nights we equally stunning as well. Without exaggeration, the most well-known Christian artists, bands, pastors, and leaders were part of these evenings. It was beautiful to see! We shared the platform with these bands, artists, and leaders and each night was collaborative. My husband Nick preached one of the evenings and I was asked to call the Women of Burundi to be messengers of the Gospel. There were so many incredible young people that shared their testimonies and each night hundreds came to Christ. Our team ministered until late into the night and truly there were so many powerful moments where God broke in.
In the aftermath of this breakthrough, the reports have been that the youth are still passionately sharing the gospel. A fresh fire has been lit among the youth and they are already asking and excited about doing the “next” Carry The Love. I will close with this, Isaiah 66:8 poses the question “can a nation be born in a day?” My faith is provoked more than it has ever been before. I pray that we will be people who like Jesus look at the crowds and are filled with compassion because they are like sheep without a shepherd. I pray we believe that the harvest around us is plentiful and that we say yes to being ones who join Jesus in the harvest field.