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West Africa

By John Lindner ⋅ January 1, 2007 ⋅

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One U.S. pastor who realized that the old way of doing missions wasn’t working anymore is Larry Nelson.

Nelson moved to Kingsport, Tenn., 20 years ago and planted Agape Life Church. The church soon grew to 500 members, and four daughter congregations were planted.

As Nelson was flying back from a missions trip to Africa in 1991 he felt the Lord tell him, “I want you to be part of raising up 500 new churches.” At first he missed the “be part of” bit and tried to do it all himself, which didn’t work.

Then he realized God had a different plan. “My objective was to go and find the person in any particular country who had a vision for raising up churches on a large scale,” Nelson said. “After we found that individual, we would try to facilitate helping them fulfill the vision that God had placed in their heart.”

To carry out that plan, Nelson formed Agape Global Ministries in 1992.

“Our first objective was to develop a relationship with this individual,” Nelson said, “and then we began to work with them on a limited basis. We would help them buy a generator, a tent, an automobile…something just to get started, and, to be very honest, to see if we could trust them.

“As the relationship grew, we would take people from this country—as many as 20 or 30—on crusades overseas and begin to release funds to help.

“We would never put anything in our name. Whatever we built, whether land or buildings or vehicles, everything always stayed in the hands of the local ministry.

“We found when we developed a relationship with people in any particular country and gave them liberty to work with their people and their leadership, we found that the winning of souls has been phenomenal. In the last 12 years we’ve seen 917,000 people saved from this outreach.”

By 2001 AGM had “helped” plant 500 churches throughout 17 countries.

So when Johan Gous brought Steven Loots to Kingsport and asked to present their plan, Nelson was ready. Since then AGM has helped plant 268 more churches.