Praying for a Paris Pentecost

There is great leadership uncertainty in America due to the attempted assassination of President Trump, the VP pick of J.D. Vance, President Biden not seeking re-election, and the Kamala Harris stepping up.

But this week the global community will focus on the 2024 Paris Olympics which begin Friday, July 26. The great athletes and gold medals will excite us. But the far greater story will be people coming to Jesus because of the Games. 

I want you to pray passionately for a Paris Pentecost.

Praying for a Paris Pentecost

Pentecost was not a sporting event in Jerusalem. But God chose it to launch the era of the Church because it brought together people “from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). It was a strategic time/place to multiply the Good News because world visitors could take their new-found faith in Jesus back to their home countries.

That’s why Youth With A Mission organized an evangelistic outreach at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. I missed Munich but discovered YWAM just afterwards while in New Zealand. Shirley and I planned to attend the Montreal outreach in 1976, but God directed me to write my first book that summer. The 1980 Moscow Olympics outreach was canceled due to the American boycott that year, but we still led a team into the Soviet Union.

The 1984 Games in Los Angeles was my first foray to an Olympic venue. Others followed: Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996, and Athens 2004.  I didn’t watch one sporting event during the four Olympics I attended. But I experienced a far greater joy and adrenaline rush than being entertained by great athletes. A few examples:

• A homeless man came to Jesus because of a mysterious $100 bill.
• Shirley and I stayed at YWAM’s version of “Honeymoon Hollow.”
• I met one of history’s greatest sprinters doing ministry at a shrine devoted to immorality.
• We preached openly in a Western nation closed to evangelism for nearly 2000 years.
• And I was rescued from being kicked off a train by a “smoking angel.”

In this article I will share a behind-the-scenes look at Olympic Games evangelism. The stories are taken from my book One Small Life, chapter 28, “Olympic Games Outreach.” (This blog will be a bit longer than usual.)

Let’s start with a glimpse of sharing Good News at a sporting event bigger than the Olympics.

1978 Argentina World Cup (Mundial) 

After the training and exuberant worship with hundreds of participants in Buenos Aires, we traveled by bus to four other major cities where the world cup soccer games were happening: Mar Del Plata, Mendoza, Cordoba, and Rosario.

It took four hours to travel through the lush Argentine countryside to Rosario. Shirley and I were assigned to “Honeymoon Hollow.” It was a ten-foot square stone “shed” with bed sheets hung both ways to make four little cubicles for couples. There was just enough room for sleeping bags, mattresses, and suitcases. We were the oldest “newlyweds” in the group at twenty months. It would our home for three weeks.

It was both challenging and hilarious living in Honeymoon Hollow. At night, some couples hammed it up whispering “Good Night, darlings” and blowing kisses through the sheet partitions. To enjoy some “special moments” with your spouse in the Hollow, you needed to make an appointment with the other three couples and hope that nobody crashed it.

Oh, the joys of being on mission for Jesus.

One morning we preached on National Radio. So many exciting things were happening in Rosario besides soccer that our picture and an article appeared in the local newspaper. The following week we shared the Good News on television. I preached nearly every day in open-air services with translation into Spanish. 

Next up: the greatest Olympics outreach on American soil.

1984 Los Angeles Olympics

From July 27 to August 12, 1984, thirty-five hundred outreach participants from seventy-seven nations descended upon the “City of the Angels” for three weeks of ministry during the 23rd Olympiad. It was the greatest “open heaven” for evangelism I ever experienced in the USA.

After the preparation days of the kick-off, we split up into five large teams throughout the greater Los Angeles area to share Jesus with area residents, 7000 athletes from 140 nations (221 events in twenty-one sports), and 5.79 million visitors. 

The greatest and most eternal events took place in the streets—not the stadiums. I served on the leadership group in Pasadena after the kick-off crusade. We hit the streets on Sunday July 29 with open-air preaching, drama and dance groups, service teams, and many other creative expressions of ministry.

One day Pastor David Cole and I were witnessing on the corner of Hollywood and Cherokee. As I gazed down the street, I saw an American “greenback” blowing along the ground. I walked over to pick it up as another man lunged for it. I expected it to be a $1 or $5 bill. When I unfolded it, we both gasped.

It was a $100 dollar bill (worth over $300 today).

The man who got there second shrieked, “Darn! I wish I’d picked it up first.” His name was Percy Gage—from Texas—and he’d been on the streets for a week. Six months before, his marriage split up. Four months later, his parents were killed in a car accident. His father was a pastor. Now he was homeless, and needed Jesus, and had just missed the $100 bill.

Dave and I decided to take him out to lunch with our new windfall. At a nearby restaurant, we shared God’s love with him. Perry teared up as we spoke, prayed out loud, and asked Jesus to forgive him and change his life. It was a wonderful conversion. We used the rest of the money to buy him clothes, went witnessing with him in the afternoon, and then brought him home with us. He showered, shaved, and stayed with us. He was a new man. Two nights later he helped lead another person to Christ. The multiplication had begun. All because of a mysterious $100 bill.

U.S. sprinter and long-jumper Carl Lewis was the star of the ’84 Games, becoming only the third track and field athlete in history to win four gold medals. But Jesus was the real star—as thousands of people found eternal gold through him and took him back to their nations.

Jesus, Carl Lewis, and I would meet up one day—twenty years later.

1992 Barcelona Olympics

We sent our first King’s Kids international outreach team to the Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain, in 1992 joining 3500 other kids and staff from 100 nations for King’s Kids International’s first Target World. Our team slept on air mattresses and sleeping bags on a cement school floor. It was primitive, hot, dirty, crowded, noisy, but life-changing as we worshipped, prayed, and experienced a taste of heaven. From this spiritual powder-keg, we then fanned out on hundreds of teams across Europe and the Middle East to spend the summer sharing our faith.

Our team spend five unforgettable weeks on a tour of Spain’s major cities. We started out on an overnight train ride to Spain’s capital city of Madrid. I almost didn’t make it.

While the team slept in their cabins, I guarded our large pile of luggage between cars of the packed train. During the early hours of the morning, at an undisclosed stop somewhere in central Spain, angry security guards confronted me and tried to remove our bags.

One guard pulled his night-stick to hit me–the closest I’ve ever been to being beaten–but was stopped by a Dutch girl who appeared out of nowhere. She vehemently argued with the head security guard in Spanish while I held on to the luggage for dear life. If they threw our bags off the train, I knew I’d have to exit with them—or we’d lose everything we’d brought for the trip in the middle of nowhere.

And if I left, how would the team ever find me in the days before cell phones? As I tugged on our equipment to keep it from being tossed onto the platform, the girl’s arguments prevailed, and the goons left in a huff—luggage saved. I profusely thanked her for rescuing us and went back to guard duty as the doors closed and the train barreled on. The Dutch girl found a seat in an adjacent car, and promptly lit up a cigarette.

That’s why I called her the “Smoking Angel.” I never saw her again.

In Madrid, It was 110 degrees when we ministered on the out-door stage at the World Expo. Between performances, we huddled in an air-conditioned storage room nearby. After one performance, an American in the crowd came looking for us and coyly said to me, “I really enjoyed your ‘Awesome God’ song out there.” (It was one of our theme songs that summer.) Breaking into a grin, he held out his hand and said, “I’m Rich Mullins. I wrote it.” I laughed, bear-hugged him, and asked, “Would you sing the solos of your song at our next performance?”

He agreed, and at our fifth gig of the day, Rich Mullins joined the team and helped us belt out “Our God is an awesome God, He reigns in heaven above. With wisdom, power, and love our God is an awesome God!” What a divine appointment, despite 110-degree heat. 

We also learned at Barcelona that God sees things differently than we do. For example, a Spanish pastor friend spent every day translating for the U.S. Basketball “Dream Team” during the Barcelona Games. He said most of their lives were empty, proud, egotistical, and greedy. One exception was David Robinson who proudly witnessed for Jesus and wore a T-shirt which said, “Enter his COURTS with praise.” To the world, they were a “dream.” To God, many of them were a nightmare–in need of grace and salvation.

The 10,000 outreach participants in Barcelona were a part of God’s true “dream team.”

1996 Atlanta Olympics

Atlanta seemed to be providentially chosen to host 100th anniversary of the modern Olympics in 1996. It would be the largest international gathering in history with 15,000 athletes and coaches, 15,500 journalists, 2 million visitors, 3.5 billion television viewers, 150 head of state, 195 nations represented, 85,000 staff and volunteers, 12 million ticket holders–and millions praying all over the world.

We flew to Atlanta with an eighty-three member King’s Kids team and 220 bags of luggage and equipment. We met up with 5,000 other King’s Kids from 150 nations at the 1996 Target World. That year our multi-national teams would use choreography, puppets, dance, rollerblading, basketball, and other creative forms to share Christ.

One evening, we walked to Centennial Park and ministered to hundreds of people in the main square for two hours until we were asked to stop. We had many encouraging conversations pointing people to Jesus. Five days later, on July 27 in the same park, Eric Rudolph exploded a bomb there that killed a woman and threw the Centennial Games into confusion. It was eerie watching it on the news where we had just shared the Good News.

Eight years later and 30 days after after having my right hip resurfaced in Belgium, I few into Greece for my final Olympic foray.

2004 Athens Olympics

Our 2004 Olympics outreach team included thirty-eight adults and young people, and three babies. August 14 we took the subway into central Athens, near the Olympic venues, and participated in the “Light the World” parade at Omonia Square. It was an amazing time of declaring the Lordship of Christ over the nation of Greece. Afterwards we stayed for a Delirious concert in the main square packed with five-to-ten thousand people.

When the band played “Did You See the Mountains Tremble,” I sensed the awesome power of God. I was near the mosh pit up front enjoying the worship with Jonathan Macris, the head of the largest evangelical mission in the county.  Jonathan turned to me during the song and shouted, “This is the first time in hundreds of years that the Good News of Jesus is being openly proclaimed in Greece without harassment and arrest!” We smiled and gave each other a bear hug. It was a powerful moment–a great beginning to the outreach.

The next day outreach teams headed out to thirty-five different Greek Islands to share the love of God and distribute literature. Our team traveled to Corinth, then ministered for weeks in Naflio where we openly preached in the streets and daily led people to faith in Jesus.

On Sunday, August 22, we bussed back to Athens just in time for a True Love Waits rally being held at the Dora Stratou Theater near the Acropolis. It was the hottest day of the outreach–reaching 115 degrees. From 3:00-4:30 p.m. we climbed to the high point of Philapapu–carrying sexual-purity pledge cards from around the world.

Historically, this area was a cesspool of sexual immorality in the ancient Greek world—focused on a temple to Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love. We turned it into “the hill of the Lord” (Psalm 24), broke up into groups, and prayed.

At 5 p.m. the rally began in the incredible heat, including many journalists and thousands watching via the Internet. Richard Ross gave the call to the kids of the world to remain abstinent until marriage and an American evangelist shared an altar call.

Twenty years after his LA Olympics triumph, U.S. sprinter Carl Lewis agreed to speak at the True Love Waits rally along with Joe DeLoach, the only man that ever beat him in Olympic competition. They both shared their faith in Jesus and commitment to abstinence before marriage.  We visited together afterwards. What a delight to meet the world’s “faster human of the 1980s” in ministry—not sports entertainment. Carl was warm, humble, and passionate about his faith.

I will never forget the Olympic outreaches–though I never attended a single sporting event. Instead, we watched scores of thousands of people meet Jesus Christ from “every nation under heaven.”

That was far more precious than gold (Psalm 19:10).

 Love France is recruiting one million people to pray for a move of God in Paris this summer. You can join the prayer thrust and download their excellent daily prayer guide here: Pray One Million Prayer Guide.

Let’s intercede for a Paris Pentecost that will impact the world for Jesus.