Celebrating the power of possibility.
I'm Dr. John Avant and I believe anything is possible.
Welcome to another episode of Anything is Possible. I'm Halerin Hilton Hill and these are great stories.
I love getting to do this about great people whose lives prove that anything is possible.
Joining me on this episode, Dr. John Avant, welcome to the broadcast.
Thank you, Haloran. Good to be here.
Let me start with this. When I first met you, you were the pastor of First Baptist Concord.
Yes.
I had heard a lot about you. I came to a service and what I remember most was how much I loved hearing you teach the word.
There was a passion that was more than just, okay, I got to give the sermon, I got to give the homily this week.
I mean, I think if I had squirted some lighter fluid on you, you would have just burned up.
Probably.
Is that an accurate description? Do you love it?
I love it. Everything flows from my love for Jesus, but He's just given me a passion for life.
I met Him during a great student movement in the 70s called the Jesus Movement and I thought that's everything that it meant to follow Jesus.
I didn't know there was anything, any other kind of Christianity than this all-in kind of passion.
A lot of people said I'd get over it. I'm in my 60s now and not yet.
You haven't done it. Let's go back to the beginning of your life. What is your story start?
Wow. Dad was Air Force and then General Electric and we moved all over the place for a while.
We settled down in middle school in Hendersonville, North Carolina, not far from here.
I'm kind of a mountain boy, but I was not following Jesus. I didn't know Him.
My whole life changed as I said when I was a teenager and was introduced to this beautiful idea of the good news of Jesus and it changed me forever.
Were your parents religious?
They were and they had a very close relationship with the Lord growing up and it kind of drifted a little bit.
When I came to faith in Christ, they wondered if I'd joined a cult or something because of my whole life changed.
I was singing lead in a rock band and then suddenly I was singing in a Jesus music kind of hippie-like group.
They came to the church where I was and said, oh, this is what we knew as teenagers.
I saw them come back to recommit their life, baptize, change their whole family history.
You have siblings.
Yes.
How many?
Two. A brother runs the pediatric ICU unit. He's a doctor in Greenville.
My sister is a worship leader and mom and grandmother and all that good stuff in South Carolina as well.
You have children?
Yes, three kids. One is here. Her husband teaches theater at Webb.
She's got a big show this weekend and her husband, Matt, is an IT.
I've got a son who's an attorney in Houston and his wife and then a daughter and her husband who are in South Carolina on staff at a church there.
You're married?
Yes. Incredible wife. She's leading a women's conference in Michigan as we speak and we do ministry together.
She's been stuck with me for 43 years.
Let's go back to this experience that you had finding your faith. Where were you? What did you hear? What happened?
Well, a pretty girl turned around in study hall and invited me to come hear her sing. I was a singer myself.
Really?
Yes. I thought, well, wherever she's singing, I'd love to go. She wasn't interested in me in that way.
She was interested in my soul and I really didn't understand that until I realized she wants me to come to a church.
But when I went, I saw people doing music I related to and heard a message from a man named Ian Walker who has been my father in ministry all these years.
He shared that faith was actually not about religion but about relationship and I'd never heard that.
I'd never heard the gospel presented clearly and I responded and changed my life forever.
What was that next day like? What things had to change in your life?
Well, initially, not a lot changed as far as what I was doing. It was really interesting because I remember I didn't, nobody even told me it was a problem with smoking weed.
I was sitting one night with some of the members of the band I was with and I remember holding a joint and going, something's different.
I don't want this. Why don't I want it? What's going on? I threw it on the ground and stomped it and the guy cussed me out.
I said, I don't think I'm going to do this anymore. The Lord was transforming me and giving me a new passion.
It wasn't until people like Ian and others really helped me understand discipleship and what it meant to follow Jesus that I understood the Holy Spirit was changing me and giving me new passions.
And so from that time, everything began to change.
Possibility powered by Covenant Health, Home Federal and the Knoxville News Sentinel. Coming up.
If the things Jesus taught are true, the creator of the universe becomes one of us, lives a perfect life, takes our sin, dies for us, rises again, is coming again, fills us with his spirit.
He can't be moderately important. He can't be a part of our life. Cultural Christianity is not Christianity.
It's one thing for you to have a faith experience and then to decide to follow Jesus or to end the resistance and to be drawn.
It's another to decide that you want to go into ministry. Walk me through that.
Well, it's a very crazy story. It actually comes all the way to Knoxville eventually.
So I'm sitting in school again and they told me that my pastor, their principal, called me over the old loudspeaker and said, your pastor's on the phone and I thought somebody died.
And I went to the office and he said, I want you to come by my office after school.
The Lord has spoken to me and he's calling you to ministry and you're going to preach Sunday and I'm going to help you.
And I really didn't know what he was talking about. I couldn't imagine that it was actually at First Baptist Church, Hendersonville, North Carolina.
But that's what he meant and I was 17 years old and I'm still astonished by it.
And the next Sunday, the pastor just calls at school and says, God told me you're going to be a minister.
That's right.
And it had to be the worst sermon in the history of Christianity, but when I stepped down, I knew that he's right.
This is what I'll do the remainder of my days. And he became my father in ministry.
I mean, literally everything in my life has been changed through that family.
Years later, our marriage was in trouble. He and his wife coached us in marriage, really saved our marriage.
When I was invited to come here to be pastor at First Baptist Concord, I was like, no, I don't think that's what I'm supposed to do.
Ian said, no, my family's in Knoxville. My grandson is an intern at the church. You're going to come and mentor him the way I mentored you.
And I did. And today, the grandson of the man who led me to faith is my pastor here in Knoxville at Midtown Community Church.
And really an interesting end to that story. Ian and his wife Esther have been in a nursing home here in Knoxville in their 90s.
And I had the privilege a few months ago to go and sit with Ian and his family filmed it and walk through every single way he had blessed my life from the very beginning.
And then last month I did his funeral. And so I stand kind of an amazement at how the Lord has put all that together, the story he creates in our lives.
One of the things I've always enjoyed about you is, like I said, I love hearing you teach the word. It's a beautiful thing.
But what I see reflected there is you love to study the word, right? You're a scholar. So you did the Masters of Divinity, you did a PhD.
You are a real scholar of the word. When did you make the decision that you were going to go in deep on scholarship?
Because you are, I know within the Southern Baptist Convention, you were, what I understand is you are a rising star. You are doing this.
Yeah, I don't know. Some of that can create ego and ambition. And I look back in my younger years and go, man, there's some things there that I'm not proud of, some ugliness just that God needed to strip away.
But my desire to learn and be a lifetime learner, really I was just doing my bachelor's degree at better university and met a man I had not far away now from Ian Walker or my family.
So I didn't really have a mentor. I met a man from Nigeria named Titus Oluwafemi, the most brilliant man I've ever known to this day.
Spoke seven languages, Masters in Chemical Engineering, PhD in Religion, and he began to mentor my wife and I and changed us, set us on a road to where we wanted to be a part of racial reconciliation all of our life.
But he kept challenging me. You need to use your mind. Use your mind in every way you can.
And when he was tragically killed in a car accident, I heard the Lord whisper to me, live your life for two. And I really didn't know what that meant.
But over the years ahead, I came to believe that it was living out a part of Titus's dreams and a part of his challenge to me.
So in seminary, as I was finishing, they started a new PhD degree. I did not intend to do a PhD, but they started a new degree on the history of the movements of God in the world, from the New Testament all the way to modern days.
Interesting that you would study that, but then you were part of a big revival.
Yeah, yeah. We still can't believe what we walked into in the 90s. I was pastoring a church in Texas. And January 22, 1995, a college student came forward in the service.
And a very long story, making a long story short, God broke loose in our church and then among our students at Howard Payne University, and it began to spread across the country.
It changed our city, changed it in just about every way. It broke down racial barriers. People came to Christ in large numbers.
Churches came together. And then about two to three hundred college campuses, depending upon who you ask, broke out in this movement that just kept spreading in 95 and 96.
And I was just pastoring a mid-sized church in small town Texas, and suddenly I was speaking all over the place and just changed the trajectory of my life to this day.
So you study the history of these movements. What did you learn about movements? Because I think we're at a place in our history now where America needs a revival desperately.
But what did you learn about revivals? How they happened, how long they last? Is there a framework? Is there a there there?
Yeah, well, specifically my passion is movements of God, and they've changed the history of the world so many times.
You think about the New Testament that we have came out of a movement that won over the same Roman Empire that was killing the people that wrote the New Testament.
That's astonishing. And a lot of that when you study it is tied up in suffering. It's why I'm never going to miss going overseas as long as I'm healthy and being a part of what's happening overseas.
Because the greatest revivals, I think, in the history of the world are happening now in the persecuted church.
But in the ancient world, the New Testament movement and the post New Testament movement was greatly influenced by plagues, which is interesting in a post COVID world.
Terrible, terrible plagues. 5,000 people a day dying in Rome. And yet Christians would take dying children and they would have been thrown out into the streets by Romans and nurse them to health, love them, care for them.
And imagine if you were a Roman citizen that threw your sick child into the gutter and fled, and you come back a year later when the plague is over and your child's alive being raised by followers of Jesus.
What would you do? And so these movements that are happening now, fastest growing movement in the history of Christianity, is in the nation of Iran right now.
We have an adopted adult Iranian daughter, she's not in Iran at the moment, but from 100 believers in 94 to 5 million now in Iran. And so terrible suffering.
And so in our country, the church has become, I'm afraid, addicted to comfort. And if we want revival here, we're going to have to get out of our comfort zones.
So you said what you noticed is with these movements of God, there normally wasn't attached suffering. That suffering may be till the soil or broke up the fallow ground as it were and set you up to need revival.
Can there be revival without suffering?
Yes, I actually preached a message called, Can We Have Peace Without Persecution? And in the New Testament church, we actually see both.
In Acts chapter 9, after Paul, the persecutor, became a follower of Jesus, it says there was peace throughout the church and it exploded in growth.
We can have that, but I think the only way that what we can't have is revival without desperation. When you think about it, the things that Jesus taught, if they're true, the only thing he can't be is moderately important.
It's impossible.
Say that again. Say that right there again.
If the things Jesus taught are true, the creator of the universe becomes one of us, lives a perfect life, takes our sin, dies for us, rises again, is coming again, fills us with his spirit, he can't be moderately important.
He can't be a part of our life. Cultural Christianity is not Christianity. We're not born into it. It can't be something that's just a part of our life.
And so if someone becomes desperate for God, whether they're suffering or not, we can have revival.
That is, I like that a lot, a lot, a lot.
So your life continues on, you're blowing and going and growing, but then your life starts to shift.
And you highlighted just a minute ago that God had to purge some things out of you. What was going on?
Well, I pastored three large churches. A large church ministry doesn't have to, but it often breeds ego and arrogance.
And we're having a lot of scandals, a lot of people, burning out, falling away. Pastors are quitting at record numbers.
And I get all that. At some points, I've probably been a part of the problem, and hopefully I'm not still.
But maybe in the 90s, we began to go overseas and we began to see a different kind of faith lived out.
We also were a part of an interracial movement where God took an all-anglo church and created a church that looked like heaven.
But it was very painful. We saw the ugly fruit of racism.
But all of that, I think, went into beginning to change my wife and I's heart and shift us to just be able to say,
Lord, we're not special. We're just your servant.
And our yeses on the table, what you want us to do is what we'll do.
As I shared, it eventually took us here. We pastored three large transitional churches where pastors,
often great pastors, had left or were retiring or whatever, and there was a need for transition.
But about eight years ago, we started sensing God's directing something different in our life.
We're to help pastors and help missionaries and help churches and universities and not just be in one place.
And that had been most of our lives.
And so an opportunity came to help lead a ministry that I've loved for 30 years called Life Action.
And we took the big leap out of a secure, stay in one spot kind of ministry to a ministry where I travel more than 200 days a year now.
You smile when you say it. That's a basic thought by itself.
I want to do, in part two of our interview, I want to explore a couple of things.
One, I want to talk about race and racial reconciliation. I would like to talk about the church today,
especially in the context of the political environment that we're in now.
I want to ask you the question, what it means to follow Christ in 2024?
And then I want to ask you about your greatest challenge.
Your greatest challenge because I think it's courageous of you,
and I don't know if you would count this as your own courage or just the transformational power of the spirit,
but I think it's courageous of you to have looked at all of those things and decided I'm not afraid to deal with that.
And I would really love to know where you sourced that courage.
Because at this point, if you start, I'm talking about at the time at which we're recording this interview,
if you talk about race and reconciliation, if you talk anything about politics and the church and what it means to follow Christ,
oh my goodness, you might as I see a scene from MacGyver, there's a bomb and there's a clock ticking down,
and if we don't diffuse it, it's going to kill all of us. So I would love to explore that.
My guest is Dr. John Avan, part two coming up.